A Bridge Too Far: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack

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Music reviews of A Bridge Too Far: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack

Music Review: Fine score is also a requiem for composer's war buddies
Rating: 5 Stars

Richard Attenborough's epic about Operation Market-Garden isn't a bad movie (as I have stated in my review of the DVD); it just had the misfortune of having been made in the late 1970s, when most moviewatchers 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 will serve 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; Addison had been a young tank officer in XXX Corps, and when he heard his friend Attenborough was making a film about Market-Garden, he 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 enhanced CD also contains -- for PCs using Windows 95 and up -- a QuickTime video file of the original 1977 movie trailer.

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