The Bridge on the River Kwai

Rating

Director

David Lean

Screenplay

Michael Wilson, Carl Foreman (Novel: Pierre Boulle)

Length

161 min.

Starring

William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald, Geoffrey Horne, Andr Morell, Peter Williams, John Boxer, Percy Herbert, Harold Goodwin, Ann Sears, Henry Okawa

MPAA Rating

PG

Review

Man’s obsession with accomplishment leads a British colonel to work at odds with his government by helping build The Bridge on the River Kwai.

A troop of British soldiers, surrendered on the battlefield, are taken to a Japanese internment camp where they are expected to work on building a major railway bridge over the Kwai River. Leading the new troops is Col. Nicholason (Alec Guinness) whose insistence that he and his officers receive the standard Geneva Convention treatment gets him locked in a sweatbox.

Already working in the camp is U.S. Navy Commander Shears(William Holden) who knows the ins and outs of the camp. While planning his eventual escape, he does what he can, bribing Japanese soldiers, to keep on the sick list so he can avoid hard labor.

Each man eventually gets what he desires. After several days in the punishment box, Nicholson is released and he and his officers are granted the freedom not to have to work and to lead their soldiers in productivity. Nicholson even offers to help formulate a better plan for success and achieve the construction goals by their deadline. Shears manages to escape with some other compatriots who die while he fakes his own death to ensure his freedom.

Freedom isn’t just a state of being, it’s also a state of mind and each man slowly becomes a prisoner of his own ideals. Shears’ freedom is long lived after he’s drafted by the British forces to accompany an explosives effort to destroy the very bridge Nicholson is working on. Meanwhile, Nicholson is so possessed with the railway trestle that he tries to thwart his own military’s plans for destruction.

David Lean understands the deep rooted human capacity for obsession. This film and his later epic Lawrence of Arabia feature similar themes of rebellion and fixation. Guinness gives a tremendously satisfying performance as a man consumed by his desire to do a job and do it well. Although Holden plays a large role in the picture, Guinness sustains the film from beginning to end.

Not to slight Holden who gives an adequate performance, but even the superb Sessue Hayakawa as the concentration camp’s strict commander Col. Saito can’t compare with Guinness. Although Saito begins the film as an overbearing megalomaniac, his dealings with the strong and determine Col. Nicholson allows him to grow and shed much of his abrasive personality and becomes a more pitiable character.

Virtually devoid of faults, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a tight and entertaining picture that feels quicker than its nearly-three-hour length. Lean’s talent behind the camera turns the potentially unwieldy story into an intriguing tale of compulsive self-destruction.

Review Written

November 8, 2006