A Movie too Far

Deventer, Holland. June 1976. What was a few months earlier a city on the verge of bankruptcy now resembles a city under siege. Dutch, German, British soldiers stalk cobblestone roads. Tanks, jeeps, a variety of military vehicles squat swollen and ominous atop the modest Wilhelmina Bridge above the IJssel River. A row of bombed-out buildings sits on the Zandpoort almost directly underneath, while a carpet of rubble extends from the foot of these buildings across the underpass. This siege is the biggest thing to hit Deventer since the oil crisis.

You see, producer Joseph E. Levine has come to town. And he has brought with him World War Two as the star of A Bridge Too Far--at $25,000,000, the most expensive independent film venture ever. Based on Cornelius Ryan's best seller, A Bridge Too Far is a detailed account of the September 1944 Battle of Arnhem, at which the combined British and American airborne and ground armies, attempting to capture the Arnhem Bridge (for which Levine has substituted the Wilhelmina) and end the war by Christmas, suffered staggering defeat--almost twice as many casualties as on D day--at the hands of the already-broken German forces. For audiences who can't take their war films straight, Levine has tagged his epic "pacifist" in intent and has spiced it with 14 of the most imposing box-office biggies ever signed for one picture: Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell and Liv Ullmann. He has also peopled Deventer with a 150-man crew, members of the Royal Dutch Army, British Red Devils (paratroopers), Dutch university students and thousands of inhabitants from north-central Holland.

Yet what in spring has promised to be a glorious clash of million-dollar egos, a cradle of hotshot gossip, is aborted by a shooting schedule where stars' commitments are staggered and isolated, where their entrances and exits are precisely coordinated so that they pass one another like cars shooting by on the Los Angeles Freeway. In the course of time, the process of film making inadvertently diminishes its individuals, who simply function as cogs in a complicated machine.

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June 14, Monday. Today the unit shoots at the headquarters of British Lieutenant Colonel Frost, one of the bombed-out buildings on the Zandpoort. Hopkins, Schell and Kruger are working this week. Caan has already finished his three-week stint and cleared out pronto. The construction crew, all tough and beefy boys, chuckle at having to build a wooden steer so that Caan--a member of the Rodeo Cowboys' Association--could practice his lassoing between takes.

Twenty-odd people are crowding atop the debris-strewn roof of Frost's house--crew, actors and Levine's son and coproducer, Richard, who is now engaging in a fierce diatribe against lousy household help and incompetent secretaries. Hopkins, who won a 1975 Emmy for his TV portrayal of Bruno Hauptmann in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, has the plum role of Lieutenant Colonel Frost, the officer required to hold the Arnhem Bridge until other Allied units arrived. Now Hopkins sits patiently to the side between takes. He lifts his head to the hot sun, closing his eyes as if in meditation, seemingly oblivious of the coarse British uniform, the bandages and weapons encumbering his frame. It's meditation, of sorts, he explains; the notion intrigues him: "Often I see a white light in the middle of my forehead," he smiles. Hopkins has lost about 30 pounds since he appeared on Broadway in Equus three years ago. Then he was known as difficult; now he's placid, a lamb. "I used to be arrogant, driven by power; it doesn't matter anymore; I do the job and do the best I can. I'm not consumed by it," he says.

Director Richard Attenborough, small, tranquil, with an Irish cap pulled over wide blue eyes, orders close-ups of Hopkins. The sparkers (lighting technicians) set up, another 20 minutes. They take. And again.

"Tony, dear, were you aware your eye was running?" Attenborough asks.

"Was it?" Hopkins replies. "Just dust." Someone from make-up rubs Vaseline on his face, then adds a dab of blood that is described as "a combination of Nescafé and Kensington gore." They take, print, then strike the set and move the equipment.

That afternoon, the setup is on the second floor of Frost's house. Two prop men spray cans of dirty water on the walls. Special effects has a controlled fire coming up. About 40 extras and technicians mill about the rubble, ignoring the clouds of plaster and dust that descend to coat already-settled plaster and dust. This time, Hopkins' scene requires a short-wave radio conversation with Connery, who plays Scottish Commander Urquhart. Connery isn't due on location yet, so Attenborough reads his lines. Again, take after take. Hopkins is supposed to be dodging bullets and gunfire.

"Tony, dear," Attenborough cajoles, "could you move a little to the left and, darling, could you remember to duck on the word reassurance?"

They take. Tony ducks.

"Thank you, darling." The "thank you" is a caress. Attenborough talks like that to his actors and crew, always a "dear" or "darling" or "love," always a "good morning, Angelface" or "Ducky." Seductive, unruffled, rarely patronizing; never without a pleasant word. The crew adores him.

One assistant director (a.d.) who'd crewed for Stanley Kubrick on Barry Lyndon offers, "I wouldn't work with Kubrick again if I had to burn in hell. But Richard, Richard's a genius, a wonderful man. Kubrick, though, with all that money and time at his disposal, to make a picture that's pretty but not commercial ...?" Hard-nosed priorities and standards; movies, these fellows know, have nothing to do with art. The technicians are fond of pointing out that, despite extraordinary technical logistics, Attenborough is keeping A Bridge Too Far precisely on schedule. According to another veteran on the crew, that is "a bloody miracle."

During tea break, Hopkins removes his helmet and climbs over cables, mattresses and a cake tray that has slid to the floor, smearing whipped cream into the chalky plaster. He is staking out private space for himself in a sooty window seat. "I'd never played a soldier before," he says. "I read this book--no, that's a lie; I read parts of the book, then decided to just listen to Dickie Attenborough and get on with it. The funny thing is that with this part, you can't do any psychological preparation the way I usually do. Here, you must speak your lines and get off, because there are tanks all around. I usually wear earplugs when they start firing the guns." (Later, what Hopkins means by preparation becomes evident. The margins of his script for Audrey Rose, which he shot following Bridge, are cluttered with annotations regarding motivation, psychological observation and character background, all made in a small, tight handwriting.)

Sound engineer Simon Kaye teases Hopkins about poor enunciation, warning that he'll have to redub all the dialog. Hopkins, whose breathless voice quality is as velvety close to Richard Burton's as anybody's in the business, counters with the question: "What's Connery's diction like?"

Sound man Kaye: "Perfect. Fine. Scottish."

"Burton?"

"Fine."

"Olivier?"

"Fine."

"Ah," Hopkins responds, then shrugs, leans back into the window seat and pulls his helmet down over his face.

June 15, Tuesday. By ten a.m., the Zandpoort looks like the railway depot in Gone with the Wind. Hundreds of Dutch students have been bussed in from Nijmegen at sunrise and are being paid 86 gulden per day to be uniformed, bandaged, splinted, slinged, greased with Nescafé and Kensington gore and deposited on rock heaps surrounding the house. A make-up man comes by with a bag of white dust and slaps it onto the red berets and green camouflage suits of Frost's troops. Hours slip by. Cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth oversees the sparkers. Special effects reviews plans for detonating explosives.

Colonel Waddy, the film's British military advisor, stands near one of the lighting vans, looking like a fish out of water. This ultraconservative British career officer is an old-line military stickler who reminisces about "our war against the Jews," referring to the post-World War Two embargo on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Waddy claims that the real Battle of Arnhem was a travesty: "Within maybe 10, 20 or 30 seconds of the Allies' first air landing in Arnhem, it was all over," he observes. "The Allies ran into impossible luck from the beginning, when their troops landed in full view of German Field Marshal Model's window, where he happened to be standing at that exact moment. Arnhem, to be blunt, was a bloody massacre."

Waddy is not exactly boasting about the accuracy of A Bridge Too Far. "I've been told that movies just can't afford to be so exact," he sighs. "For instance, when the tanks approach the bridge, we filmed them, oh, 30 or 40 yards apart. In real life, tanks never travel so close to one another, they keep a distance of at least 200 yards. But it would take hours to get the scene on film." He shakes his head, resigned. Gnawing inaccuracies. Diplomatic disapproval.

The real General Frost had paid a (continued on page 146) Movie Too Far (continued from page 94) visit a few weeks earlier. "It was a bit unnerving," Hopkins recalls in his trailer as he waits to be beckoned to the set, "because he expected the whole thing to be a document, as exact as it actually happened. He made line changes, but not only that, he refused to have certain scenes play as already written. 'Now, listen,' he'd say, 'you wouldn't run the cross fires that fast.' 'Why not?' I'd ask. 'No,' he'd insist. 'You'd show the enemy contempt for danger by crossing the road slowly.' Me, using my actor's imagination, I took the road at the speed of light. And Hardy Kruger told me that when an enemy opens fire, you do anything to save yourself--dig a hole in concrete--anything. But Frost was at Arnhem; we changed the shot to accommodate him."

Hopkins walks out to the Zandpoort, takes his place beside his ersatz army. An assistant director is blocking the background action; extras march into the scene, then out, from both sides of the frame simultaneously. Stretchers. Jeeps. Crutches. The whole bit. Special effects has the fumes coming up through the windows of Frost's house, nice and black now. The explosions are wired to go off. Places. The camera begins to roll.

Pop. Hssss. Whooosh. First, like caps or blanks. The sound deepens. A flame shoots up, then falls two stories from inside the house. Another. A rumble. Soot fans out of a third-story window. "Everybody out," somebody calls.

"Clear the area," another orders. From nowhere, fire hoses are suddenly being rushed toward the building. Extras, technicians, cables, equipment--people stumbling out of the way, dragging belongings with them.

"What's happening?" Whoosh. Hsss. "Is it a real fire?" Pop. "Is it out of control?"

The a.d.s are scrambling around, shouting into walkie-talkies. "Stand back, stand back," they admonish. "There may be an explosion. Then it dawns: It's for real, no longer make-believe.

"Get those bottles of gas out of that building," a special-effects man cries. Fourteen bottles of liquid gas are stored in the building constructed next to Frost's house. If it erupts into flames, they will explode. The fire brigade is working fast now, the cameras move into the fire and keep turning, a team of men rushes in and relays the large silver tanks of gas out of the area. Finally, golden flames burst through Frost's roof. The third floor begins a slow-motion collapse, but the camera unit stays on top of the fire even as it's being hosed down. Everyone else stands just feet away, as if mesmerized.

One silent observer is the producer himself. Levine is a small, round, jaunty figure with his sleek black cane with a gold handle shaped like the bridge at Arnhem. "Well, Joe," a friend kibitzes, "how does it feel to watch thousands of dollars go up in smoke like that?"

Levine just smiles, then turns to a visiting photographer who's been snapping away throughout this miniholocaust: "Can you get your film on the next plane to the States?" He grins. Calmly. Ever the showman.

June 16, Wednesday. The company ferries across the river to photograph the German troops and General Bittrich (Maximilian Schell) approaching the bridge. Today local students and the Royal Dutch Army (known affectionately as the hippie army) are employed as extras; a hairdresser is frantically cutting hair.

Schell, in heavy Pan-Cake make-up and Wehrmacht overcoat, banters with Levine, who, it seems, has brought over 46 Andrew Wyeth paintings to make his room here feel more like home. "I'll give you 46 sausages for 46 Wyeths," Schell offers. Levine laughs, but not too much. Later Schell, an art aficionado himself, suggests, "Why don't you leave out this shot and give me a Wyeth? They cost about the same." Levine grins broadly. Then Schell tells one of the corniest and most ironically timed jokes possible: "You know the definition of chutzpah?" he asks Levine. "When a Jewish boy murders his parents and pleads for leniency because he's an orphan." Nobody laughs. Except Schell, who slips his hand through the suspenders holding up his gray Wehrmacht trousers.

Schell wins the prize as the actor least liked by the unit. He's aloof, elitist, doesn't mingle or try to ingratiate himself. His driver complains that Schell never talks, not a word, not even to his secretary, a dark-haired young woman who everyone assumes is his girlfriend. The driver says the only sign of life from Schell is that he counts the cars passing in the opposite direction: "Today he got to 210. I think it's very strange."

Sue d'Arcy is not fond of Max, either, because during an interview between the actor and a German reporter, D'Arcy, who was sitting in, found Schell's fingers crawling up and down her back. Now she flails about the set like a rape victim, afraid to talk with him, unwilling even to deliver a set of stills to his trailer. Someone dubs him Max the Hand. The name sticks.

"I don't know what my image is and I don't care," Schell responds, refreshingly cavalier about his reputation. "Yes, I'm a womanizer. It's just a fact; why should I hide it? Some people might say, 'Oh, he's just after women,' but I don't care what they say. If I like a woman and want to make love to her and she wants it, too, what's the difference?"

Given such advance press, I find Schell something of a surprise. Likable. Witty. Highly intelligent. And an interviewer's delight, because--unlike most actors--he really doesn't care what others think. Which seems as eminently sensible as it is rare. "Sometimes you find a woman who interests you," Schell admits, "and she'll say, 'No, I won't go with you because you are Maximilian Schell.' An actor is somehow in a very feminine position. For instance, he never writes or creates his parts; he's like a woman on a dance floor waiting to be asked to dance. Sometimes, professionally speaking, it's wonderful--you can say yes or no to the man of your choice. If you have no choice, you can dance with the wrong director. Every actor fails if he's not in the right part and the director doesn't put him in the right frame."

Later that afternoon, Schell and Hopkins film a scene in which the conquering German general offers the wounded British officer a Cadbury chocolate bar. A touch of humanism showing that Germans aren't all bogeymen and that the movie is, yes, yes, yes, pacifist. Afterward, Schell, a director himself, notes, "That scene can be a wonderful, memorable moment if it's done well. I don't know. Dickie will cut it; if he cuts it right, it can be very good. But if there are already three chocolate exchanges, then it can become a cheap moment, not a good one. A similar scene occurs later on in the script, when Bittrich gives Dr. Spaander [Laurence Olivier] brandy, so already danger exists because it's repetitive. And we have to find a way to do it differently. When we're readying the shot next week, I'll talk to Dickie about it."

Does Schell regard himself as an actor or a director first? "I think of myself as a human being. And a student," he answers evasively. "I like to explore things, and the best way to explore them is as a film maker." And what role does intelligence play for the actor? "Actors don't need intelligence. Sometimes it gets in the way. Sometimes it's much better to be like an animal." Finally, does he ever feel silly acting? "Yes," without skipping a beat. "Most of the time."

June 17, Thursday. Night work. No stars tonight, only three stunt artists, two minor players and the production unit, which assembles by 7:30 p.m., still broad daylight. This is special-effects night--the blowing up of the Arnhem (Wilhelmina) Bridge--and both the first and the second camera crews will be filming. By 11:30, the first shot is ready, a small arc of fire swooping across the bridge, accompanied by a machine-gun-bullet staccato. It goes smoothly. By midnight, the temperature has dropped to well below chilly; between setups, lorry drivers, carpenters, supplementary crew members disappear into the Pelikaan and other cafés a block away for a beer; other technicians huddle in vans and belt down brandy. Everyone is cold, impatient for the fireworks to begin, yet worried that the bang-up explosion scene might get out of hand, just as the fire did the other day.

Levine and Rosalie, his wife, sit majestically in their director's chairs just to the left of the first-unit camera. Rosalie, a dignified blonde who dresses for the set the way anybody's favorite aunt might for a country-club canasta game, chats graciously with the crew, all the while her knitting needles moving as if propelled by some outside force. "Rosalie Levine is amazing," the sparkers like to say. "She sits knitting, always knitting, but when they yell 'Action,' suddenly the movement stops, she raises her head and watches what's going on. Like, she's really interested, you can tell. Then, the moment you hear 'Cut,' the click-click of the needles begins again."

By three a.m., everything's in order for the explosion. You can cut the tension with a knife. This has to be one take and it has to be right; the whole thing is too big and too complicated to rewire. Besides, daylight ascends in an hour, no time to lose. "Off the bridge," an a.d. yells. Only essential crew--Attenborough, Unsworth, camera and sound units and special effects--remain; others watch from the roof of the Cheese Factory, a medieval fortress turned company commissary across the street, or gather in its doorway. Then the sky suddenly crackles, irradiated by a white light. The light yellows, intensifies; sparks shoot out. A diaphanous mushroom appears.

"Was that all?" someone asks.

"I prefer Guy Fawkes Day," another comments. Dryly.

June 18, Friday night. Everyone who knows cinematographer Unsworth falls a little bit in love with him. Though insiders say he works slowly, his fine cinematography is always worth waiting for; witness 2001: A Space Odyssey. A genteel and private man who could easily have stepped out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel as the elder colonel of the manor, Unsworth, on afternoons of a rest day, strolls in happy solitude through the streets of Deventer; and he is one of the few people who've successfully carved out private space for themselves without appearing uninterested in or unsympathetic to the world at large. Movies never cease to attract him. "At home, when I'm not working, I go often, sometimes to three or four each day. Occasionally, ofcourse, I'm aware of the craft, but generally, I do get carried away with the story." Unsworth feels that each picture has its own special problems: "On this one, we decided from the beginning to open it without much color--monochromatic. That's what Dickie and I agreed on. This is a war movie and we think it an appropriate choice."

While Unsworth coordinates the camera unit and the electricians (they position the lights according to his instructions), the camera operator, Peter MacDonald, who has worked with Unsworth for approximately 12 years, looks through the view finder as each shot is being filmed. In fact, it's striking how rarely either Unsworth or Attenborough actually says anything on set. Each organ of the production--camera, lights, construction, props, etc.--seems magically competent at highly specialized tasks. It's through the artery of assistant directors, with their walkie-talkies, that instructions and movement are channeled; and the major mouthpiece on set is the first a.d., David Tomblin, who calls all setups, takes, cuts and prints. Who directs traffic. Who seems to be invisibly wired to Attenborough's mind.

How is this done? "We never talk," Tomblin states cryptically. Ah, then, they've worked together before, naturally. "Never," he states even more cryptically.

Tonight there are two setups: The first is on the bridge, a stunt man being thrown from a jeep. The second is on a barren knoll, where Schell will be looking up at the bridge from a quarter of a mile away. Again, a grueling wait in the cold night. But what is finally emerging after a week is an irresistible pattern, a surreal choreography.

Where two hours, four or one day on a set seems simply tedious, gradually--over a period of time--a sense of mass movement, a sense of the operation itself looms grander and more fascinating than any isolated moment of film making. Camaraderie of the unit combines with massive dependence on machinery to produce a technical tour de force. The process takes on a life of its own. On location, actors are but skilled robots, playthings of the grander persona--that process. Just as in war, where strategy is all, logistics over power emotions; the unit overwhelms the individual.

June 21, Monday. Laurence Olivier works today, and it's almost as if the queen of England were paying a visit. Deference is in the air; there are fewer salty jokes, the crew sets up speedily, more quietly, solicitously. The scene is Deventer Town Hall, which has been transformed into German Battle Headquarters; here Dr. Spaander will beg Bittrich and General Ludwig (Hardy Kruger) for a three-hour cease-fire in order to evacuate the Allied wounded. Olivier, who has been ill lately, seems pink and fragile, the shadow of Heathcliff. "Larry, sit here," Attenborough says kindly.

Coproducer Richard Levine comes over and is at a loss for words: "You're so marvelous," he exclaims. "Your accent--it's like, it's like, marvelous, a perfect mixture of Dutch and German and all accents." Awe. Olivier responds with a polite smile. Between takes, he generally keeps to himself, sitting in his appointed chair, drinking orange juice.

Max Schell is in rare form this morning. He lounges around, blowing smoke rings at a woman across the room. The sparkers smirk. Olivier muffs a line. A light whines and Attenborough, impatient for the first time in a week, announces: "We'll all stop until the light is adjusted correctly." It is, finally; and they take. Spaander is a pained and kindly humanist; and Olivier, in his few lines, turns on all the juice. The set is quiet. The performance, just a fragment, is affecting, extraordinarily affecting. It's the only time that what's happening in front of the cameras has overpowered what's going on behind them.

In the afternoon, Tony Hopkins and his wife, Jenni, stop by to watch Olivier work. So does Sean Connery, who has come directly from the airport, by way of wardrobe fittings. This is the scene where Bittrich gives Spaander the brandy: Silence. Twice Schell misses his cue to open the door; otherwise, the moment is shot swiftly (though not perceivably differently from the earlier chocolate exchange). The sound engineer wants to retake the click of Nazi heels. Schell and Kruger click for him. Now that the cameras have stopped turning, now that a number of colleagues are on set and the shoot is finished, Schell mugs continuously as he clicks. It's beguiling, this sudden letting down of hair. The crew is dumfounded.

June 22, Tuesday. The morning shoot is at Het Schol in De Hoven, a ten-minute ride from Deventer. Space is tight, a cramped hallway of a beautiful but decrepit house that was recently vandalized by squatters and that will be turned into a funeral home after the unit is finished with it. Olivier sits in an empty, dusty living room to the left of the hallway, waiting for his call; Connery, in Scottish beret and paratrooper duds, sprawls beside him, whistling, "I've got you ... under my skin...." In the small quarters, where dust floats down like a spring drizzle, the sparkers are feisty, Olivier or no Olivier. "Hey," they bait a female journalist, "wanna go muff-diving?" Raucous laughter.

Unsworth walks over and gently claps his hands over the woman's ears: "Don't listen to these boys; they'll corrupt you." Chivalry walks hand in hand with lasciviousness.

"If you can't stand the fire, don't go into the war zone," someone quips. More laughter. Right. Absolutely.

Connery works precisely, like a machine; both he and Olivier fluff lines and, (continued on page 152) Movie too far (continued from page 148) at one point, Attenborough's voice strains with a coloration of displeasure. "Would you prefer 'take our wounded' or 'accept our wounded'?" Olivier asks on the third go-round. They decide on take. The goings are dusty, dirty, uncomfortable. Uncontrollable noise, then an overhead plane, from outside. Unlike the ease of yesterday's shoot, here it's get in, take, get it right and get out. Too small. Too filthy. Not good for Olivier's health or anyone's disposition.

Afternoon: Back to Frost's house on the Zandpoort. Connery has already flown home to Marbella and will return in early July for the bulk of his work. Olivier won't be on location again until tomorrow, with Liv Ullmann. More soldiers, more bandages and stunts this afternoon. Accompanied by gunfire, the stunt men fall, drop, pop from behind Frost's house onto a pile of rubble. Painstaking coordination of men and small explosives, but the soot is blackening, the sound thunderous. Stunt coordinator Alf Joint and one of his stunt boys lean against a van after it's all finished, flexing their breasts for one another. "Our dorsal wings," they laugh. More blood, wounds, extras, on and on. Ullmann pays a visit, her personal hairdresser in tow.

"Who's that?" one of the sparkers asks.

"Liv Ullmann," someone says.

"What's she been in?"

"You know, Bergman's films."

"Who's that?"

"Swedish guy, I think."

August 21, Saturday. Afternoon. The Pelikaan Café. A rest day. Two months have gone by and they've wrought changes. Art-department and construction people have been here in Deventer since February, most others since April. The location is wearing thin; there's still good will and that flabbergasting camaraderie, but everyone has begun counting the days until early October, when they can go home.

A few sour notes emerge: Gordon Arnell left (or was fired, depending on whether you talk to Arnell or Levine). D'Arcy was fired, the alleged catalyst being her refusal to collaborate on a log of the film with a writer hand-picked by Levine. Then, just a few weeks ago, Tatum O'Neal and her friend Melanie Griffith arrived on set, promptly took a prop-department boat out onto the river, smashed it up and were shipped back to London. Two prop boys have fought a punch-out and one ignored his broken jaw for over a week rather than worry "my mum," who had come over on holiday. A plasterer took a walk around the block and dropped dead. Special-effects chief Johnny Richardson was involved in a devastating automobile crash; his girlfriend was killed and he sustained multiple fractures. Undercurrents of exhaustion; erosion of spirit.

Now the unit is also buzzing about a deterioration of unity. "There are two directors on this film," someone confides airily, then walks away.

"The director has two heads," another says mysteriously. The other head, it seems, belongs to camera operator Peter MacDonald; a few people on the crew say he is making most of the pertinent film-making decisions. One technician alleges that MacDonald is always the cohesive force on a picture. But this seems like casual conjecture, probably easily inflamed by Attenborough's implacably good nature and gentle delivery.

Then one of the gaffers drops the biggest pearl of all, the scandal that may have contributed to the exhaustion and tight-lipped ambivalence now in evidence. "You should have been here for the cake! Man, that was some cake. It flew. Some batter. Cocaine, acid, grass, hash, if you could smoke it or chew it or eat it, it was there. One of our sparkers was carried off to the hospital, along with an older guy on the unit who had a metal plate in his head. This guy's functions were so slow, and the doctors couldn't figure out why, so they had him shaved down and were ready to operate. I think the production unit was afraid to say what was wrong until that point, but finally they did, in order to spare the guy from the knife."

A short, youngish man with a bristly beard introduces himself as the guiding light behind the cake. "You want the recipe? It was a ginger cake," he offers. "It was terrific, but what a bloody job to wangle myself on the catering staff to serve it." He was allegedly jailed for three days after this little prank.

Most of the sparkers, as if prepped regarding the matter of the ginger cake, deny it categorically. At first. Then someone points out the fellow who'd been taken to the hospital. Later the victim admits, "Most people fell asleep, got kind of groggy, but me, I thought I was going to die. I mean, I've never smoked anything in my life; I ate that cake and was suddenly so sick, sicker than I'd ever been. They took me to the hospital and I was there for five hours. I don't know who did it, but don't use my name, please; if my guv'nor back in London found out, I'd get it." The sparker stops abruptly, turns and disappears into the crowd.

August 22, Sunday. A grand parade and liberation sequence in the center of town. Sixteen coaches have brought in 1300 extras, mostly women, all dressed in Forties attire, from Twello, Nijmegen and Arnhem. Today is a shopkeeper's dream. The street is swelling with people, all waving tiny Dutch flags.

In his trailer, make-up chief Tom Smith is toning down Michael Caine's skin color. It's Caine's last day of work and he sinks back into his chair, a large, ruddy man for whom petty irritation has suddenly replaced normally expansive humor. "Elliott [Gould] gets all the best lines, the laugh lines. I get the shitty ones," he's now complaining. Mimicking his character, Vandeleur: " 'Yes'...'no'...'oh, really.'..." This morning, in the thick of the cheering crowd, Caine is supposed to set Gould up with the line: "Have you ever been liberated?" to which Gould replies: "I got divorced twice, does that count?" The script requires Vandeleur to smile in response; the exchange bothers Caine. "I think I'll add: 'yes ... [a beat] ... it counts.' " This brings guffaws in the make-up trailer, but it's not pacification enough. Caine storms out and makes his way into the throng.

All morning, Caine and Gould huddle together, laughing and talking chummily. At morning tea break, Gould piles a half-dozen sandwiches onto a plate, removes his heavy Army boots and joins his son, Jason (by Barbra Streisand), who has just arrived on the set. The boy is small, fragile, about eight, with a pale face and light-brown curls; he looks exactly like his mother, exactly like his father. The man tries desperately to close out the mob, to focus on his child, but autograph hounds continually break his attention. Gould, expressionless, signs for them.

Working the crowd is about as easy as working a convention of junkies. They move too quickly, too often, too eagerly. "Remove half of the flags," an a.d. calls down. The crowd presses too close to the tanks. One woman crushes her leg against a tank, a minor injury. Two old people faint. Caine is required to pull off a verbal twister: "When you refer to 'Bailey crap,' I take it you mean that glorious precision-made piece of British-built equipment that is the envy of the civilized world?" Three times he flubs it; his face reddening, he curses. Finally, the lines are broken into two takes. Cut. Print. All the extras applaud.

August 23, Monday. The site is Bussloo Recreation Park, a lovely wooded spot with a sandbanked lake, about 15 minutes outside Deventer. The shot: Gould and his troops building a Bailey bridge (a portable bridge) from pontoons. By eight a.m., dozens of trucks, vans and cars have wended their way into the area. Twenty minutes later, Gould enters the make-up trailer. Does he mind people sitting there? "Naw, I'm just gonna take a shave," which he manages to do while chewing gum steadily. One of the boys assigned to clean up the trailer makes chitchat:

"Were you in M*A*S*H? I hear you were in M*A*S*H, but I don't remember you."

"Was it the TV show you're thinking of?" Gould responds, unemotional.

"Yeah, that's it."

Gould offers nothing more; he checks his face, left side, right side, still chewing gum; a faint hint of amusement creeps into his eyes. "Well, thanks for the shave," he nods before leaving.

Although he keeps to himself a great deal, Gould is a favorite among the crew and the extras, in particular, because he remembers to say good morning, to joke and chat between scenes. He's faultlessly polite, controlled but remote. Fragile. Someone who's taken too many hard knocks. Assiduously, he avoids the press, perhaps because it's clobbered him too often for his erratic career and marriages. Another American actor, here as an extra, remarks that during the long setups, Gould has been impatient, grumbling that in America, more attention is paid to the emotional context of a scene, less to its mechanics; but what's visible now is pure professionalism.

Someone hints that the unit's work contracts include a clause instructing them not to talk about the production; while odd and unconfirmed, this loyalty oath of sorts doesn't seem so farfetched here, where the skeleton publicity unit--or what's left of it--periodically and rudely forages through the set like silly, self-important bloodhounds looking to sniff out trespassers. Generally, however, the technicians connect with the actors on a fairly basic level, speaking fondly of whoever says good morning or plays touch football. "Only Hackman and Connery came around and shook everyone's hand after they were finished," one gaffer remarks. "Both kept to themselves most of the time, though. Ryan O'Neal and Jimmy Caan, on the other hand, wanted desperately for us to like them. You can just tell; there's a difference. For some, it's important to be considered one of the boys."

The extras maintain a different view of things. The Dutch students who saw O'Neal chew out one of their friends when he repeatedly failed to hit his mark during a shoot-out sequence refuse to forget it: "I have no use for him. It was an ugly thing for O'Neal to do," a tow-headed guy in charge of weapons shrugs.

The British "soldiers," mostly serious actors who've been hanging around all summer as part of the A.P.A. (Attenborough's Private Army, which actually underwent two weeks of military training), maintain their own standards of judgment. "What's been shocking me is both the quality of acting and the preparation," one theater-trained extra observes. "You'd be surprised how many of these stars come onto the set in the morning unprepared. Connery, Hackman, O'Neal. For the money they're being paid, it's disgraceful. Edward [Day of the Jackal] Fox showed them all up, even though his role is secondary. He had a four-and-a-half-minute monolog; for technical reasons, they had to take his scene seven times and not once did he miss a word!"

"I don't know what was wrong with Connery," someone offers. "Maybe he was drinking. I heard them say on the walkie-talkie, 'Bring Sean's Scotch to his trailer,' but for all I know, he had a toothache. Or he was exhausted; you know, he hasn't stopped working in three years. And recently his friend and partner, Stanley Baker, died; so he could have been upset. But evenings, he'd sit calmly in front of the Pelikaan, just like a regular person. That was nice, I think."

The shoot isn't going well this afternoon. Three times, amid an avalanche of gunfire, the "army" heaves the mammoth pontoons into the water to construct the Bailey bridge; three times, the pontoons hit, then scatter irreparably. Hauling them back up the bank takes time. Meanwhile, the hot sun beats down on the khaki uniforms, on a crew becoming irritable as it awaits word of possible overtime work, on Gould, who paces up and down between takes, not quite sure what to do with himself.

Suddenly, not long after the crackle of mortar fire, as the camera team readjusts an angle, one of the actors--an American boy who'd been peculiarly nervous all morning about his one speaking line, to be delivered in the water--falls backward to the ground. Hard. People turn and stare. Is it an elaborate pantomime to pass time? The boy's muscles contract; he starts to shake. Nobody moves for what seems like minutes. Quickly, two doctors and a nurse are by his side. "Watch he doesn't swallow his tongue," someone whispers.

"Epilepsy?" another asks. Fear, panic, also curiosity at the violence one can do to one's own body, as limbs, rigid, strike out in all directions. The medics manage to strap the boy onto a stretcher and the ambulance pulls away. Later, word comes that he's all right but will be replaced.

"What if he'd been in the water when the seizure overcame him?" a friend speculates.

The incident casts a pall on an already difficult day. In the afternoon, 40 German film exhibitors are brought over to Bussloo for tea. Girlfriends, wives and children come by, as well; a few complain because they want pastries, or simply a cup of tea, but after it begins to seem like half the police force of Deventer is sponging meals off the company, taking food is strictly taboo, except for the unit itself and appointed guests.

Then a surprise: No overtime this afternoon. In fact, the unit breaks set early and will try to recoup this wash-out day tomorrow before the night shoot. Which means that assembly time will be moved ahead two hours.

"Shit," one of the sparkers comments.

"Damn it," says a construction man, surveying the stock piles--pontoons, weapons, camera crane, tracks and, farther back, the vehicles--as teams begin snaking equipment out of Bussloo. "This outfit doesn't need Attenborough. Or Levine. What this goddamn picture needs is General MacArthur."

Within hours, Bussloo Park is stripped of all signs of war, only to have the fantasy magically re-created the next day. Within weeks, O'Neal, Olivier, Ullmann return, Robert Redford flies in; the machinery of war, the machinery of moviemaking--the play within the play, if you will--grinds on. In early October, the picture is in the can; the crew goes home to England, swearing this is one of the most amenable, least temperamental jobs they ever did. Levine takes out an ad in Variety, proudly announcing that A Bridge Too Far was completed one day over schedule and an unspecified amount under budget. People magazine reports that Redford has been paid $2,000,000 for four weeks' work ("And we got him cheap!" Levine gloats).

Perhaps he's right. For once, the machinery has given life to celluloid; the celluloid, like an ungrateful child, obliterates all else. Finally, in the editing and screening rooms, in the moviehouses, the overwhelming pas de deux of man and technology is subordinated by whatever luminosity, intensity or illusion the celluloid has captured. That luminosity alone testifies to the player's worth; it's his so-called ace. Levine seems to have loaded this deck with aces, and by June, when A Bridge Too Far premiered, the surreal, day-to-day domination of lights and cables and scruffy men who make the illusion happen had long since become a shadow, a memory of little consequence.

And what of Deventer, the sleepy hollow that went from the red to the chips almost overnight? It's now a ghost town. Prices have plummeted at the Pelikaan. The girls who ran away to the war have gone back to their husbands. "Oh, what a lovely war this is," an apple-cheeked Dutch boy cooed as he adjusted his helmet one golden August morning.

"Oh, what a lovely war," an apple-cheeked Dutch girl cooed as she ordered a beer one golden August evening.

And now the war is over.

"A flame shoots up, then falls two stories from inside the house. Then it dawns: It's for real."

"'You should have been here for the cake! Man, that was some cake. Some batter. Cocaine, acid, grass.' "