According to his biographer Nigel Hamilton, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was a bit of a late bloomer.

Toward the end of his 30s in 1925, Monti went on his first date with a lady, or more properly a girl as Betty Anderson, the girl in question

was 17 years old at the time. He spent the date drawing diagrams in the sand indicating how he would deploy troops and

tanks on a battlefield in some war that might happen someday.

I'm not really sure how it went back then but apparently the date also

included a marriage proposal and he got rejected.

Bad strategy, Monte!

Today's film is another one of our bridge films, really three bridge films and one. And it's also one of our big

Ensemble Films where a huge number of real life officers and soldiers are played by

some of the biggest stars of the silver screen from the UK, the US, and Germany who could be enticed to participate in 1977 by the opportunity to work with each other and director Richard Attenborough.

Field Marshal Montgomery, however, is not depicted in the film despite the fact that

the entire plot surrounds an attempt to put one of his most ambitious war plans into action.

Operation Market Garden is sold

as a way to end the war by Christmas of 1944

and this film is first and foremost

a look at why it didn't work.

The basics of the plan are that 35,000 a look at why it didn't work.

The basics of the plan are that 35,000 Allied paratroopers are going to be flown behind

enemy lines and dropped along a corridor of roads leading through the Netherlands and up into

Germany.

They're going to need to capture and ideally prevent the destruction of three bridges

so that a bunch of tanks and other Nazi killing equipment can be driven up from Allied bases and delivered across the Rhine

...