Best Picture: #30
Original Release Date: December 14, 1957
Rating: PG
Runtime: 2 hours, 41 minutes
Director: David Lean
Quick Impressions:
Doing this Best Picture project with my daughter has caused me to think of 1950s film in a new way. I’ve always associated movies from this era with the childhood of my mother (who was born in 1952) and with my own childhood (because in fifth grade I became wildly obsessed with Marilyn Monroe). As a result, I think of 50s movies as safe, traditional, and family friendly. But now, focusing solely on the Best Picture winners of the decade, I’ve come away with the impression that the 50s was a highly experimental decade for film. Every one of these winners is radically different from the rest. You watch and get the idea that in 1950s Hollywood, there was suddenly no consensus of what makes a great film, what an Oscar movie ought to be. Consecutive winners Around the World in 80 Days and The Bridge on the River Kwai not only seem like they’re from different eras. They don’t even seem like they’re from the same planet!
David Lean’s look back at a singular moment of World War II is highly captivating. And viewers could almost be fooled into believing the film came out much more recently. There’s an urgency to it, a realism, derived in part from the decision to film on location in Sri Lanka. The Oscar-winning cinematography makes a powerful contribution to the film’s overall effectiveness.
My daughter commented many times that the film focuses on just a few specific people, exploring their relationships and motivations in depth rather than making sweeping statements about the course of World War II as a whole. I love a good character study. This is a character study of three men that happens to take place in a Japanese P.O.W. camp during World War II. Of course, the film also highlights for us that war in general is “madness.” But it’s not a propaganda piece designed to help the war effort. We aren’t taking sides here. If anything, we’re observing commonality. This is a very philosophical war movie grounded in close character study, featuring three outstanding performances. (I do find William Holden the least interesting of the three, but I thought it sounded a bit mean to say, “two outstanding performances as well as a pretty solid turn by William Holden.”)
I first became aware of this movie when I was six, while watching The Parent Trap and dreaming of having a secret twin. My mother mentioned The Bridge on the River Kwai to me because Hayley Mills and the other campers also whistle “The Colonel Bogey March.” But I never knew until now that the march actually has lyrics and is also sometimes titled “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball.” I’m glad they leave the words out of the movie. The simple whistling is so iconic. Plus near the end of the film, there’s an inexplicable eeriness to the sound, and I don’t think the mood would be quite the same if the cheeky words “Hitler has only got one ball” were echoing out into the surrounding landscape.
The Plot:
Trying to summarize this film has made me realize my shameful confusion regarding how the British Army in World War II was organized. But at any rate, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) commands a group of British soldiers who have been taken prisoner by the Japanese after being ordered to surrender. They march (whistling all the way) to a POW camp where Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) orders them to build a bridge on the River Kwai, connecting two sections of the Thailand-Burma railway. Saito has express orders and a hard deadline to meet, and he commands every British soldier to work. Citing the Geneva Convention, Nicholson refuses to allow his officers to do manual labor. A prolonged contest of wills ensues. Meanwhile, American POW Shears (William Holden) miraculously escapes from the camp, but a cruel twist of fate brings him back again to blow up the bridge that Nicholson has, in the interim, become frighteningly obsessed with building well. The doctor frequently and correctly observes that all parties involved are crazy.
The Good:
This film is immediately engaging, and (especially after watching Around the World in 80 Days) refreshingly focused.
A world war is a pretty big thing, but this movie just wants to tell us one small, tightly focused story about a bridge. From a philosophical standpoint, the film is quite profound and has a lot to say about war and existence in general. But the story is simple. We have three key players, British Colonel Nicholson, Japanese Colonel Saito, and Shears, a U.S. sailor whose rank is complicated.
The Japanese army wants to build a bridge on the River Kwai. They need it, so their trains can cross the river. Saito doesn’t particularly want to build the bridge, but he has orders and must get it built. Meanwhile, Nicholson doesn’t want to be ordered to build the bridge, but becomes fanatically obsessed with building the best bridge ever as long as he and his officers are put in charge of the planning and construction. And then there’s Shears. He doesn’t even want to be there, but he has to blow up the bridge. He’s been given orders and can’t refuse the mission.
The movie sets up these men with their complicated motivations, then lets us watch their interplay as these struggles (both interior and interpersonal) play out. It’s very much a character study and also a look at the way war drives men to madness.
All three principal actors give good performances, but Guinness (who won Best Actor) and Hayakawa (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor) are truly exceptional.
Both my daughter and I found Colonel Saito the most sympathetic character by far. Guinness is great, but Hayakawa gives my favorite performance of the film. My daughter commented multiple times on the way Saito is shown to us as a sympathetic man with problems. We’re invited to try to understand him, to empathize with him, surprising to her since World War II is often portrayed on screen as a battle of good versus evil. This film is not interested in arguing about whether the intent of the Japanese empire during World War II was moral. It doesn’t concern itself with the broader events of the war at all. We’re just taking a closer look at Saito, the human being.
As well as loving Hayakawa’s performance, we actually found Saito’s early stance by far the more reasonable. Why shouldn’t the British officers do manual labor? I mean, he’s right. They’re prisoners now, and they’re prisoners because they’ve surrendered. What he says and advocates for actually seems to make the most sense.
Nicholson, though, is by the most complicated character in this story. (They’re all complex, but Nicholson is doing some crazy mental gymnastics to make sense of and bring meaning to his current unpleasant situation.) His obsession with law and order is fascinating. And what he achieves through his long stand-off with Saito is interesting, too. We get this long, agonizing battle of the wills between two men, each under intense pressure and wrestling with his own inner demons. I find it fascinating that Nicholson keeps himself focused by deciding to break Saito. He succeeds in this, but he’s the one who seems to emerge from the encounter more broken. They’re both such troubled men, put in awkward and impossible predicaments by the governments they serve.
And then, poor Shears. It’s like nobody told him he was actually staring in Final Destination. Escape from this island is impossible, Shears! If you managed it, then clearly you’ve done something wrong! Go back and try again!
It’s so weird to watch. Shears doesn’t even want to be there. This mission was not his idea to say the least. And Nicholson is so invested in the perfectly built bridge and all it means to him. Saito just wants to maintain his honor by providing the bridge he promised.
I don’t want to spell out the final events in this movie too clearly, but basically, all of them are denied the thing they actually want.
The ending of the film left me with a kind of “Ozymandius” feeling about life in general. We must have our work, but that’s more for us, to sustain us. Purpose and legacy are, perhaps, illusions. War is madness. Life is distractingly eventful, but then…
The (Oscar-winning) score is powerful, moving, and memorable. And the (also Oscar-winning) cinematography is exceptional. This movie looks different from its contemporaries. If not for the visible age of the film, you could easily believe it was shot in my lifetime.
Best Scene:
The film’s final scene certainly capitalizes on everything the movie has built up to this point–such as an enormous, structurally sound railroad bridge and a guy who does not have killer instincts despite the fact that he looks like Anakin Skywalker (according to my daughter). (This guy’s subplot is almost comical. The first question he’s asked is, “Can you kill someone?” And he’s like, “Oh! Ummmmmm…” And then again and again, this keeps becoming an issue until finally in the very last scene, it becomes even more urgent than ever before.)
Such palpable tension mounts as the plot threads finally come together in this scene! My daughter kept saying, “I’m scared! This is stressing me out.”
It gives you such an uneasy feeling! You know that feeling that builds when you disagree with someone you love about something fundamental? Or you have a friend whose stated goals are going to conflict with yours, but you really enjoy hanging out with that person? Or you know your relationship is doomed, but you keep trying to hang on until you reach that final moment of terrible crisis? Or you’ve done something unspeakable, but everything is absolutely fine as long as the other person doesn’t find out…but they’ve hired a detective never suspecting that the guilty party is you, their dearest friend??????
One of the protagonists wants to build a bridge. The other is coming to blow it up! Drama! It’s coming, and you know it’s coming. The movie lays the foundations for this final showdown with such care, and then, once all the dominoes are in place, they fall with such agonizing, protracted slowness that the scene might as well be unfolding in slow motion.
This final flourish is also the movie’s best action sequence, and it offers memorable visuals, too.
I am also a huge fan of the scene in which Saito raves that he hates the British. Hayakawa’s giving such a good performance.
Best Scene Visually:
When the small team of British commandos move through the woods with their Thai guides but worry about encountering Japanese soldiers, the movie started to remind me of Predator. I love the visuals here. As my daughter pointed out, frequently seeing the men’s faces through the branches of trees or the notches in leaves creates the impression that they are being watched. But we see them from so many different angles, through so many different bits of foliage, that we begin to feel fear and uncertainty about just how many pairs of eyes are out there. Just who is watching? From where? This then turns into the second best action sequence in the film.
There are some other great shots, too, most involving the bridge–the commandos looking up at the bridge, Saito staring out at the bridge.
The Negatives:
The first part of the movie frustrated me so much. Why wouldn’t Nicholson just agree to work on the bridge? It is fair for the officers to do manual labor just like the enlisted men, and they have been taken prisoner.
I suppose one sticking point is that Saito views surrender as dishonorable, whereas Nicholson insists that they are still following orders like good soldiers because they were ordered to surrender.
It is interesting to watch the battle of wills (and clash of ideals) play out between these two men. But it’s still frustrating. (That’s actually a strength of the movie dressed up as a weakness, though.)
I guess my only real criticism of the film is that Nicholson and Saito are so fascinating and (almost weirdly) sympathetic that I just didn’t care as much about the William Holden storyline. Shears gets a part right out of a Greek tragedy, but I just never felt as emotionally invested in him as in the other two. One strength of the movie is that it keeps your sympathies constantly shifting, but despite that, I still found myself wishing most of the time that Shears and the British commandos would not succeed in blowing up the bridge. Obviously as an American, I do not side with Japan during World War II, but I just liked Saito and Nicholson more. And it was a very nice bridge.
I know the the movie is trying to get our sympathies to shift around like this. But I actually do think Guinness and Hayakawa are out-acting Holden.
Overall:
The Bridge on the River Kwai is my favorite Best Picture of the 1950s so far. In fact, it’s way out in the lead. Of course, I also love All About Eve, but that came out in 1950 which is technically the last year of the 1940s (even though I don’t personally think of it that way), so if I want to say The Bridge on the River Kwai is my favorite, I can do so without any qualms.