The Bridge at Remagen (Complete Movie Review)

Spring, 1945.

After the failure of his Ardennes Counteroffensive - the famous "Battle of the Bulge" - three months earlier, Adolf Hitler huddles in his bunker beneath Berlin, trying desperately to stave off certain defeat as his "Thousand Year Reich" falls back on all fronts.

In the East, the Red Army has overrun most of Poland and East Prussia. Russian armies, several million soldiers strong, are now less than 100 miles away from the Nazi capital.  Only the floodwaters of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, as well as the tattered remnants of the once mighty German forces which invaded Russia in 1941, block their advance.

In the West, the American, British, Canadian and French forces have liberated most of France, all of Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Holland.   And though the surprise German attack in December caught Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Anglo-American subordinates by surprise, its failure has eliminated one of the Allies' worst strategic scenarios from Hitler's options - a slow and bloody slog to the Rhine River, the Reich's sole natural shield between the advancing Allies and the heart of Germany itself.

If you have read - however casually - any general history book about the last 11 months of World War II in Europe, you are doubtlessly aware of the importance that rivers and bridges played in both the offensive and defensive strategies of the Axis and Allies in Northwest Europe.

Rivers are, by their very nature, particularly helpful to an army on the defensive, as Hitler's army surely was by the middle of 1944.  If a defender sites his forces just right and can either hold or destroy all the bridges in front of the attackers, he can slow down his opponent's advancing armies and inflict heavy casualties - thus buying his leaders either time to gain concessions at a negotiating table or to somehow marshal enough weapons and troops for a counterstrike at the enemy.

The Allies, of course, were well aware of the value of bridgeheads in this first real war of mechanized mobility; the ill-fated attempt to capture the bridge at Arnhem (chronicled brilliantly in 1977's A Bridge Too Far) is perhaps one of the best-known incidents in which an entire combined-arms operation was planned and executed in order to grab bridges ahead of a large advancing force and outflank a defensive position.

Perhaps because it was overshadowed by either the failed operation at Arnhem or the string of Allied victories - of which the various crossings of the Rhine River were a part - which followed the Battle of the Bulge, the dramatic capture of the bridge at Remagen isn't as well remembered, and neither is this 1969 film directed by British director John Guillermin.

Not to be confused with Richard Attenborough's aforementioned A Bridge Too Far, The Bridge at Remagen is a fictionalized account of the true and amazing story of how, almost by sheer luck, American soldiers of the Ninth Armored Division captured the last standing bridge over the Rhine in early March of 1945.

Produced by David L. Wolper and written by Roger O. Hirson (story), William Roberts and Richard Yates (screenplay), The Bridge at Remagen is a hybrid of fact and Hollywood fiction, taking the basic elements of the real event and depicting those as accurately as possible, while replacing the basicallly hum-drum real-life American and German participants with more "exciting" or "dramatic" Hollywood counterparts.

In the film, as in real life, the U.S. First Army is advancing at a furious pace toward the Rhine, the last natural barrier between the Allies and what they perceive to be the ultimate price - Berlin.  For the generals, here personified by "General Shinner" (E.G. Marshall), grabbing any bridge over that broad and dangerous waterway is the path to glory in the history books.

For the average GI, especially the sardonic Sgt. Angelo (Ben Gazzara) and the war-weary but experienced Lt. Phil Hartman (George Segal), seizing a bridge and crossing over it to the other side means a speedier end to the war and a ticket on the "big boat" back to the States.

But the Germans, following the insane and selfish edicts of their Fuehrer, are blowing up all the bridges in the Allies' front, sometimes minutes before a single U.S. GI or British Tommy can set foot on them.

All of them...except the Ludendorff railway bridge at the small and almost forgotten city of Remagen, a few miles downstream from what would be the West German capital, Bonn.

On the opposing side, German Maj. Kruger (Robert Vaughn) not only has to worry about the almost relentless American advance toward the Ludendorff Bridge and his ill-equipped and outnumbered troops, but he has to carefully balance his oath obedience to Hitler - who wants the bridge blown up no matter what - and his desire to help over 55,000 survivors of the battered German 15th Army cross the Rhine rather than leave them trapped on the western banks.

To his (and the screenwriters') credit, Guillermin is able to strike a balance between historical accuracy and Hollywood-isms, such as the inclusion of stock characters, such as the stereotypically hard-nosed and ambitious Maj. Barnes (Bradford Dillman), the cynical-yet-compassionate company commander (Segal's Lt. Hartman), the ever-resourceful NCO whose street smarts make him the archetypical citizen-soldier (Gazzara's Sgt. Angelo), and, of course, the conscientious German officer (Maj. Kruger) who must defend the bridge with the few troops he has - even though he knows he is doomed no matter what he does.

For entertainment purposes, The Bridge at Remagen is fine; the acting is pretty good overall, the pacing is good and the scenery - shot mostly in Czechoslovakia just before the Soviet-led invasion in 1968 - gives the movie a particular sense of European authencity lacking in many "shot in the U.S." war movies. On top of this, the score by Elmer Bernstein adds the perfect accompaniment to the action scenes of the 115-minute-long feature.

Of course, if you compare this film's battle sequences to those of war movies filmed after 1998's Saving Private Ryan, you probably won't be too impressed if blood-and-guts realism is your cup of tea.   And because the characters are all fictitious, you shouldn't use the film as a source for a term paper on the real battle.

But if you enjoy the occasional "escapist" action-adventure flick such as The Guns of Navarone or even good - if fictionalized - recreations of World War II episodes (The Great Escape comes to mind), The Bridge at Remagen is a good, exciting movie.