The Bridge on the River Kwai: A Review of David Lean's 1957 Movie

World War II, for good or ill, has been the backdrop for hundreds – if not thousands – of movies produced by all the nations which participated in it even as it was being waged.

Of course, though “combat” films along the lines of A Walk in the Sun, Battleground, The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan often come to mind when the term World War II movie is mentioned, the genre actually straddles quite a few other film styles that aren’t restricted to movies about battles, campaigns or the hardware of the war.  Many love stories, dramas, comedies and even science fiction films have been set or partially set during World War II.

Naturally, the sheer scope of World War II – fought on three continents and involving millions of combatants – and its more or less unambiguous “good versus evil” nature resulted in the near-mythologizing of certain events by Hollywood and writers of fiction.

One of the most popular subgenres of World War II films is the “sabotage and commando raid” movie, in which a small team of what we now call special operations operatives is inserted deep behind enemy lines and is tasked to capture/retrieve/rescue/assassinate/destroy a strategically important target that conventional forces are unable to get to.

Another popular subgenre of World War II films is the Prisoner of War narrative, which often focuses on how POWs – of either side – bravely try to escape from enemy camps or stand up to their captors’ deliberate attempts to break their spirits.

The Bridge on the River Kwai, which was British director David Lean’s first epic-scale movie and would lead to a string of Big Pictures which range from Lawrence of Arabia to A Passage to India, is a multi-faceted mix of “partly based on a true story,” “POW narrative” and “sabotage and commando raid” movies, blended with some dark comedy and psychodrama elements.

Based on the French language novel Le pont de la riviere Kwai by Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes) and written by the then-blacklisted Harold Wilson and Carl Foreman, The Bridge on the River Kwai is partly based on the building of a Japanese railroad bridge linking Thailand to Burma by a combined “construction crew” of 180,000 Asian laborers and 60,000 Allied POWs in 1942-43.

Because 12,000 POWs and over 80,000 Asian workers died in the construction of the Burma Railway, the Japanese project earned the sobriquet of “The Death Railway.”

The Foreman-Wilson screenplay (credited to Boulle due to the Red Scare blacklisting of its authors even though the French novelist did not speak or write English) is a multi-layered script that actually tells two overlapping stories which dovetail dramatically at the film’s climax.

The best known element of The Bridge on the River Kwai is, of course, the initial clash of wills and cultures between the POWs’ senior officer, Col.Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and the Japanese commandant, Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa).

Saito has been tasked with the twin jobs of running the Japanese Army’s prisoner of war camp and building the section of the Burma Railway which will span Thailand’s Kwai River.

Nicholson, meanwhile, is concerned with making sure the men under his command continue to behave like proper soldiers, especially those soldiers in the British and Commonwealth armies captured by the Japanese during the campaigns of late 1941 and early 1942.

For Saito – who in real life was reputed to be one of the few Japanese officers who did not behave sadistically toward Allied POWs – the main priority is to get that bridge built so that the Imperial Army’s long lines of supply can be more efficient and operations in the China-Burma-India theater run smoothly.  This means that he needs every prisoner – no matter what his rank may be – has to work on the bridge.

For Nicholson, however, Saito’s insistence that officers have to do manual labor alongside the enlisted men is a weightier issue than the whole concept of having to build the bridge for the enemy. 

This bit of the story is intriguing because it makes the viewer wonder why Nicholson, ostensibly a by-the-book career British Army officer, is willing to actively aid the Japanese in building the bridge even though most military codes of conduct prohibit such collaboration with the enemy.

Indeed, the POWs’ medical officer, Maj. Clipton (James Donald) poses the question to Nicholson:

Major Clipton: The fact is, what we're doing could be construed as - forgive me sir - collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps even as treasonable activity. Must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built for themselves?

Nicholson’s attitude is both maddening and perplexing.  Maddening because there’s a very overt racist overtone to it – there are several scenes when he says to various characters that the prisoners’ efforts will be a monument to what the British soldier can do and that what they are doing will bring civilization to this neck of the Asian jungles.

It’s also perplexing because we never really know why he believes that building the bridge and helping the enemy is beneficial (other than, of course, seeing all his men shot by the Japanese). Is this Nicholson’s way of coping with Britain’s defeats in Singapore and elsewhere by a race he and other Westerners considered inferior prior to the war?  Or is this a sly strategic retreat carried out for with a future blow against the Japanese?  Or, perhaps even more elementary, has Nicholson gone insane under the strain of war and captivity?

Whatever Nicholson’s motives are, they propel him towatd conflict with not only Saito (over the issue of officers doing manual labor) but also with the rebellious Commander Shears (the top-billed William Holden), an unusually cynical American who hates the war, questions its sanity and can’t stand Nicholson or his “high-minded principles.”

Shears, who probably was captured as a result of the disastrous naval battles near what is now Indonesia, is the film’s clearest anti-war messenger and is prone to oppose not only his Japanese captors but almost all Allied authority figures.  His main priority: to survive and, hopefully, escape from the hellish prison camp,

Eventually, the film morphs seamlessly from “POW narrative” to “sabotage and commando raid” action-adventure once Major Warden (Jack Hawkins), a Southeast Asia Command special ops commander based in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) is tasked with the bridge’s destruction.

My Take: Say what you will about The Bridge on the River Kwai’s historical inaccuracies (and there are lots), its racist undertones or the McCarthy-era treatment of Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman that denied them onscreen credit for their screenplay until the film was restored in the late 1980s*, but this is one of the great – if rather myth-based – World War II epics. 

Not only is the film extremely well-acted (Guinness earned the Best Actor Oscar for 1957 and was subsequently knighted by Queen Elizabeth II) and well-made, but it was also well-received by audiences and critics alike.

Even though producer Sam Spiegel had to cast (and give top billing to) William Holden to attract the ever-fickle American moviegoer to a story which features mainly British characters and actors (with some Japanese and Asian actors tossed in for authenticity and dramatic needs), the film showcases some of Britain’s most talented filmmakers and actors, including director Lean, Guinness, Hawkins, Donald, Geofrey Home, Andre Morell and Percy Herbert, just to name a few.

In my opinion, though Foreman and Wilson could have dispensed with the romantic subplot added to Holden’s character’s story arc and thereby cut the film’s running time a little bit, The Bridge on the River Kwai is definitely worth watching.

Sure, it takes liberties with the historical events it’s based on; the real-life British officer on who Col. Nicholson is patterned after was neither a collaborator nor a martinet, and – as mentioned earlier – Col. Saito was not a cruel Japanese Army officer chiefly concerned with saving face, nor was the bridge ever successfully sabotaged.

And with a running time of 161 minutes, it’s definitely not a film for viewers with a short attention span or who shun character-driven movies in lieu of high-octane, fast-paced action flicks.  It does have several action scenes, but the big fireworks of the movie are in the psychological clashes between characters and not in do-or-die battle sequences.

I also would like to comment about the racism issue that does rear its ugly head in the movie, if I may.

Racism, of course, is deplorable no matter what the context may be.  Whether it’s white supremacist ranting against people with darker pigmentation, African-American screeds against “White America,” Nazi ravings against the Jews, Slavs and other “non-Aryan” races, racist views are the antithesis of civilized thinking and have done as much harm, if not more, than religious divisions and war-for-profit.

Yet, as easy as it is to say that only the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and – to a lesser extent – Italy had extremely obnoxious racist attitudes that governed the way they waged war, it’s also true that the Allies, especially the Americans – whose military services were segregated – were not exactly free of noxious racist beliefs.

Indeed, it’s worth remembering that before World War II, most American, British and Australians dismissed the Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen as caricatures; the “Japs” were often characterized as bucktoothed, nearsighted and merely imitative who could be easily defeated after one or two bombing raids set their wood-and-paper cities ablaze.

So pervasive was this view of the Japanese that when news came of  the attack on Pearl Harbor, many Americans, even military men who should have known better, believed there were other reasons – German planning and participation in the surprise raid was one, but the biggest (and most unfair and untrue) was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s complicity so he could drag America kicking and screaming into World War II – for the Japanese success against American forces on Oahu on Dec. 7, 1941.  They simply could not get over the fact that a supposedly inferior race had launched such a daring attack on the United States.

Thus, if The Bridge on the River Kwai has characters which are racist (Nicholson is perhaps one of those jingoistic Brits who couldn’t quite believe they had been bested by the Japanese in Malaya and elsewhere), or if it seems the movie is anti-Japanese, it’s worth remembering that the novel and movie came out in the mid to late 1950s, a decade after the equally racist Japanese kept Allied POWs in camps that were harsher than the average German POW camp overseen by the Luftwaffe and the Heer (air force and army).  (The SS-run concentration and labor camps, naturally, are in a special category of hellish prisons, and even some Japanese facilities were way more hospitable than Auschwitz or Treblinka.)

(*In 1984, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences retroactively awarded Wilson and Foreman with the Best Adapted Screenplay, albeit too late for them to hold their Oscars.  Wilson had died six years earlier, and Foreman died the day after the Academy made its announcement.)