AFI #36: The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on July 16, 2021.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: David Lean.

Cast: Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald, Geoffrey Horne, André Morell, Percy Herbert, Ann Sears, Henry Okawa, Keiichiro Katsumoto, M.R.B. Chakrabandhu.

"You call this fishing?"

There are an awful lot of films on this AFI 100 list about a man's downfall. Through The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, we watch Michael Corleone fall further and further as he fights for his family, before losing sight of what he was fighting for. In Citizen Kane, we see the seeds of Charles Foster Kane's undoing planted in his early years, despite his best intentions to be a man of the people. We see the titular Lawrence Of Arabia progressively turn from hero into pompous ass who buy into his own bullshit. And we see Jake LaMotta start out as a shit bloke in Raging Bull and end up as an even shitter bloke, so, like, who cares?

As you might have predicted by that intro, The Bridge On The River Kwai is also about the downfall of a man - or in this case two men, not one. They are British Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (played with steely grace by Alec Guinness) and Japanese Colonel Saito (played with wonderful empathy by Sessue Hayakawa, who is the star of a fascinating episode of The Dollop).

As head of a POW camp in modern day Myanmar, Saito seeks to use any means necessary to get the prisoners of the camp to build a bridge over the Kwai River, thus connecting the Japanese Imperial army railway between Rangoon and Bangkok. Nicholson, as highest ranking officer of the prisoners, wants to keep morale and military precision up, lest the soldiers lose hope in the face of hopelessness. 

Spoilers ahead. Naturally. 

What ensues is one of the great military battles in cinematic history, although unlike Saving Private Ryan's storming of the beach or Lawrence Of Arabia's raid on Aqaba, this battle is purely psychological - it is the battle between Nicholson and Saito. 

Nicholson endures beatings and long stretches in the "hot box" in order to ensure officers don't have to do manual labour, as per the Geneva Convention. It's a stand based on principles and his ideal that "without law, there's no civilisation", but Nicholson is also aware that if he gives in early, then who knows what else will have to be given up. He eventually backs Saito into a corner. Saito needs his bridge built by a certain date, and finally realises only Nicholson can get it done. Nicholson happily takes over and quickly sacrifices his own principles to get it built.

And thus the bridge becomes a curse for both men. The only way Saito can get it built in time is to let the enemy take total control of the project, thereby diminishing his own status and leadership. Some have interpreted some of his final actions - he writes a letter and includes a lock of hair - as a lead-up to ritual suicide (although this is debated despite it being foreshadowed). Either way, he is a dejected and broken man by film's end. The bridge, meant to be his great success, is in fact his great failure because it wasn't Saito who got it built, but the enemy.

Similarly, Nicholson comes to see the bridge as his legacy and his greatest achievement. It's only in the final moments he realises he has aided the enemy, even going so far as to try and foil an attempt to sabotage his beloved bridge. In a wonderful inversion of Saito's downfall, the bridge that he had come to see as his great success is in fact his great failure. This symbolism sneaks up on you, and it's a huge part of The Bridge On The River Kwai's brilliance.

It's a bold script that switches focus mid-film, but that's exactly what blacklisted screenwriters Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson did in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Saito and Nicholson are sidelined in the latter half of the film once their psychological battle reaches a peace accord of sorts, and the story, in search of new tensions to tease out, focuses on William Holden's reluctant saboteur Shears. This American sailor, played by one of the era's biggest box office drawcards, is obviously shoehorned into the story to get American bums on American seats, but it works in a story sense as well. Shears becomes the audience surrogate to take us from the POW camp to the sabotage attempt, but he also serves as an outsider; the unwilling combatant able to comment on the futility and insanity of it all.

The tension is seriously ramped up in the second half with the scene in which explosives are planted on the bridge's pylons - a cinematic moment that doesn't get talked about enough in terms of the great heist/intense moments in movies. From there, there's not much left to do but blow-up the damned bridge and everything it's come to symbolise about the "madness" of war.

Of course, much is made of how highly fictionalised the film is, reportedly angering some of the poor bastards who had to build the real bridge. They have every right to be angry about that sort of stuff, but to the general populace it doesn't matter and shouldn't. You want the real story? There are countless, docos, YouTube videos and books on the subject.

David Lean wasn't trying to display a truth beyond the maxim "war is madness". The opening shot shows jungle, crosses, a railroad, and more crosses, and that's pretty much everything we need to know about the realities of the film. From there, we witness Lean stepping into his epic era, which would include the remarkable Lawrence Of Arabia and slightly overblown Dr Zhivago. The scale of the film, shot on location in Sri Lanka, is impressive, but Lean's ability to make the POW camp seem small, self-contained and hemmed in by the jungle is just as impressive.

If you didn't watch the above video, the key bit is Steven Spielberg describing the film as "one of the most perfect movies ever made". There are flaws that are of its time - the day-for-night, some of the dubbing and sound mixing - and the middle section involving Shears in Columbo is overly padded, which is thanks to the meddling of producer Sam Spiegel and the studio as opposed to Lean's efforts (Lean confirmed the Columbia Pictures almost shut down production when they found out there wasn't a white woman in the film, forcing the addition of some of the Columbo scenes). But the script, the direction, and the performances remain impeccable.

The esteem in which The Bridge On The River Kwai is held appears to be slipping, perhaps due to the way war films are striving for greater realism, especially post-Saving Private Ryan - the poor treatment of Nicholson is fairly tame and bloodless compared to what we expect in war films today, and all those aforementioned docos, YouTube videos and books have perhaps taken some of the lustre off the film. Film Magazine's list of the 100 greatest movies (2006) didn't include it, neither did The Wordsworth Book of Movie Classics (1992) although it included three other Lean films. Kwai didn't make the cut in Empire Magazine's 2021 readers' poll of the best films, it's slipped to #239 on the IMDb users ratings after being as high as #31 in 1998, and on the AFI list it dropped from #13 to #36 between 1998 and 2007.

Maybe it's not as realistic as modern war films, and maybe it plays too loose with the horrible truth, but The Bridge On The River Kwai still stands up as one of the great examinations of the madness of war. The way it destroys two men by giving them exactly what they want is sublime storytelling. And in this world of CG everything, blowing up that damned bridge remains one of the great set pieces of all time. There's nothing unrealistic about that.