User Reviews

After years of more intimate British films and just discovering the joys of location shooting with 1955's "Summertime", master director David Lean made his first actual widescreen epic with 1957's "The Bridge on the River Kwai", an acknowledged classic that deserves attention from a new generation of viewers and another visit from the rest of us who love perfectly executed films by an unparalleled craftsman. Recently, this movie has been overshadowed by his 1962 follow-up epic, the comparatively more elaborate "Lawrence of Arabia", but this richly textured WWII-set adventure is special enough on its own terms. While it has its share of action and suspense presented in exacting detail, the film is even more resonant as a psychological drama about the test of wills between mission-driven officers amid the perils of wartime survival.

The plot takes place in 1943 when after surrendering in Singapore, Col. Nicholson marches his ragged British company into a Japanese prisoner work camp in the Burmese jungle (this is where the famous whistling of "Colonel Bogey March" is first heard). The erudite Col. Saito runs the camp and demands that the new prisoners build a massive railway bridge, a critical juncture between Rangoon and Malaysia. In a classic stand-off, Nicholson finally forces Saito to respect Geneva Convention and not allow his officers to do manual labor on the construction. Upon his ironic Pyrrhic victory, Nicholson slowly descends into the madness of seeing the completed bridge as a potential morale booster for his battle-weary men. Meanwhile, shortly after Nicholson's arrival, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Shears escapes from the camp only to be later blackmailed into joining a British commando mission led by do-or-die Maj. Warden and hesitant Lt. Joyce with the sole goal of blowing up the bridge. Through Peter Taylor's thoughtful film editing, the movie breathlessly alternates between the parallel story lines of the bridge construction and the jungle commando mission until the exciting climax.

Lean's accomplishments are many with this memorable film - the authenticity of the Burmese jungle locations (filmed in Sri Lanka), the seamless integration of the two story lines, the masterful handing of the final scenes, and in particular, the gradual metamorphosis of Nicholson from a by-the-book British officer to Saito's willing collaborator. A frequent participant in Lean's films, Alec Guinness gives his career-best performance as Nicholson providing all sorts of unexpected shades to his complex characterization. As Shears, William Holden does what he did best in the 1950's, concurrently exude natural bravado and a conflicted soul and then added a layer of cynicism that dares to challenge the viewer to support him. The 68-year old Sessue Hayakawa came out of retirement to play Saito and delivers a subtle performance of unbending discipline and pained humiliation. Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne lend sturdy support as Warden and Joyce respectively. With the same expert eye he lent to "Summertime", Jack Hildyard provides the superbly expressive and composed cinematography. Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, both blacklisted at the time, wrote the brilliantly developed screenplay. This is essential viewing.

The two-disc 2000 Limited Edition DVD set has a pristine print transfer with great sound making the entire experience feel surprisingly fresh upon viewing. There is a nearly hour-long documentary on Disc Two, "The Making of The Bridge on the River Kwai", produced for the DVD and full of intriguing insight into the production logistics. There are a couple of shorter featurettes produced around the time of the film's original release, the first is a black-and-white teaser for the film itself and the second a rather pedestrian lesson in Film 101 produced by USC grad students and introduced by Holden. Director John Milius provides a respectful tribute to the film in another short.

David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai" like Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" is an anti-heroic war film, set in a prisoner of war camp environment... But there, the point of resemblance came to an end...

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is an adventure film in which the nature of World War II is explored... And if in "Grand Illusion" the characters were described by a great artist who treasures their common humanity, in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" they are forced to carry out their destinies by an officer who cannot bear to see his bridge blown up...

Escape is almost impossible from the Japanese camp located near the Kwai River in Burma... The prisoners are badly treated by cruel guards... The camp commander is a rigid psychopath... Conditions are hard to bear... Psychological state of the war British prisoners in constant alteration...

Into the presumptuous situation comes Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness in a fascinating performance), a strict, serene, dedicated British Officer, deeply concerned for the welfare of his men...

Nicholson is under severe pressure from the stubborn Japanese Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) for insisting on his attachment to the Geneva convention and refusing to allow his officers to be used on the construction of the strategic bridge...

Nichilson survives the oppressive punishment imposed on him, but his obsession has risen to near-madness... He agrees to help the Japanese build their bridge, and in his determination to find victory in defeat, he ignores that the bridge, which he insists must be a 'proper bridge,' will serve the Japanese objectives against the British troops...

In addition to the powerful rules of a prison camp picture, captors against captives and an interesting moral respect to a military code, a third element, in the story, is introduced: a small commando team led by Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) and an American sailor (William Holden) whose mission is to destroy the strategic bridge..

The film leads swiftly to a suspenseful climax: a Japanese train and a Commando force directed to a same goal, the Brige of the River Kwai...

Each character, in the motion picture, has a valid reason for what he is doing, and each elaborates a relationship to the bridge revealed to be obsession and insane...

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" hits with 'war' in a compelling logic of events, the indulgence of self-destruction.

With a great visual beauty and terrific whistling tune March, "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is a great dramatic entertainment of the wills of men...

SPOILER: This film is long (161 minutes), is almost 40 years old, and yet still is terrific, still holds up and will forever, I suspect, be considered one of the greatest war movies ever made.

'Kwai' is particularly amazing in that there is very little action in it, yet it consistently entertains - during the actual movie and no matter when you see it. It entertained me when I saw in the theater as a 12- year-old as years later as a 50-something-year-old seeing it on DVD. I say this to encourage younger people to check this film out, and give it a chance.

Anyone who is fascinated with character studies might find this particularly interesting with Alec Guiness' role in here as Colonel Nicholson. He was mesmerizing in his role. William Holden, Sessue Hayakawan, Jack Hawkins and the rest of the cast are all excellent, with the four mentioned above perhaps playing the roles of their lives.

The gorgeous countryside of Ceylon is photographed beautifully. David Lean, one of the all-time great directors, did this film, too, so it certainly has good credentials. A winner of seven Oscars, this great movie has stood the test of time.

This movie can only be watched as a comedy. Very English, and played dead straight.

The Japanese are clueless idiots that can take over huge areas of territory, but have no idea how to make a bridge. A British officer (Alec Guinness), confronted with the uncivilised scoundrels, decides he'd rather spend a month in a heat box in Burma than have his officers work, following the Geneva Convention. Behind schedule and desperate for assistance, the British educated but cringeworthy Japanese commander offers the officer good food and wine, but is rejected. Eventually the Japanese commander relents. After a mere month in an amplified 100% humidity 35 degree Celsius environment, the British officer, showing few ill effects, decides to take over the building of the bridge, to bring a little British civilisation to the jungles of Burma. It's all jolly good show, and very capital, what. It brings great spirit to the men, and they respond with a bespoke bridge, built to last 600 years. They even place a nice plaque on the bridge, celebrating their achievements - written in English, of course.

Unknown to the officer, a group of British-US-Canadian 'commandos' (all four of them) are bringing plastic explosives, with young Burmese ladies to carry their possessions and assist in their baths. They encounter only three Japanese soldiers on the way to the bridge, and are soon viewing the bridge from the nearest hill, alongside the Burmese ladies. One of the team sets plastic explosives on the bridge, with a wire from the bridge that is so obvious, that only a British officer can spot it, and he immediately tries to stop his piece of British colonialism being destroyed - even if it does aid the enemy.

The ending is so absurd it has to be seen to be believed.

This movie is Englishness to its core. If someone asked me to give them a movie exemplifying English culture, this would be hard to go past. It isn't a war movie, it's an attack on the rigid English class system, English superiority complex, and servile masses pushed to its extreme limits. There are so many clues, such as one English officer presenting a suicide pill to the American soldier, but when placed in a situation where he might use it, he is instead carried by several lovely Burmese ladies on a stretcher, right to the bridge. When Guinness, the epitome of the English class system, falls on the detonator, the film is brought to its natural conclusion. You can almost imagine Lean and co's wry smiles if only one person in the cinema actually got it, and roaring with laughter when the Americans gave him an Oscar for a 'war film'.

You can admire it as a satirical comedy. But it is a bit slow.

It is also a bit hypocritical, the English upper class using the hideous treatment of British soldiers for their high farce. So what if a few working class men died, this is art damn it.

Let's face it - war is organized madness, and although the stakes in World War II were tremendous for whichever side lost, the individual effects of the war on the men and nations involved caused madness on several levels.

Pierre Boule's short novel brilliantly discusses the madness in the crazy situation that sweeps up Colonels Nicholson and Saito. Under normal circumstances, the two men might never had been friends but they might have had a degree of respect for each other. Both come from nations that have long histories and traditions, and whose officer corps prided themselves on leadership and withstanding privations. The Japanese formalized these traditions in the code of Bushido (which was twisted, unfortunately, in World War II). It included sharing privation with one's men and was similar to the concept of noblesse oblige that the aristocratic officers of Britain's army tried to maintain. Nicholson's stoicism when put into the isolation box was as much in his tradition as Saito's tradition would have included willingly reducing his own share of his rations for the benefit of his men in a siege.

The situation that develops is a racial rivalry. The Japanese, in 1943, have won so many of the campaigns, and witnessed the surrender of Allied (i.e. Western - American, British, French, Dutch troops) that they really have a contempt for them. As we now know was true, the Japanese soldiers frequently fought to the last man (think of Saipan and Okinawa in the last stages of the war, where flame throwers were frequently used to force Japanese soldiers and civilians out into the open). Westerners could do this too, but traditionally the western states saw no shame in surrendering after putting up a hard fight. Not so the Japanese military.

Saito is identifying with this tradition. In the novel, he is also disappointed that he is in charge of a prisoner of war camp - he'd prefer to be back in the fighting. But they need the prisoners to build the railroads throughout the new Japanese empire (as mentioned on another comment, the "Greater East Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere") that can have men and material race from one end of the empire to the other.

In reality this frequently ended up more like slave labor than what Boule arranges (or what Saito probably had in mind). Nicholson insists on treatment under the Geneva convention for P.O.W.s, but Saito thinks it's typically Western and wimpish. As punishment for his presumption he puts Nicholson in a hellish underground cell in solitary. But Nicholson's men refuse to cooperate until he's released, and when he is he sneers at the Japanese engineers and their mistakes, and insists on the English army engineers taking control of the building - and this works well for the Japanese Army but not for Saito, who seriously feels like he has lost face and should commit suicide.

Director David Lean wisely shot the film on location, capturing the heat and disorientation of a humid jungle war front. His wide screen film manages to make the locale of the prison camp and the Kwai River (and the bridge) look like it is the entire world, and that escape is impossible from it (indeed the one man who escapes - Holden - has to return eventually).

The novel does not include the character played by William Holden, one of his typically laconic Americans who retain a clear sightedness when compared to the British. Holden's "Shears" sees the prison camp as a massive graveyard (he's on the burial detail) and hates it to the point of escaping. He reaches safety in a recovery hospital in Ceylon, but he's forced by Jack Hawkins to return to the campsite to destroy the bridge.

Hawkins' too seems a realist - he is trying to destroy an enemy target that is nearly completed, and will make the enemy's war effort far easier. But his resolve to do this involves blackmailing Holden into assisting him, and forcing himself to continue on his mission after being seriously injured. At the end the mission kills hundreds of men. Hawkins has succeeded, but the local natives who assisted him look at him like he is a mass murderer.

Guinness' Nicholson is one of the most myopic soldiers in film (or fiction for that matter) totally forgetting the purpose of himself and his soldiers even in a P.O.W. situation but thinking solely in terms of oneupmanship and morale. It was a splendid performance. One might make a case that he behaved like a man who was hallucinating after an illness, and indeed he does (accidentally) get back to reality at the eleventh hour - too late to save himself, but in time to save his military honor.

Sessue Hayakawa had a film career in Hollywood that went back to the silent period (even appearing opposite Gloria Swanson in a Cecil B. DeMille movie), but the coming of sound and the deterioration of Japanese-American relations caused him to leave American movies. Like Swanson's sound comeback in Wilder's SUNSET BLVD., Hayakawa's appearance as Saito, a harsh foe but ultimately sympathetic given his code of behavior and how he is humiliated, brought him belated recognition and an Oscar nomination.

Finally there is James Douglas, a highly useful, plain looking British actor who frequently brought dollops of common sense to his films. His P.O.W. Major Clipton tries to rouse Nicholson's sense of reality, but fails (in fact he soon sees that Nicholson's unreality is far more catching with the rest of the British P.O.W.s than he imagined). He sees natural foes, British and Japanese, joining together building a bridge of friendship in a time of war. And the final result is just destruction, confusion and death from that war. Is it any wonder that at the end, he mutters the two words in the "Summary Line" as the story's conclusion.

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is neither an anti-war, nor a pro-war (if there is such a thing) film. I'm not really sure just what such designations actually mean. "Bridge ..." is richer and more personal than a simple depiction of epic events. In "Bridge ...", the epic supports the intimate. If you miss this, you miss a lot. "Bridge ..." is about the human heart first, and war second.

After 47 years, it remains a powerful illustration of our failed hopes as human beings. (something sorely lacking in the more technically pre-occupied action films of today.) Oddly, it's an able companion to the less cinematic "A Streetcar Named Desire", or "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof" -- full of irony -- brilliant, subtle, and ultimately believable because we've all, in one way or another, experienced the feelings and the fears of the principals.

You can't miss, entirely, this interpretation if you watch the film carefully, and open your senses to the quieter moments: Saito weeping alone having lost the battle of wills, or sending a letter home (Even a brutal camp warden can do that -- nation, race, codes of honor notwithstanding); Saito's confession to Nicholson that he had wanted to be an artist but that his father thought he "belonged in the army"; the scene on the completed bridge, which Saito begins, looking at the sunset and quietly declaring - "beautiful!", with a detached Nicholson attributing the observation to the bridge (his obsession); Nicholson, in turn, speaking of his thoughtful realization that he is "nearer the end than the beginning", and wondering, aloud, what the sum total of his life has meant "to anyone or anything". . . Rescued by the bridge, Nicholson, at last, has something of value to leave behind.

. . . Neither, are the supporting characters free of the ironies of our existence. Shears yearns for a world in which there's no place for war, but who's final act is the ultimate act of war -- killing the enemy close-up, with a knife, and ending his own life in the same cause as did the prisoner he buried, and who's name he could not recall. Joyce, the recruit, who's pre-war occupation consisted of checking and re-checking columns of figures, wants the challenge of "thinking". The denouement of his aspiration nearly costs Warden his life and, ultimately, costs him his own.

The climactic irony (Shakespearian to be sure) comes with Nicholson's realization that he has been living in "his own" and not "the world's" reality. A "friendly fire" mortar round, exploded behind him, shakes him back to "the way things are". . . "What have I done?", he asks before he falls on the plunger that will explode his own -- his only -- "beautiful creation" (ironically, again, his enemy's confirmation).

We all strive to create, or just contribute to, a world in which our dreams can flourish. This includes the powerful, who approve the wars, and the powerless, who fight them. But, often, we find the realities of that world make the dreams of our part in it impossible to realize: The "madness" which, above the carnage, Clipton desperately verbalizes.

"The Bridge on the River Kwai" is a true classic because it can be so many things to so many people -- and it is timeless: The kids and many adults will enjoy the action, the historians will enjoy critiquing its accuracy, veterans will re-visit the comradeship of the "trenches", and film buffs will revel in the picture's rhythm, drama, and well-executed technical elements.

In the final analysis, the settings, costumes, historicity, etc. are only "helpers" (however beautifully provided by Lean and company). Its bigger theme -- the aspirations of the human heart, and the painful surrendering of those aspirations -- are what we are most urgently invited to experience in this extraordinary film. 10 out of 10.

I have a deep admiration for David Lean as the director who pushed the boundaries of film making far beyond, and set the marker not only in technical aspects of the craft, but often in atmosphere and feel of the film. His movies are beautiful to watch and that's why sometimes we can't see how bad the cake tastes from all the icing and decorations. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is like that, sticky sweet but ultimately nauseating. Every time a movie parts from reality we observe a genre, and the intention of film maker, along with symbolism it's trying to project. War movies in particular have to be true to the bone (unless they're parodies) because they represent the bestiality of mankind, and duality of man. This film tried to portray those essential elements but fell into Hollywood blender and came out silly and unrealistic.

First and foremost, anybody who even remotely knows anything about Japanese tradition, military culture social and military codes and character of Japanese man, can only laugh at pitiful Colonel Saito who is not only without any remorselessness, but looks like a powerless teacher on the first day in a new school, being played like a flute by honorable Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness),who not only survives days, locked in a tin box in tropical heat and humidity, but wins every concession for his troops he can think of, making the poor Colonel Saito cry at the end of one of his parades of will?!? Japanese soldiers and camp commanders were "very well known" for their compassion, sensitivity and sensibility which was expressed many times during the war, especially in Wake Island massacre, Manila massacre and Bataan Death March, so even the hint of Colonel Nicholson's behavior would result in quick decapitation. William Holden with his tanned biceps glowing in the sun is a true picture of starved Japanese prisoner, and his escape, along with return through the jungle in 50's style loafers (observe the scene where he and his band of sturdy man are being washed by Burmese women prior to attacking the bridge), is down right preposterous. Building a bridge as a monument to his ego is possible way of expression for "open only in a case of war" type of character Col. Nicholson apparently is, but convincing other prisoners to join in that venture simply on "let's show 'em" premise, in those times and circumstances is not likely to happen. To complete the three-ring circus, Japanese soldiers show solidarity and play along, so at the end you're not sure what did you just see. The battle of wills, winner makes history film, anti-war film, or simply a Hollywood action movie/spectacle without any plausibility or logic? Judge for yourself. Oh, and 5 stars are only for cinematography and Holden's loafers.