The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)
One of those legendary movies that I have had ample opportunities to watch but always chose to miss for one reason or another, despite having seen many of Lean's films. It's inexplicable how I've managed to miss it over a lifetime—it premiered two years after I was born. Perhaps it was the length of the thing, clocking in at 2 hours 41 minutes. For whatever reason, I had never watched the whole thing (but I had curiously seen the ending many, many times). The multi-Oscar winning blockbuster marks the point when David Lean became more recognized as an artist than merely a capable director. It is also the point where he became less of a British director than a director of international locales.

All I'd ever seen of The Bridge on the River Kwai

Lean was not Sam Spiegel's first choice for director of an adaptation of the Pierre Boulle novel (which Spiegel had picked up in an airport book-shop)—Spiegel first thought of Fred Zinnemann and William Wyler, Howard Hawks and John Ford, even Orson Welles—he also thought of Humphrey Bogart for the role of the commando Shears (to be later played by William Holden for a million dollar salary, after the next choice, Cary Grant, whose last film that wasn't a light comedy, Crisis directed by Richard Brooks, was a box-office flop).

For the role of the persevering, but ultimately deluded Col. Nicholson, Spiegel sought out Laurence Olivier, who opted, instead to direct and co-star with Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. Spencer Tracy, Charles Laughton, Ronald Colman, James Mason, Noel Coward and Ray Milland were also considered before the final brilliant (and Oscar-winning) choice of Alec Guinness.

The film begins with the arrival of British POW's (to the whistled tune of "The Colonel Bogey March" to keep regimented time) at a Japanese work camp in Burma run by Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Saito informs the prisoners they will be assisting in the building of a railway bridge that will run weapons and supplies for the war effort between Bangkok and Rangoon. The ranking officer, Lt. Col. Nicholson quotes the Geneva Convention to Saito stating that officers are exempt from manual labor and the next day, resists the commands to go to the bridge-site. This awards Nicholson a slap across the face and the troops a day in the blistering Burmese sun...after being threatened with outright execution. 

For the veteran prisoners, like American Navy Commander Shears (William Holden)—a fixer who bribes the guards to avoid doing heavy labor—Nicholson is a bit too "regular army" for the situation and Shears continues in his efforts to escape the camp, despite Nicholson's command to his troops that no one escapes—Nicholson was commanded to surrender to the Japanese and considers escape attempts as against orders and treasonous. Shears will not entertain such distinctions; he's a prisoner of war. He plans another attempt to escape and is the only one of three to survive, washing up in a Siamese village, shot and barely alive from the ordeal. But, the village cares for him and supplies him with a canoe and after another long journey further down the river, he is picked up British forces in Ceylon.

Nicholson continues his by-the-book resistance to hard labor and Saito orders the senior officers confined and Nicholson locked up in a metal solitary shed for his defiance. For days, he bakes in the Burmese sun, surviving by the ministrations of the troop doctor, Clipton (James Donald), who is given permission to visit the prisoner only if he can persuade Nicholson to give in. Nicholson refuses.

This puts Saito in a bind. He has been tasked to build the militarily important transport bridge by a certain date, and if he cannot complete it in time, he will be forced to commit suicide for the dishonor. The Colonel must have Nicholson's men working on the bridge to ensure its completion, and so he tasks Nicholson to supervise the building of the bridge, which the Lt. Col. is all too willing to do, on the condition that it is built his way, meaning that the British will survey, design, engineer and construct the bridge. Both men get what they want—for Saito, it's the meeting of his goal, while for Nicholson, it will be occupational therapy for the men, possible better treatment, and a chance to show the Japanese the superiority of Western—and by that is meant occidental—thinking and productivity. And by that, he means that the British are more civilized than the Japanese. Whatever his high-minded ideals, the roots of the task are in prejudice.

The first half is a rough slog, split between the battle of wills between Guinness' Nicholson and Hayakawa's Saito. The atmosphere is oppressive and close-knit as Nicholson internalizes his defiance until it becomes something like compliance, while Shear's cynical American fights his way back to civilization, stripping away his veneer of crustiness along the way. One gets a good distillation of Stockholm Syndrome: Nicholson begins to see eye-to-eye with his captor, and Holden's defiance grows stronger the farther he gets from the camp.

The movie turns on its ear while re-tracing steps in the film's second half: Shears is convalescing in Ceylon, and enjoying it, but he is persuaded—it wouldn't be very British to say "blackmailed"—to retrace his steps and go back to the camp—the last thing he wants to do—in order to take out the bridge that, unbeknownst to him or British Special Forces, Nicholson and the prisoners are building to improve their conditions and to prove the vainglorious point that they are better than their captors—a point that might be better made if they attempted escape. But, by this time, Nicholson is so committed to the bridge that he doesn't even consider that he is aiding and abetting the Japanese war effort.

That point, out of captivity, is only too evident to the Special Forces commandos—Shears, Major Warden (Jack Hawkins), and Lt. Joyce (Geoffrey Horne), another is killed in the parachute drop—sent to destroy the bridge before it can become useful. They painfully make the trip with the help of Burmese natives, as Nicholson and his men re-double their efforts to meet the deadline for the bridge to be used for a train carrying soldiers and officials—the first true successful use of the bridge. For Nicholson, completion of the bridge is a personal triumph and a source of great pride.

So, imagine what he would think if he knew that his own government, his own Army, had been sent to destroy the thing. That is the tension that underscores the last half of the film and how agents from the same Army can come to cross-purposes in the madness of war. The foolhardiness comes full-circle as the mission to blow up the bridge comes to its conclusion. "Sides" and loyalties are blurred in the melee, as allies fight allies over an enemy bridge. Best intentions underline deaths and, after so much planning and work on both sides, it all comes down to a twist of Fate, as opposed to any deliberate act of sabotage or murder on the part of the combatants.

It's a masterful film under Lean's direction, though some may quibble about the length of the first part of the film—one has to light the fuse no matter its length—and once out of the camp area, Lean's freedom to shoot beautiful jungle vistas in all manner of light gives the film grace notes of beauty no matter how down, dirty and gritty the action on-screen gets. 

It's as if Lean is looking for anything to off-set the mixed loyalties and complexities of the plots of men knotted up in the situation. Those beauty shots and the quick cut-away reactions of the Burmese women to the deaths in the final scene are practically essential as some sort of respite from the quagmire that is played out in the shadow of that bridge, as if there has to be shown something natural and decent still remaining, despite all.

The Bridge on the River Kwai is paved with good intentions. Like all roads to Hell.