The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

(On VHS, August 2000) There’s a lot to love about this film: The lush backdrops of the south-Asian jungle, the expensive sets, the great actors, the superb premise of wartime defiance by typically British soldiers forced to work for the Japanese. The script is very good for most of the film’s duration, presenting issues of ethics and conduct yet not browbeating anyone with them. All throughout the film, there’s a palpable sympathy with the bridge-building team, which makes things worse when the film decides that war is hell and that there can be no such thing as a fun wartime adventure. That’s when people start dying and the last-minute attempt to instill a Profound Message falls flat. Too bad, because the rest of the film is classic material.

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, April 2021) Considering that it’s been twenty years since I first saw The Bridge on the River Kwai and can now put it in context (of Hollywood’s thirst for spectacle at a decade when TV was entering households, in the context of epic director David Lean’s career, in the context of Alec Guinness and William Holden and the shifting context of war movies over the decades), I was curious to see what I would make out of a second view. While I wasn’t completely bowled over by the result, it’s still quite a remarkable film – perhaps the most entertaining of Lean’s epics (I meant: you can admire Lawrence of Arabia, but it’s not quite as much fun as this one), certainly one of Guinness’ landmark roles as a depiction of a British stereotype, a great turn from Holden and a shining illustration of what 1950s filmmaking could do when it was allowed to spend some time and money shooting on location. The portrayal of a British officer under pressure to do something good (like building a bridge) under bad circumstances (such as being a prisoner of war) in service of something distasteful (such as facilitating military transports) is suitably complex. The similarities to Apocalypse Now go much farther than opposing, “Madness!” to “The horror!” – if The Bridge on the River Kwai has aged so well, it’s in large part because it has a grim attitude toward war that would resonate just as well with later generations. As an older viewer, I now understand far better the grim conclusion and how it works in the context of the film as more than a downbeat tragedy or a spectacular sequence. I still think that the film is too long, that it meanders, that it’s unbalanced between its two leads. But it still works well enough, and it’s still worth a look.