OHHHH, I GET IT

I just realized that A Bridge Too Far was released in 1977. Which means it was probably conceived around 1974-1975, about when we were watching the collapse of South Vietnam. The picture is intended to show the arrogance of military types on top, and the foolishness of their foolproof plans that don't take into account the cleverness of the enemy or the realities of war.

But because Attenborough is so fond of directing pageantry, that gets bogged down in the glory of large numbers of planes taking off, hundreds of parachutes, etc. You have an antiwar message inside an ain't-war-grand star-studded envelope.

It might have been cleverer to show the guys getting the orders to go, and going, and only then starting to find out how screwed they are. It's rarely that obvious going into an operation how screwed it is, or no one would approve it. It's usually only in hindsight that the impossibility of success is clear.

It's also easy to critique military gambles that go wrong. The ones that go right often have the same chance of success, they just luck out. Macarthur's attack on Inchon Harbor could have been a disaster, but it was an overwhelming success. Pearl Harbor could have been a catastrophe for the Japanese if the US had known they were coming. If France had mobilized in reaction to the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the German military would have collapsed.

Hmmmm ... sometimes I think I missed my calling. Or one of my callings. I think I could have been a pretty good soldier, if I hadn't grown up during the Vietnam War.

We also rented The Longest Day, a 1962 movie about D-Day. This at least didn't have a propaganda point to make. It just showed the events of the landings, from the screwed up night drops to the screwed up errors in judgment in the German High Command. Not much of a theme here either, but at least they weren't trying to make World War II into Vietnam. On the other hand there's some bombastic dialog I suspect no one in the Army would have put up with -- I doubt the soldiers needed to be told why Hitler needed to be stopped, or how many men the operation involved. I still think Band of Brothers has all these movies beat, for the sheer feeling of what it must have been like to fight your way from Normandy to Bavaria.