A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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...

(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...

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 ...

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...