A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Stephen J. Rubin (0:27)

Professor Stephen J. Rubin, author, podcaster, historian, filmmaker, who wears a lot of hats, more hats than I do. Anyway, this is the commentary for A Bridge Too Far. It's interesting that most war movies have a lot of stock footage in them to augment the action or the size of the film. This movie has no problem. They're getting all the stock footage kind of out of the way in the beginning as context, just to reacquaint the audience with what war in Europe was like some 30 years before this movie was made.

And we will not see any more black and white stock footage in this picture, because pretty much everything we're about to see was created for the movie. And we'll talk about that quite a bit, Steve.

<UNKNOWN> (1:23)

Oh, yeah. And I have to tell you, when this came out in 1977, I was just really excited to see it. I mean, I grew up, as you did, Steve, watching epics like The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, The Great Escape, Guns of Navarone. Bridge Too Far was mana from heaven for us, a big scale World War II movie with a lot of rolling gear, no digital effects, not like today.

But it was just really warmly. That was the warmly regard. That was the summer, of course, of Star Wars. Everybody was going to see Star Wars, but I think I was more excited to see A Bridge Too Far.

Stephen J. Rubin (2:04)

Well, to your point, World War II movies had kind of fallen out of fashion. Even in the 60s, well, 60s was a great decade for World War II movies. But because of Vietnam war movies, certainly your dad's or your grandfather's war movies had fallen a bit out of favor.

And so this was a comeback, in a sense, to a genre that was pretty popular, even with the Greatest Generation and people who fought during the war. War movies never really fell out of favor as a genre or a menu item at the movies. But things were changing. The audiences were getting older.

So it took a guy who was in his 70s, Joseph E. Levine, to say, this is a pretty interesting story. And this was based on a book by Cornelius Ryan, who wrote The Longest Day, which Steve mentioned a few moments ago. There it is. There's his credit.

And in spite of the success of the book, the book was pretty successful. No studio really wanted to touch this project, primarily because of the size of it. I mean, this is an epic picture, a movie with enormous size and, of course, enormous cost.

<UNKNOWN> (3:26)

Don't you find it interesting how effective in these epic World War II movies, when you put in so many named actors? I wonder if the movie would have had any of its power with a bunch of unknowns. I think by putting named actors who immediately know who those guys are, you're sitting up and you're interested. And my God, this cast, just like The Longest Day, like Battle of the Bulge, I mean, it's just a killer cast.

Stephen J. Rubin (3:56)

Well, movie stars were very important at the time that this was made. We'll talk a little bit more about this because the casting of this movie was a little bit of an adventure for the filmmakers. But I want to kind of stay a little bit more towards the origins of this movie. And here we are, you know, looking at this movie nearly 50 years later after it was made. In a sense, this movie hasn't aged at all partly because it was a period film. But one of the questions I had, maybe you have an answer for this, but it's like who's the auteur of this movie? I mean, we do see Joseph E. Levine presents and clearly, you know, Richard Attenborough was the general in charge of the day-to-day battles. But Levine, in a parallel universe sort of way, is a bit more like Montgomery, who drew up the plans for Market Garden and who really set the wheels and the treads, if you will, in motion.

This is a movie that was made the old-fashioned way by an old-fashioned producer, with not so much an old-fashioned director, but we'll talk about Attenborough quite a bit during the course of this commentary, obviously.

This was a big deal for somebody like Attenborough, and one of the things that's, if you're a credits junkie like we are, he surrounded himself with all of these great people to help him get the movie produced. We'll talk about Jeffrey Unsworth, the cinematographer, Anthony Gibbs, the editor, who I think did extraordinary work on this picture. John Addison's score, he has an interesting story. But in any case, earlier on, you said there are no digital effects and point of fact. I don't even know if there are any optical effects with the exception of the scenes where the armada of C-47s is flying to drop the American paratroopers. I think that might be one of the very few opticals, but there are no real miniatures in this movie as far as I can tell. So you are seeing a movie that is giving you something that movies today don't give you. They are giving you reality in virtually every way. I mean, if you see tanks, they're real tanks. If you see things blowing up, that's real pyro. It's dangerous. So there's an excitement to watching a movie like this today that we sort of took for granted back in the day. We grew up with movies where if something had to be destroyed, it was destroyed or blown up, or real stunts, et cetera.