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

(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" didn't help A Bridge Too Far survive at the box office, either.)

Pity, because one of the finest attributes this movie has is its score. From the stirring and boldly optimistic march of the opening "Overture" (which also serves as the XXX Corps theme) to the somber and melancholy "Arnhem Destroyed," Addison's score follows the heartbreaking progress of Market-Garden as American, British and Polish paratroopers strive to capture a series of bridges along a single highway in Nazi-occupied Holland while a British armored corps races northward to relieve them.

For the composer, this score was an intensely personal project; in September 1944, Addison was a young tank officer in XXX Corps, the ground force assigned to the Garden half of the operation. 33 years later, when he heard his friend Attenborough was making a film about Market-Garden, Addison asked for the job as composer. 

 Perhaps that's why this score is so powerful and moving. Whether the music is underscoring the breathtaking "Air Lift" (one of the most impressive scenes involving hundreds of C-47s and almost an army's worth of military clad extras), the nerve racking vigil of a sergeant as his company commander is being operated on in "Hospital Tent" or the race-against-time efforts of paratroopers and engineers to build a "Bailey Bridge," Addison gives each cue his heart and soul, thinking, perhaps, about his fellow tankers who fought and died in Northwest Europe in 1944-45. As director Attenborough writes in the liner notes, "[t]he music for A Bridge Too Far is, therefore, in one sense his requiem for those who fought beside him."

This 1999 reissue of the 1977 recording was produced and released by Rykodisc. The enhanced CD also contains a QuickTime video file of the original 1977 movie trailer. The video will play well on PCs with Windows 95, Windows XP, and even Windows Vista, but the QuickTime software will not work in computers that run on later Microsoft operating systems.

Track Listing

1.         Overture         

2.         A Dutch Rhapsody    

3.         Before The Holocaust

4.         Underground Resistance        

5.         Air Lift           

6.         Hospital Tent 

7.         Arnhem          

8.         Nijmegen Bridge       

9.         March of the Paratroopers     

10.       Bailey Bridge 

11.       Human Roadblock     

12.       Futile Mission

13.       The Waal River          

14.       Arnhem Destroyed    

15.       Retreat

16.       A Bridge Too Far March