A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977)

Middling aptitude and by-the-numbers technical facility didn’t stop top-of-the-line British character actor Richard Attenborough from choosing epic-sized films for the bulk of the twelve films he directed, starting with debut pic OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR/’69.  And if, on the whole, the films were well-received/commercially successful, his ‘safe’ filmmaking can now look dull.  (It did at the time, but less people noticed . . . or seemed to mind.  When he finally made something intimate in SHADOWLANDS/’93, his comfort level & talent for working on a smaller canvas was something of a happy shock.)  But this, his third film came in Extra-Extra-Large.  A fact-based WWII story about an Allied operation to secure a series of Dutch bridges before the German retreat, a Cock-up and SNAFU since it was a joint British/U.S. effort, suffers from heavy lifting in a William Goldman script that telegraphs every wrong decision in the early going, then leaves too many plot strands hanging to dry at the end.  Attenborough keeps things straight (if not quite clear) using more than a dozen top stars, but since he’s unable to handle the fugal storyline, the film only starts to gain traction in the third act with Robert Redford (the last star to show up*) getting a full twenty minutes of Attenborough’s undivided attention.  Even at a remove of 80+ years, it’s hard to imagine such a huge operation making no plans for anything going wrong.  It’s like a throwback to the idiocies of WWI British war planning.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Cornelius Ryan, who wrote the book BRIDGE is based on, did a better job organizing the screenplay he wrote for an even bigger multi-pronged military campaign movie, THE LONGEST DAY/’62, though that film not without its corny aspects.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Redford’s startling charisma, at its zenith here, all the more impressive surrounded as he is by the likes of Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, James Caan, Edward Fox, Anthony Hopkins . . . and so on.