A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Or really, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, for even though Coppola at the time insisted on pretending this to be a close adaptation of the Stoker’s novel, this runs as roughshod over the original as is the norm for movie Draculas. This isn’t a bad thing, I believe – I, for one, don’t need a one to one adaptation of a Victorian novel, as much as I like that particular example of its form. This one is about as close to the original as Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Where Hooper chose to retell Dracula as a Quatermass movie, Coppola’s Dracula is the Dario Argento version of Dracula that Argento’s actual Dracula isn’t.

The main project of Coppola’s version appears to be a bit of projection: of the director’s own middle-aged horniness on the novel, overplaying the sexual subtext of a novel that does indeed have rather a lot of sexual subtext so intensely, one repeatedly wants to recommend cold showers to the filmmaker as much as to his characters. Some study of the dictionary entries for “sledgehammer” and “subtlety” might have been of use, as well. All of this has something of the air of watching a high budget Jess Franco movie without the crotch shot obsession but it with even more sexy (and “sexy”) writhing.

That’s not a bad thing in my book, mind you, but rather is an inherent part of what has turned this initially often maligned film into a bit of a classic: sex – eroticism tends to be subtler – is absolutely and always at the core of Dracula’s aesthetics, created out of thin air and celluloid, through the operatically overblown and utterly beautiful production design, the incredible number of bad accents by hot actors who should have known better (as well as Keanu Reeves), and Coppola’s insane/awesome decision to only use effects and filmmaking tricks reproducible on set and in camera (actual theatrical magic).

Thus, Coppola manages to create a mood of highly artificial, overheated and oversexed beauty that never lets up for a single shot – the film’s aesthetics are its actual point, its mood irreproducible and uncreatable by any other means. This may very well be the best possible example of the cinema of style as substance not made by an Italian.

In short: When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

British attempts at creating a new franchise in the spirit of James Bond have historically never fared too well. A nice example for this tradition is this attempt at bringing in French director Etienne Périer and turn to the ever popular Alistair MacLean for scripting duties to make a young Anthony Hopkins playing a permanently disgruntled treasury agent into “The New James Bond”.

Apparently, nobody involved in the production bothered to understand why the Bond movies were the smashes they were, so that series’ sense for POP and the popping eye candy is replaced by the more realistic and workaday charms of your typical Alistair MacLean hero and his world. Hopkins’s Calvert is still supremely competent, mind you, but like all MacLean heroes, he’s rather too down to Earth and focussed on solving the problems at hand to ever feel charismatic or cool like even the Roger Moore version of Bond does.

There is quite a bit of geographical hopping around here too, but where the Bond films show what tourists like to see – and typically set an outrageous action set piece there – When Eight Bells Toll prefers various, dramatically grey, coast lines, and lots of ships and boats (and helicopters, to be fair). There’s nothing wrong with that at all of course, but if you’re trying to beat the contemporary Bond movies at their own game, you might at least look as if you’re trying.

There are at least some direct if tepid attempts at copying the sexy/sleazy bits of the Bonds, but the film – after all written by the rather notoriously couth MacLean - feels faintly embarrassed by that instead of convinced, which obviously also turns it unconvincing.

All of this doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had here. If you go into the film not asking for the Bond it doesn’t know how to deliver but for a more on-brand action/adventure Alistair MacLean style affair, there’s a lot to like here, particularly if you enjoy your action and adventure taking place on coastlines and boats (there is, thankfully, not too much interest in diving here), and featuring ultra-competent, slightly boring protagonists.

Three Films Make A Post: Once the pigs tasted blood... No one could control their hunger!!

The Farthest (2017): I had heard great things about Emer Reynolds’s documentary about the Voyager mission. Actually having seen it, I find myself mostly annoyed by it. In theory, there’s an incredible richness of material in here, interviews with a bunch of intelligent and important women and men who were involved in one of the great achievements of human history, but what the film does with this is pretty pitiful. Because its assumed audience are apparently idiots who can’t follow a thought that’s longer than ten words, it turns these highly intelligent people into talking heads out of a shitty “TV’s Stupidest Awards” show, dispensing sound bites instead of thoughts. Add pretty pictures, a cloying soundtrack, and a nearly desperate drive to entertain instead of to enlighten, and you have your award-winning documentary right there.

Proof (2005): As John Madden’s adaptation of David Auburn’s play proves, you can make things more accessible without making them painfully stupid. Madden also mostly manages to turn the stage play into a movie while neither ignoring the roots of the piece nor having the visual elements be pure, functionless flim-flam. This features Gwyneth Paltrow (before her unfortunate contemporary career turn into hawking crap to the gullible), Jake Gyllenhaal, and Anthony Hopkins (actually acting instead of doing the shtick he has frequently fallen back on after Silence of the Lambs) at their best, working through the film’s complicated emotional and intellectual turns, bringing its thoughts about family, mental illness, “Great Men” and their daughters, and quite a bit more to life. Sure, from time to time things are a bit mid-brow, please give us an Oscar, Hollywood (there’s an inadvertently hilarious montage full of chin-stroking mathematicians you gotta see to believe), Madden can’t get away from completely even in his best movies (let’s not speak about that thing with Nicholas Cage), but the film’s stretching far inside of these genre structures.


Summer Wars aka サマーウォーズ (2009): Because I am apparently a curmudgeon today, turns out I’m also not quite as fond of this anime by Mamoru Hosoda about a traditional, if crazy, Japanese family saving the world as the rest of said world apparently is. It’s not that the animation isn’t beautiful, or the character design doesn’t breathe warmth and love for these characters, nor am I complaining about a lack of clever ideas. It’s just that this thing is so incessantly emotionally manipulative, doing its damndest to squeeze the last possible tear drop out of its audience that it rubs me all wrong, nearly becoming a satire of the things it praises by the pure power of laying everything on so thick and then ladling tears and good cheer on top. Honestly, I felt slightly nauseated by it.