Clumping Around Market Garden

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Operation Market-Garden was yet another in the great tradition of British military foulups. Like such classics as the charge of the Light Brigade and Gallipoli, it was a bold idea totally bollixed up in the execution. This movie version of the battle, based on Cornelius Ryan's bestselling history, does permit Britain's acting fraternity to redeem its generals' follies. Whatever is lively and memorable in the film, which is not much, is provided by the English members of the most expensive all-star cast in recent memory. Their Yank allies, doubtless because they had second-banana roles in the original production 33 years ago, have dim, brief lives on the screen.

Painful Crawl. The idea behind the battle was simple enough: drop 35,000 British and American paratroopers in Holland, behind the German lines in the fall of 1944, and ask them to seize and hold six bridges leading to Germany proper until ground forces could get to them, a distance of 64 miles. Together the forces could then smash into the Ruhr, wipe out what was left of the enemy's war production, and everybody would be home for Christmas.

Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The paratroopers' radios were faulty, so communication with them was impossible; fog in England hampered air-support operations; the road over which the ground forces were supposed to travel was too narrow, slowing their progress to a painful crawl. Finally, there were more German troops in the area than the Allied high command expected, partly because they had ignored their own intelligence reports.

All of this William Goldman's script lays out with admirable clarity and for something like half the film's running time. When events begin to overwhelm dramatic logic, Director Attenborough loses his design in the smoke and din of a huge, confused battle. Then, too, there is an attempt to humanize the conflict by recounting sundry vignettes of what life was like for troops serving below staff level. By the time James Caan has got his wounded captain to hospital and Elliott Gould has thrown a temporary bridge across a stream in record time and Robert Redford has led an amphibious assault, the flow of battle has been lost by the moviemakers -- and by the audience as well.

At that, these worthies can consider themselves lucky: they have at least had some running about to accomplish. Poor Gene Hackman is required to play a Polish general as if he were a Polish joke, while Ryan O'Neal, as General James Gavin, looks as if he is about to inquire, "Tennis, anyone?" like a summer-stock juvenile. As a general whose troops are surrounded almost the minute they hit the drop zone, Sean Connery is suitably glum. Liv Ullmann and Laurence Olivier play long-suffering Dutch locals caught up in all this boom-boom in humble, long-suffering style.

Despite the fact that the characters are based on historical models, they come out as standard-issue war-movie types. As a result, the film lacks the grandeur one sometimes finds in the literature of military history, where erroneous command decisions, flowing out of the psychological flaws of the generals, can take on a near-tragic force. It also lacks the common humanity of well-made war movies, in which one is invited to share the fates of a small unit whose interest is survival rather than the big historical picture. Aspiring to combine the two forms, A Bridge Too Far achieves distinction in neither.

One is left only with the memory of those splendid British players doing their eccentric bits: Dirk Bogarde edging his performance as a commanding officer with campy arrogance; Edward Fox catching just the right note of awkwardness as another general trying to be hail-fellow-well-met with his troops; Michael Caine as an Irish Guards officer being at once casual and ostentatious as he strikes heroic poses to in spire his men; Anthony Hopkins being stoical about occupying the most exposed position in the battle. That's all good stuff, but the rest of the film puts one in mind of the legendary English officer who, upon being asked to describe Dunkirk, replied: "My dear chap -- the noise, the confusion!"

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