The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

David Lean, Director

Drama, I’ve long told my students, is a shy bird in literary history. It has its brief seasons of breathtaking glory, as in ancient Athens during the age of the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and as in Europe, especially England, during the late Renaissance, when you have a fellow named Shakespeare, so brilliant that we tend to underrate such titans as Ben Jonson in England and Calderon in Spain and Racine in France. Then the drama plays hide-and-seek for a few hundred years, suddenly taking the world by storm when the motion picture was invented. I don’t just mean that the entertainment was popular. I mean that at its finest, film could stand the comparison with the greatest that has ever been done — always keeping Shakespeare as the genius who ruins all the odds. Film could show the full range of what it means to be human, even in a single character, but especially in characters set off against one another, perhaps tragically, with great virtues but also terrible forms of blindness and weakness, and the pride that always goes before a fall.

Well, who’d have thought, when I was a boy and our Film of the Week, The Bridge on the River Kwai, was shown on television once a year, that we were watching a Greek tragedy? But that’s how I think of it now. The situation seems simple enough. We have a company of British soldiers, marched off to a prison camp in the jungles of Burma, British in their general good humor, their unflappability, and their commitment to regulations, especially manifest in their rational, upright, determined, and somewhat priggish commander, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness). They are there to provide most of the labor for building a bridge for railroad trains to cross the River Kwai. That work is strategic for the war — strategic, that is, for the Japanese. The camp is headed by Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa, who won and deserved an Oscar for his agonizingly sensitive performance, as did Guinness). Saito, whose favorite line to feed the prisoners is, “Be happy in your work,” can speak English, as he was once a student at the London School of Economics. But he admires, envies, and hates his opponents. He cannot get the bridge finished, partly because his Japanese engineer is incompetent, and partly because he has lacked the manpower for it. When Nicholson and his company arrive, he tries to seize the opportunity by commanding that all the British prisoners must do manual labor, including the officers. Democratic of him, yes? But according to the Geneva Convention — and of course Nicholson has a copy of it in his pocket — officers are exempt from manual labor, even in prison camps. Thus is set a battle of wills, with Saito attempting to break the British spirit by sending Nicholson to the “oven,” a tiny metal shed where you might die of heat prostration long before you died of thirst or hunger, and Nicholson holding his own.

Yet there’s more. An American (William Holden) is in the camp too, with a hard-nosed American cynicism about ideals and gentlemanly codes of honor. His name is Shears, and we learn later on that he’s passed himself off as an officer, and that infraction of the rules will prove his undoing in the end. Meanwhile, he thinks that both Saito and Nicholson inhabit a sort of dream world; the reason that he, Shears, obeys is to pursue his own benefit, not by being miserable to others, to be sure, but by a sharp eye for the main chance. He sees the folly of the Japanese would-be tyrant, and the British would-be schoolmaster of the world, who intends, as he says, to introduce civilization where there isn’t any; but he also does not see as far and as deeply as they do.

Shall I add a fourth to the mix? While Nicholson and his men, showing British ingenuity and discipline, are actually building the bridge, and doing a better job of it than the Japanese soldiers and officers can do, and taking real pride and satisfaction in it, the British at headquarters far away are sending a college don (Jack Hawkins), whose specialty is explosives, into the interior to blow the bridge to smithereens, preferably while a train is crossing it. They coerce Shears to accompany him. For the don, Major Warden, it’s great fun, a challenge, a game, and that too is something that Shears sees, and it appalls him. Add an innocent soldier in the bloom of youth, and a British doctor who is in the army but who cannot understand what motivates his own commander, and consider that each “side,” British against British, does not know what the other is doing, and you are set up for high tragedy, for what may be the greatest war movie of all time, and the greatest anti-war movie likewise, a film in which the heroic is inextricable from the foolish and the mad. “My God,” says Nicholson, “what have I done?”

The director, David Lean, was to my mind unexcelled in English or American films when it came to epic sweep, exotic locations, and the setting of titanic principles against one another, without an easy solution, or perhaps without any solution at all. This is one movie which is far superior to the rather spare and expository novel by the same name. It swept the Oscars that year, and I haven’t even mentioned the brilliant and enthralling cinematography, or the music that, if it enters your heart when you are young, as it entered mine, will never leave you.