Shows of Force

Want to see a sterling example of a 4K upgrade from start to finish? Via Vision’s Imprint edition of A Bridge Too Far arrived last week, delayed for weeks due to the Canada Post strike, and it’s a hell of a thing.

A Bridge Too Far is a three-hour adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s book about Operation Market Garden, which in September 1944 attempted to break the back of the already faltering Nazi war machine. The plan involved dropping 35,000 British, American and Polish paratroopers into occupied Holland to capture three key bridges, from which the Allies would mount an offensive into Germany in the hopes of taking Berlin – and ending the war – by Christmas.

All they had to do was hold the bridges for a day or two until a convoy of Allied jeeps, trucks and tanks could join them. But the ground forces were delayed by weather, logistics, equipment issues and a key intelligence failure – a Panzer division happened to be on leave in Arnhem, just miles from the most important bridge – leaving the paratroopers without necessary support. It was a slaughter, and Ryan’s book lays out the path to tragedy in meticulous detail.

Mounted by producer Joseph E. Levine as an epic, old-school WWII picture with a cast of thousands led by a dozen or more very famous faces, directed by Richard Attenborough in full prestige epic mode – his version of The Longest Day, but without the triumphalism – A Bridge Too Far is indeed a gargantuan undertaking, with elaborate special effects and no small amount of heroism.

It’s a downbeat picture – we know the Allies didn’t get anywhere near Berlin in 1944, after all – but Attenborough gets the tone exactly right, taking us from the initial optimism of the officers and the commitment of their troops to frustration and disappointment when things start to go wrong, and ultimately to the exhaustion and desperation that sets in when the cavalry doesn’t arrive.

In his excellent book Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman wrote at length about turning small, fascinating anecdotes in Ryan’s book into character vignettes for various actors, and while some reviews at the time complained that the parade of movie stars like Fox, Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal, Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, James Caan, Elliott Gould, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier and Liv Ullmann was a distraction, the casting works as a shorthand to connect us to a given character at a given place and time. This isn’t a movie that follows a single platoon on a mission, fleshing out the characters as individuals over the course of the picture; it’s operating on a much larger canvas, and by casting to type Goldman shaves a good hour off of the picture.

Released in June of 1977, just three weeks after Star Wars rewrote the blockbuster landscape, A Bridge Too Far was a massive hit – it was the year’s sixth-highest grossing film – but it also feels like the last gasp of this sort of war picture. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now were already in production, their New Hollywood energy allowing for more mature and stylized investigations of Americans at war; Attenborough’s vision of combat would look downright square by comparison. But in the moment, it works just fine: A Bridge Too Far is in quiet awe of the commitment and sacrifice of the men who fought at Arnhem and Nijmegen and Eindhoven, while acknowledging the failures of their superiors to consider dissenting opinions that might have made a difference.

Via Vision’s 4K disc – “newly scanned and restored,” and offering the film for the first time in UHD and Dolby Vision – is the best version of A Bridge Too Far I’ve ever seen, a near-pristine transfer that paradoxically enough preserves cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth’s use of diffusion filters with absolute clarity … and reveals the optical trickery in one airfield shot that adds a lot more planes than were actually present. But the rest of the picture looks brand new, and sounds great, with your choice of 4.0 and 5.1 soundtracks presented in DTS-HD.

In addition to that flawless new master, Imprint’s edition rescues all the special features produced for the various DVDs edition of A Bridge Too Far back when, starting with an expansive audio commentary from screenwriter Goldman (who’s supported over the length of the film by crew members and historical experts) and an on-screen fact track that are included on the 4K and Blu-ray feature discs. A separately packaged Blu-ray holds the rest of the supplements, offering hours and hours of material.

The entire production is tackled in Simon Lewis’ one-hour doc “Making A Bridge Too Far,” a companion piece to his new book of the same name, but if you want to dig deeper into specific aspects of the film, there’s plenty to explore.

Writers C. Courtney Joyner and Jon Burlingame discuss Attenborough’s direction and John Addison’s score in “Attenborough at War” and “A Futile Mission,” respectively; Elliott Gould looks back at his piece of the picture in a new interview with Daniel Kremer, “More Than Another War Movie,” while camera operator Peter MacDonald discusses the project in a long interview (“We Are the Cavalry”) and appears with clapper loader Tony Jackson to talk about their late, great collaborator Unsworth in “Behind the Lens.”  And Daniel Griffith’s “Joseph E. Levine: Becoming the Showman” offers a zippy biography of the producer who brought Santa Claus, Hercules, Godzilla and The Graduate to American screens, and gets bonus points for enlisting Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Frank Conniff as a talking head. (He knows stuff!)

A separate tab on the menu leads to the archival features, which reach deeper than I’d expected. In addition to the retrospective interview with Attenborough and the documentaries “Heroes from the Sky” (an episode of the 2001 TV series History Vs. Hollywood) and “A Distant Battle: Memories of Operation Market Garden” that appeared on MGM’s special-edition DVD, Imprint has also unearthed “The Arnhem Report,” Iain Johnstone’s hour-long production documentary (transferred from what I’m guessing is a half-inch video master) and Bobbie Wygant’s brief interviews with Attenborough and Hopkins from the movie’s press junket. (Wygant is the journalist whose unbearable interview with Harrison Ford was included on Arrow’s Witness special edition; she’s a lot less schmoozy in these clips, and both Attenborough and Hopkins take her questions seriously.)

Finally, an entirely unexpected bonus: Theirs Is the Glory, a 1946 feature film produced by J. Arthur Rank and the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit that re-creates the Battle of Arnhem on location in Holland, with a cast of 200 veterans who’d actually fought there.

Directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and written by Louis Golding and Terence Young, it’s a compelling hybrid shot in atmospheric black-and-white, with an anonymous narrator taking us through the lives of the soldiers, war correspondents and Dutch civilians re-enacting their all too recent experience. (One of them is Kate ter Horst, whom Liv Ullmann would play for Attenborough thirty years later.)

It’s a fascinating example of a propaganda film that’s determined to do right by its subjects; the patriotic undercurrent grows naturally out of what we’re watching. I didn’t even know this film existed until the box set turned up, and it’s an invaluable addition to this set.

A Bridge Too Far was one of a quartet of 4K hardbox releases that Via Vision put out last month; the others were Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, Wolfgang Petersen’s The Neverending Story and Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and if you’re a fan of any of those they are instant must-haves. The label’s doing incredible work, it really is.

Up next: Hallucinatory horrors abound as Smile 2 and The Cell make their 4K debuts. One of them’s a comedy!