A Bridge Too Far

Film appreciation by Robert Siegel of The Digital Bits

Operation Market Garden lasted just nine days in September of 1944. Thirty-two years later, producers Joseph E. Levine (who himself provided some of the film's financing) and Richard P. Levine, along with director Richard Attenborough, spent the entire spring, summer and autumn of 1976 re-creating the event for the $27 million film A Bridge Too Far, which has been released on Blu-ray Disc by MGM/UA Home Entertainment, a film for which almost 3 million feet of film were originally shot.

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The film is based on the late Cornelius Ryan's international best-seller, which chronicles the ill-fated airborne assault - the largest in the history of warfare - which was aimed at terminating the Second World War by the end of 1944. Operation Market Garden was masterminded by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and sanctioned by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was a bold plan calling for 35,000 U.S. and British paratroops to drop into Eastern Holland and there secure the six major bridges leading to the German border.

Director Richard Attenborough, who actually has a cameo in the film, got his start one weekend afternoon when he went to see a Charlie Chaplin movie. From that point-on, he was hooked on film. He was born in Cambridge, England, and after a scholarship student to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art when he was 16, his first full movie experience came in Noel Coward's In Which We Serve. At this screening, the master Coward greeted the anxious newcomer with the words "You must be Richard Attenborough, you don't know me but my name is Noel Coward." Since that experience, he has never strayed far from the camera. A star of more than 70 films, he also produced four of Britain's more successful motion pictures. In 1968, he changed direction once again and took on the task of directing Oh What a Lovely War. With producer Joe Levine he devoted two years to the planning and production of A Bridge Too Far without compromising all of his other commitments, which at the time included Chairman of Capital Radio, President of the Muscular Dystrophy Group of Great Britain, Chairman of the Actor's Charitable Trust, Governor of the National Film School and Vice-President of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Remaining the same breezy extrovert who burst to the top with the dust of drama school still in his hair, he was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in the 1976 New Year's Honors List.

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The screenplay for A Bridge Too Far was written by William Goldman from the book by Cornelius Ryan. Goldman was a novelist for ten years before he turned his acute gaze on the cinema. Born in Chicago in 1931, Goldman is the author of Boys and Girls Together, No Way to Treat a Lady, Father's Day and a standard work in the theater The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. An early screenplay of Harper which starred Paul Newman led to his writing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Goldman's association with Robert Redford continued with The Hot Rock, The Great Waldo Pepper and All the President's Men. Other screenplays he is known for are The Stepford Wives and Marathon Man. For cameraman Geoffrey Unsworth, who entered the film industry in 1932, when cinematography in English studios was still dominated by the Americans, he made steady progress from slate boy to focus puller and camera operator with Victor Saville and Alfred Hitchcock. He then spent some years with the Technicolor Organization which supplied not only the film, but cameras using it and the crew to run them. After the war, Unsworth helped fashion MGM's A Yank at Oxford, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death. He then joined the Rank Organization, then in fullest flood and shot most of the early Dick Bogarde films, staying thirteen years. When Rank switched its energies away from production, he found himself on an open market. A triple British Oscar winner, he used the same two-man camera team almost exclusively for quite a few years in such films as Becket, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Murder on the Orient Express and The Return of the Pink Panther.

The film, which cost almost $27 million dollars, a very high cost for a film at the time, ended up doubling that amount at the U.S. boxoffice alone. It has since generated over $8 million more in video sales.