Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Flick Pick: A Bridge Too Far

A Bridge Too Far
(United Artists, 1977)

Today, on the 70th anniversary of the launch of Operation Market:Garden, and a few short weeks after the passing - at the gloriously fully ripe age of 90 - of the movie's director, Sir Richard Lord Attenborough, today's pick is a magnificently done war epic, based on Cornelius Ryan's book. The cast is nothing less than a veritable galaxy of stars, running the gamur from Laurence Olivier to John Ratzenberger ages before Cheers, all of them showing up in vignettes interwoven in the film as they were in real life. Mostly accurate, in some cases painstakingly so, and occasionally not, and marvelous for the fact that they gathered a small air force and assembled an army of cast members to do the air drop scenes, back before faking such things with CGI even existed. The war movie genre numbers no small number of remarkable efforts, and this movie belongs among that pantheon.

2 comments:

Pakkinpoppa said...

My copy of that is lent out at the moment, but it is spectacular. They even built gliders to land.

RandyGC said...

I think one of the best of the historical war movies. I remember being especially impressed when I saw it in the theater when the 1st Para boys engaged armor with a PIAT gun instead of a generic bazooka sent over from the prop department.

Now those were obviously not MK-III,IV,V or VIs, but on almost every other piece of hardware and kit they seemed to have got it right, and to be fair, not many of the original PzKWs still running around.