Good, but a bit hokey

Rating: 6/10 (8 August 2006)

I have been researching this battle for a job I'm doing and have read Cornelius Ryan's book and watched the movie. I first saw it at the movies with my anti-war, ex-soldier father, in the late '70s and on the big screen, and thought the opening battle sequences where Horrocks' Irish Guards break out from their start lines behind a rolling barrage was pretty wild and probably an accurate depiction of war - very frightening, in other words.
Although this is a mostly accurate depiction of much of the operation, it suffers a bit from a touch of the Hollywoods ... a bit of nonsense thrown in here and there (although it's nowhere as bad as another piece of British war dross, the Battle of Britain - how could something so promising for so many deliver so little to so few?). As for the Brit bashing, I'm not so sure it is: Eisenhower and his staff were apparently knocked off their feet when the over-cautious Montgomery walked in with arguably the most ambitious battle plan devised in WWII and dropped it on the table.
One US officer is quoted as saying that he was more surprised than he would have been had the teetotal British general walked in with a raging hangover. Had the plan worked, and it might have done, the war would have been over sooner than it was and a lot less people would have died in the process. Even the US staff officers were impressed. Alas, everything that could go wrong, did.
The Brits, however, as any serious history buff knows, didn't stuff up everything they did: the score's about equal with the Americans - and just about everyone else involved in the war, for that matter - but it's always good sport to stereotype the English, who never seem to complain! It also makes for fun cinema. Ryan O'Neal's character, by the way, is historically accurate. He was young, and young looking, and apparently quite the dashing West Point style army officer. My favourite character, though, is Edward Fox, who plays the determined, upper-crust British career soldier to a tee.
Yet Attenborough's valid attempt to get the anti-war message into the movie makes it a touch hokey and it detracts. The casualty figures themselves would have been enough to inject that sentiment. Also, much of the fiercest action took place around the Arnhem Bridge and in Oosterbeek, where the close-quarter fighting between the British 1st Airborne and the SS was similar to that of Stalingrad and resulted in casualty figures estimated at 50 per cent on the German side ... and that's underplayed in the film and made a lot of the time to look like a pack of certifiably mad, stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen out playing cricket on the village green with a nice cup of tea thrown in for good measure.
The reason it flopped in the US may have had something to do with the fact that it was a mostly British operation and a mostly British screw-up and therefore a mostly British story. While it has appeal on that side of the Atlantic, throwing in a few big-name American actors just doesn't give it enough of an American flavour for the US box-office (but rightly so if it's to be historically accurate). The music didn't help either, but parts of the movie are great and the all-star cast does lift it beyond the mundane, if you can get past Gene Hackman's strangled-cat attempts to reproduce a Polish accent.
Still, it's not a bad way to pass a couple of hours, ... sorry, make that three.