A BRIDGE TOO FAR ***

As a director, Richard Attenborough had the knack for making, what I suppose might be called, 'intimate epics'; in other words he could muster massive, often 'all-star' casts without losing sight of the human element. He made "A Bridge Too Far" in 1977 and it's a splendid war movie with battle scenes and action sequences good enough to satisfy any aficionado of such things without in any way glorifying war itself. As in "Oh! What a Lovely War" the emphasis here is on the horror and the futility of battle and it's interesting that Attenborough chose what was fundamentally a British defeat as his subject,

He was blessed, of course, by a superb William Goldman script that allows for the individual stories of the protagonists to come to the fore, (not easy in a film of this scale). Goldman adapted Cornelius Ryan's book about Operation Market Garden and the Battle of Arnhem, doing a much finer job than Ryan and a multitude of other writers did with "The Longest Day". As with "The Longest Day"

this, too, is chock full of big names, all giving very decent accounts of themselves. The best of them are Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, Michael Caine and a somewhat surprisingly good Ryan O'Neal though it is Edward Fox as Lieutenant General Horrocks who steals the film, picking up a BAFTA at the same time. Geoffrey Unsworth did the splendid cinematography and John Addison composed the superb score.