Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [156]
Whereas at first the role seemed to Redford “like a name in a telephone directory,” there was a sentimental dimension for him. Operation Market Garden was a prelude to the Third Army thrust during which his uncle David was killed. “In that way A Bridge Too Far was a kind of homage to Uncle David. I’d never been to the battlefield area where he died. The movie gave me a chance to visit his grave in Luxembourg and acknowledge him in a personal way.”
Levine sweated like a workhorse, he said, to make his movie work. “Darryl Zanuck had the best advantage with The Longest Day because the heroes die in his movie. That makes for a dramatic audience experience. We were faced with the opposite. None of the leading guys died, and then the mission failed. Add to that all the different skirmishes, the airborne assault with gliders, the ground attacks, the planes, the boats, the tanks, the parachutes, and it was War and Peace. Dickie [Attenborough] worked harder than any director I have ever known just getting the military hardware right. He was having daily breakdowns trying to negotiate with the Dutch and the Brits and the Germans to borrow guns, tanks, trucks, and everything else we couldn’t afford to build. I regarded that movie as a nightmare. Gratifying, but a nightmare.”
Goldman overcame the inherent dramatic weakness by redefining the scenario simply as “a story about the cavalry that arrives too late.” The roles of the lesser ranks who fought and died were beefed up. Redford liked the approach: “The risk with the story was always diffusion. It was a three-hour movie documenting parallel stories about the parachute assaults from the 1st British, the 82nd American and the 101st American Airborne Infantry paving the way for the main British thrust. That’s a lot of moving targets, a lot of talking heads, a lot for the audience to comprehend and remember.” Employing immediately recognizable faces—Ryan O’Neal, James Caan and Anthony Hopkins, among others—solved the problem. “I normally dislike movies that rely on star casting, but this time it seemed valid for plot clarity.” There was also much to admire, he felt, in the sharp-focus roles written for Caan, playing a lowly sergeant who fights for his principles, and Anthony Hopkins, as Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, the tenacious frontline British commander. Redford came to love his own irascible character, Cook, who unwittingly led his men into a massacre while crossing the Waal River to back up the Arnhem bridge defenders. Among the most moving moments in a movie every bit as full of action and as noisy as Midway was Cook’s conducting his men in the communal recitation of the Hail Mary as they dove into battle. “Bill gave me some good words to work with,” says Redford. “That role could easily have been a cipher, but the choices that Attenborough and Goldman made gave it a great dignity.”
Though A Bridge Too Far took six months to shoot, Redford was in Holland just four weeks. Throughout the shoot at Deventer, thirty miles north of Arnhem, he was hounded by the media as never before. When Costa-Gavras, the Greek director of Z, invited him to dine in Paris, he fled willingly. “I was trying to escape the craziness,” says Redford, “because Europe was saturated with All the President’s Men, and by association I was being connected with the downfall of Richard Nixon. I’d rarely had to use personal security guards, but the violations were freaky. One German newspaper sent a naked woman to my hotel room with a birthday cake, presumably to get a scandal story. The paparazzi were all over Deventer like flies. One New York guy even flew to Amsterdam, spending a fortune in time and dollars just to get one candid shot. I naïvely thought, If I get away from the