56 BRIDGE TOO FAR, A
British officers quash reports that the portable radios used by the paratroopers will
prob ably not work across the long distances from the drop zones to the Arnhem
Bridge. The airborne drops on 17 September 1944 go well, but the Son Bridge near
Eindhoven is blown up by the Germans just before the 101st Airborne can get to
it. Stiff German re sis tance, the narrowness of the sometimes raised road (dubbed
“Hell’s Highway”), and the need to construct a Bailey bridge all combine to stymie
the advance of the XXX Corps. At Nijmegen, units of the 82nd Airborne cross the
Waal River in canvas- and- wood assault boats under withering fire. Eventually the
bridge is captured. At Arnhem the situation begins to deteriorate. As predicted,
the radios are useless, and many of the jeeps needed to quickly reach the Arnhem
Bridge never arrive by glider or are destroyed in action. The Germans overrun the
British supply drop zones and launch an armored attack over the bridge being held
at one end by British units under the command of Lt. Col. John Frost (Anthony
Hopkins). The British manage to hold their positions but incur mounting casual-
ties. Delayed by ground fog in England, Sosabowski’s men join the battle too late
to reinforce the British. After days of fierce house- to- house fighting, Urquhart’s
lightly armed troops are forced to surrender or retreat with staggering losses. When
Urquhart returns to British HQ, he confronts Browning about the fiasco that
was Market Garden and Browning sheepishly replies, “Well, as you know, I always
felt we tried to go a bridge too far.” In the final scene, a Dutch woman (Liv Ullmann)
abandons her badly damaged home, which was used as a hospital by the British.
Passing through the front yard, which has been converted into a makeshift
graveyard, she and her children walk along the high riverbank with her father,
an el derly doctor (Laurence Olivier), pushing some sal vaged house hold items in
a wheelbarrow.Reception
Posting $50.7 million in ticket sales against a $27 million production bud get, A
Bridge Too Far did well at the box office— but for a three- hour WWII epic with an
outsized cast of A- list movie stars, not as well as was hoped. Ignored at Oscar time,
the movie drew mixed reviews from critics. Typical is the judgment of Vincent
Canby, who found A Bridge “massive, shapeless, often unexpectedly moving, con-
fusing, sad, vivid and very, very long” (Canby, 16 June 1977). As Canby notes, the
sheer length and complexity of the film— lots of cross- cutting between disparate
locales and too many players to allow for much character development (or viewer
identification)— doubtless left audiences shell- shocked. Furthermore, the movie
did something that few war films dare: it recounted an Allied military disaster of
epic proportions, which was depressing fare for a film genre that usually serves up
triumphalist scenarios.Reel History Versus Real History
Allowing for the usual streamlining to achieve narrative coherence, William Gold-
man’s script closely follows Cornelius Ryan’s painstaking account of Market Gar-
den. Accordingly, A Bridge Too Far achieves a high degree of historical accuracy.
Inaccuracies tend to be minor. Some paratroopers are shown jumping “clean