Brooklyn Bridge (1981) is a 58-minute American documentary film by Ken Burns chronicling the history of New York City's Brooklyn Bridge, one of the most famous suspension bridges in the world.
Proposed in the mid-19th century to span the Hudson River and link the then-independent city of Brooklyn with Manhattan, a contract is finally awarded to civil engineer John A. Roebling, an immigrant from Germany. After Roebling dies in 1869, just two years into construction, his son Washington Roebling oversees the completion of the bridge.
Burns's first documentary film, it was originally shown in theaters to qualify it for an Academy Award nomination, and subsequently aired on PBS as part of its The American Experience series. Voices are provided by Kurt Vonnegut and Julie Harris, among others.
Tropes:
- The Cameo: Arthur Miller is the final talking head, musing about how the construction of the bridge serves as inspiration to other people about how they can also construct something beautiful.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: J. Lloyd Haigh, given the contract to deliver cable wire for the bridge, sends the same section of quality wire to be tested on multiple occasions, while actually delivering substandard wire to the bridge. After one of his wires snaps, he loses the contract, and eventually goes to jail.
- Corrupt Politician: Notorious New York City politician "Boss" Tweed, leader of the city's Democratic Party, who paid a bribe to get a permit. Tweed goes to prison during construction.
- The Ken Burns Effect: Burns' style was already fully formed at the time of his first film. The panning and scanning is heavily relied upon, such as when the camera pans down a diagram to emphasize how deep they had to sink the caissons for the bridge, or a zoom into a photo of a worker who died from decompression sickness.
- Narrator: Historian David McCullough narrates. McCullough would later narrate Burns's most well-known documentary, The Civil War.
- New York Is Only Manhattan: Numerous references to a bridge "from New York to Brooklyn" are a reminder of the fact that, at the time, New York really was only Manhattan. (Brooklyn, then still an independent municipality, wouldn't be absorbed into the larger NYC until 1898, over a decade after the bridge was completed.)
- Renaissance Man: John A. Roebling was an engineer, a farmer, and a student of philosophy, among other pursuits.
- The Stinger: One of the Stock Footage clips is of Bugs Bunny in the 1949 Merrie Melodies cartoon short "Bowery Bugs", telling a gullible mark about the bridge. After the credits roll, there's a clip of Bugs selling the bridge to the mark.
- Stock Footage: A sequence late in the film has clips of various pop culture references to the bridge, like Laurel and Hardy talking about it in Way Out West, or Frank Sinatra dashing over the bridge in the 1947 film It Happened in Brooklyn.
- Talking Heads: Many, in classic documentary style. David McCullough, author of a 1972 book about the bridge, narrates but also appears on camera to give some commentary.
