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Showing posts with the label A Bridge Too Far

For the Love of Movies: Which is the one movie you have watched more than three times in a row?

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Before the advent of home video, in any format (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or digital download)? That’s easy. Star Wars. Or, as it’s been officially renamed (since 1981): Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation Now, Star Wars was not the first movie that I saw more than once in theaters (for the purposes of this answer, home video/television broadcasts don’t count). That honor, for lack of a better word, goes to this 1977 movie, which opened a couple of weeks after George Lucas’s space-fantasy film. © 1977 MGM//United Artists When Star Wars premiered in May of 1977, I was more into military history than I was into science fiction/space fantasy. In fact, I didn’t want to see Star Wars that summer - even though almost all of my friends told me it was a “must-see” event. I saw A Bridge Too Far twice within a period of two weeks. My mom was not terribly thrilled to drive me to the theater to see the same flick twice, but since she was mere

Music Album Review: 'A Bridge Too Far: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack'

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(C) 1999 Rykodisc. Movie poster art (C) 1977 Metro Goldwyn Meyer/United Artists The late film composer John Addison (Tom Jones, Sleuth ) may perhaps be best remembered by millions of TV viewers for his theme for "Murder, She Wrote," but one of his best scores was written for 1977's A Bridge Too Far. Richard Attenborough's epic about Operation Market-Garden isn't a bad movie; it just had the misfortune of having been made in the late 1970s, when most movie-watchers were leery about war movies. As the liner notes to this Rykodisc/MGM Soundtrack explain, " A Bridge Too Far is not a typical war film celebrating a heroic victory." Coming on the heels of America's defeat in Southeast Asia and antipathy for most things military, Attenborough's well-crafted film failed to draw audiences and disappeared from theaters and moviegoers' radar scopes. (The success of a movie set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" d

Book Review: 'Arnhem: The Battle of the Bridges, 1944'

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Operation Market, the airborne element of Market-Garden. Official British Army photo.  On May 17, 2018, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, published the UK edition of Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. In this eighth work about the Second World War, the award-winning writer and historian turns his sights on one of the War’s most controversial battles – Operation Market-Garden. Outside of the professional military world – especially in the airborne community – Operation Market-Garden was better-known in Great Britain than in the U.S. until the summer of 1974. That’s when Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far was published and gave U.S. readers their first real look at the Allies’ ill-fated attempt to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind the German front lines in Nazi-occupied Holland to capture a series of bridges “with thunderclap surprise” and allow elements of the British Second Army to drive up a single highway, grab a bridgehead over the Lower Rhin

A Bridge Too Far: Cornelius Ryan's chronicle of the Arnhem debacle

On the morning of Sept. 17, 1944, taking off from 24 airfields in southeast England in what was "the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single battle," the leading elements of three Allied airborne divisions roared aloft and set a course for their designated drop zones in Nazi-occupied Holland. Aboard this first lift of a scheduled three, men from the veteran American 82nd and 101st Airborne and the British First Airborne Division -- which was making its first combat jump -- anxiously waited for the green lights to light up and to step out into the Dutch sky in a daring and unprecedented daylight parachute and glider landing. Their mission, to capture -- "with thunderclap surprise" -- a series of bridges that spanned the Albert Canal, the Waal River, and the last river between the advancing Allied forces and Germany: the mighty Rhine.  On the Belgian-Dutch border, the tankers, soldiers, artillerymen, engineers, and vehicle drivers of Gen