 When British P.O.W.s build a vital railway bridge in enemy-occupied Burma, Allied commandos are assigned to destroy it in David Lean's epic World War II adventure The Bridge on the River Kwai Spectacularly produced, The Bridge on the River Kwai captured the imagination of the public and won seven 1957 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Alec Guinness), and Best Director. Even its theme song, an old WWI whistling tune, the "Colonel Bogey March," became a massive wordwide hit. The Bridge On The River Kwai continues today as one of the most memorable cinematic experiences of all time. Storyline: The film deals with the situation of British prisoners of war during World War II who are ordered to build a bridge to accommodate the Burma-Siam railway. Their instinct is to sabotage the bridge but, under the leadership of Colonel Nicholson, they are persuaded that the bridge should be constructed as a symbol of British morale, spirit and dignity in adverse circumstances. At first, the prisoners admire Nicholson when he bravely endures torture rather than compromise his principles for the benefit of the Japanese commandant Saito. He is an honorable but arrogant man, who is slowly revealed to be a deluded obsessive. He convinces himself that the bridge is a monument to British character, but actually is a monument to himself, and his insistence on its construction becomes a subtle form of collaboration with the enemy. Unknown to him, the Allies have sent a mission into the jungle, led by Warden and an American, Shears, to blow up the bridge. Written by alfiehitchie Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman on October 27, 2010 -- There is no barbed wire, no stockade, no watch tower. They are not necessary. We are on an island in the jungle. Escape is impossible. --- Imagine the word "epic" and, at least in the world of exceptional cinema, only a few names spring immediately to mind. Atop that list must be Director David Lean, a British filmmaker with some of the 20th century's finest pictures to his credit. Lawrence of Arabia. Doctor Zhivago. A Passage to India. The Bridge on the River Kwai. That's about as formidable a foursome as there ever was, every one of them an undeniable classic of story, scope, production, and movie magic. The Bridge on the River Kwai is one of Lean's most commercially, critically, and aesthetically complete pictures. It's a rare film that manages rousing success with its audience, almost universal acclaim from critics, and tells a story centered on the human condition rather than the typically wartime run-and-gun elements that defined most World War II pictures of the era. With Kwai, Lean defies all cinematic preconceptions with a wartime film that's not necessarily about a war itself but rather obsession, pride, and duty, whether it's the obsession of victory, the pride in oneself, or the duty to country or a cause. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a film that tells three distinct stories, the first a battle of wits, the second an adventuresome mission into enemy territory, and the third the tale of a man who becomes lost in his own pride, unable to see anything but the work directly in front of him. Each story comments on the human condition at several levels, not the least of which is summed up at film's end with the repetitious cry of "madness! madness!" that perfectly encapsulates not only the destructive force of war but what is often man's own inability to see the greater consequences of his actions, consequences that differ for each main character but nevertheless end with the same tragic, maddening results. It is the year 1943, and the Japanese army is using prisoners of war as slave labor to further its war effort. An American Naval officer by the name of Shears (William Holden, The Towering Inferno) is one of only two prisoners to have survived the forced construction of the camp that is now under the command of the harsh Japanese Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). The camp is soon restocked by fresh British bodies -- led by the stalwart Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness, The Ladykillers) -- who are tasked with the construction of a nearby bridge that will connect railways between Bangkok and Rangoon. Nicholson and Saito immediately square off, with Nicholson refusing to obey orders for he and his officers to participate in manual labor, an act expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention and defiantly ignored by Saito. What follows is a battle of wits with neither man conceding to the other, no matter how harshly Saito treats Nicholson or how he threatens his men and officers. Meanwhile, Shears manages to escape from the camp and is several days later returned to allied-controlled territory where he is tasked with spearheading a mission to destroy the vital bridge over the river Kwai before it's put into general operation. The Bridge on the River Kwai is more a Character Drama than it is a typical War picture. The film's several action elements are few and far between, with the violence reserved for a final act that's defined not by gunshots and explosions but rather the follies of man and the madness of not only war, but that which both war and personal obsession engender inside a man. The film is about adherence to principles, beliefs, and ideals; it's about finding one's true self in the midst of brutal and unnatural conditions; and most of all, it's about pride and narrow-mindedness, both of which seem capable of overwhelming even one's most deeply-held and personal beliefs and attributes, such as loyalty and clearheadedness. The Bridge on the River Kwai is primarily the story of a stalwart British Colonel who exists only to win out, to prove his worth, and to show that he's the superior soldier. Perhaps his headstrong ways are a result of decades in the service and the loss of any semblance of a personal life; he's long since forgotten what it means to be a man of depth and with the ability to adapt to and understand a scope greater than what's placed directly in front of him. His long service time and, by extension, his very life, has come to be defined by his ability to accomplish only whatever task lies in front of him, whether that's besting Colonel Saito or proving that he can lead the construction of the best bridge built during the war, even if that means he's lost sight of the larger picture: the welfare of his men, his goals as a prisoner of war, or adhering to a strategy that will benefit his allies rather than his enemies. All of the picture's themes -- whether personal courage, bravery, sacrifice, focus, fear, obsession, dedication, and foolhardiness -- are all personified at one point or another through the picture in Colonel Nicholson's character, and it's through Alec Guinness' exemplary performance that the character truly comes to embody all of the madness of war through his experiences in building the bridge on the river Kwai. Of course, the film wouldn't work without a counterbalance to Nicholson's obsessions. He finds that foe in the Japanese Colonel Saito, a man of equal shortsightedness and dedication more to self and hubris rather than country and position. Saito ultimately loses to Nicholson, who is but the same man but with a different face, a different name, and a different uniform. Never is Saito a master over Nicholson and his fellow British POWs, even as they arrive in camp whistling "Colonel Bogey March;" Saito only ever appears to be in command over the stubborn English Colonel. Nicholson finds in Saito a "reasonable fellow" not because Saito threatens to kill the British officers for their insubordination, demands that they work as manual laborers, or proves stubborn in his ways, but because he immediately finds a man like him but with weaknesses he can exploit. Those weaknesses -- excess pride, a narrow focus -- are shared by Nicholson to an obvious fault that completely manifests itself by film's end, but he's merely the greater of the two equally stubborn men. Saito comes to realize that Nicholson is his better, but he succumbs to his adversary at every turn only in the knowledge that he'll ultimately earn the credit for Nicholson's successes with his own superiors by default, though he's ready to give up at the expense of his own life if Nicholson lets him down, the ultimate submission to a life controlled by nothing but the most stubborn of hubris. Sessue Hayakawa is Alec Guinness' equal in terms of his ability to lend to his character a crazed single-mindedness throughout the movie; he handles the part extraordinarily well and sells the shame that comes with losing out to Nicholson in those moments where the audience sees the character in solitude and wondering how a man of his stature could fall so far to a filthy, worn-down, and arrogant British officer, to the point that Nicholson becomes the de facto head of the camp and the bridge project. Even then, however, Nicholson respects the chain of command and his military training and traditions to the point that he's willing to figuratively bow to Saito's recognized but empty position of leadership. Amidst the back-and-forth between the film's flawed and obsessed characters lies the story of Shears, played by William Holden. Shears, too, is a character obsessed with self, but unlike Saito and Nicholson, he's not concerned with gaining leverage or proving his worth as a man and a leader, but instead his own survival. As one of the only men to escape the prison and live to tell about it, he's something of a traditional action hero, but he manipulates the system along the way to his own advantage until he's forced back into action by the threat of exposure of who he really is. Shears cares more about flirting with pretty women and sipping drinks on an exotic beach than he does the war effort and the hell he left behind at Saito's camp, not to mention the men left to suffer and die under the Japanese Colonel's harsh methods. Shears knows firsthand how brutal it can be -- he and one other man were the only two of their prisoner group to survive the experience -- but that doesn't stop him from looking for a way out of going back to help a team to destroy the war-critical bridge. Holden's character may receive the glory as the picture's de facto action star and shirtless Hollywood hunk who earns top billing, but his character is the least interesting of the three from a dramatic and thematic perspective. Nevertheless, he balances the film with a free and easy attitude that's the antithesis of the Saito and Nicholson characters; he sees the bigger picture which they cannot, and it's that realization that war is indeed hell -- or sheer madness, as the film so simply but eloquently states -- that drives him to do anything he can to stay away from it. Though he may be the film's good-looking hero, he actually represents the audience more so than any of the other major characters, save, perhaps, for the good Doctor Clipton (James Donald) who "has a lot to learn about the army" but clearly sees that the whole mess around the bridge on the river Kwai has disintegrated into "madness." All of the excellently-played and strongly-scripted characters almost threaten to overshadow David Lean's exceptional work on The Bridge on the River Kwai. Almost. Lean does a masterful job of accentuating his characters through his reserved but exacting visual style, one that precisely captures the action both in the foreground and in the background. Lean's picture comes alive as a lavishly detailed production that doesn't look in the least bit fancy or overdone, but instead plays with a decidedly realistic tenor where the picture seems always alive and bustling with activity around the frame, giving off a sense of real space, real time, and a real environment. His framing is consistently perfect, his shots extraordinarily precise, and the picture perfectly edited. The film enjoys a very deliberate structure that allows the action to play out in its own time and its own space, but never at the expense of pace; Lean often seems content to allow his actors to do the work in his perfectly-realized frame, and it's his faultless understanding of what the picture needs -- not necessarily what a lesser director might want -- that puts the finishing touches on a great movie. No doubt The Bridge on the River Kwai is a beneficiary of fantastic acting, a top-notch script, stupendous editing, and a fabulous but not excessively-used score; Lean understands what he's working with and does only what he needs to do to make the picture complete, and that style is what separates the legendary filmmaker from the average director. Lean proves with The Bridge on the River Kwai that the best directors are about getting the most out of their script and their actors. Lean doesn't use the film as a showpiece for cinematic excess or his position as director as a platform for showmanship; instead, he sets out to tell a complete story and use his abilities as a master craftsman to the benefit of the production and not as a platform for accolades, which is exactly why the accolades come steadily and even years after the film and in his death. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a masterful film and one of but a handful of pictures that could be described as both "legendary" and "epic." The Bridge on the River Kwai is a complete work, an exemplary Human Drama that's as much about the follies of man as it is the follies of war; the film is a buildup towards madness, wether the narrow-mindedness of its characters or the destructive nature of war itself. The madness that is excess pride, shortsightedness, and dedication to a foolhardy goal rather than a greater cause are the picture's primary themes, with the action elements merely supporting rather than defining the film. David Lean's film is a masterpiece of directorial craftsmanship, and his reserved but steady approach is one of the film's greatest assets. Lean understands that a great film need be a complete one, and his direction is merely a compliment to a greater whole, and that adherence to what makes a perfect film may be seen as his defining attribute. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a timeless classic that's been reborn on Blu-ray; the film looks and sounds just as it should and is accentuated by plenty of top-notch extras. Sony's Blu-ray release of The Bridge on the River Kwai earns my highest recommendation. Cast Notes: William Holden (Shears), Alec Guinness (Colonel Nicholson), Jack Hawkins (Major Warden), Sessue Hayakawa (Colonel Saito), James Donald (Major Clipton), Geoffrey Horne (Lieutenant Joyce), André Morell (Colonel Green [as Andre Morell]), Peter Williams (Captain Reeves), John Boxer (Major Hughes), Percy Herbert (Grogan), Harold Goodwin (Baker), Ann Sears (Nurse), Heihachirô Ôkawa (Captain Kanematsu [as Henry Okawa]), Keiichirô Katsumoto (Lt. Miura [as K. Katsumoto]), M.R.B. Chakrabandhu (Col. Broome Yai). IMDb Rating (02/11/17): 8.2/10 from 156,556 users Top 250: #137
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