Oscars Retrospective: The Bridge on the River Kwai (30th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

3:10 to Yuma Suite~George Duning - 3:10 to Yuma

The 30th Academy Awards has a surprisingly grim story attached to it though it’s a good case study to show how these guys’ minds work. The husbands of Elizabeth Taylor and Lana Turner were both tragically killed shortly before this event (Mike Todd and Johnny Stompanato respectively). This being Hollywood, the big question was less about how these deaths were affecting the people in question and more about which death was more likely to win the respective actress the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress as a condolence prize (Taylor for Raintree County

and Turner for Peyton Place;

both films are boring Oscar bait and not worth discussing). Instead the award went to relative newcomer Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve

a now-forgotten drama where Woodward plays a woman with multiple personality disorder. Despite this being an acting trick that the Academy normally loves, the film is actually very good and gives a pretty tragic portrayal of mental illness that can be disturbing at times. (I’m also sure that whatever common misconceptions exist about multiple personality disorder come from this film.) Woodward was derided in Hollywood circles, both for taking the thunder away from the grieving widows and for *gasp* making her own dress instead of hiring someone else to do so, allegedly setting Hollywood glamor back 20 years (actual quote from Joan Crawford).

This whole episode is so morally warped that I honestly don’t know what is and isn’t the right thing to do in this situation. Should awards be based on pure merit or should a personal tragedy merit some sympathy? This blog clearly takes the tact of the former but, regardless of that, undermining someone’s achievements as an actress just because she defeated two grieving widows, and also using grieving widows’ tragedies to try to improve film publicity, is really one of the most morally bankrupt episodes we’ve seen from Academy and Hollywood culture thus far.

Anyway, The Bridge on the River Kwai was a pretty clear runaway winner at this ceremony, winning the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actor (for Alec Guinness), Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (which would later be truncated to Best Adapted Screenplay), Best Scoring, Best Cinematography and Best Editing. Almost all of these are hard to argue against. Still, there’s some major films that we should acknowledge.

First things first, one interesting and unusual record occurred where two of the Best Acting Oscars actually went to the actor and actress playing a couple in Sayonara.

Sayonara is a Romeo & Juliet-esque tale set in post-war Japan where an American serviceman falls in love with a Japanese local much to the disgust of his fellow Americans and superior officers. Similar to Japanese War Bride (1952) before it, Sayonara took a major risk by showing an interracial romance and Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki would win the respective Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress as the doomed lovers. It’s an interesting quirk as this is one of the few times where two characters playing on-screen lovers won.

In terms of if they deserved it, eh. While Sayonara does deserve credit for showing love confronting racism, the film does take a pretty stereotyped point of view towards Japan and Japanese characters and the couple don’t have much depth to them beyond the fact that they’re in love and bad things happen to them. These are not very difficult performances to pull off. They may have portrayed the saddest scene of the year but probably not the actual best performance.

There was another, similar film that came out that year called Island in the Sun

which can be considered an almost brother-and-sister film to Sayonara in that they both portray doomed interracial romances, though in Island in the Sun’s case, it’s a white man dating a black woman in the British Indies. Island in the Sun feels less stereotyped and closer to what actual islander culture was like than Sayonara’s portrayal of the Japanese though the trade-off is that it’s a much more boring film to sit through.

Moving on to some foreign cinema. I know I said in a previous blog that we were going to shy off of it for a bit in terms of the awards itself, and we will, but a couple very important films still came out that are worth acknowledging for their historical relevance. From France was Et Dieu… Créa La Femme (Eng. And God Created Woman)

a film that pushed major boundaries in sexuality in film with Brigitte Bardot being such a scantily-clad bombshell that she damn near put Marilyn Monroe to shame. Major ground was broken in on-screen nudity and loosening sexual mores here.

Also worth acknowledging is Un Comdamné á Mort S’est Échappé ou Le Vent Souffle oú il Veut (Eng. A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth)

a famously low-key exercise in filmmaking that shows just how engaging a film can be with minimal character and dialogue. If The Bridge on the River Kwai was a celebration of how great a big film can be, A Man Escaped (as it’s often shortened to) shows the exact opposite.

And, finally, I should also mention Ni Liv (Eng. Nine Lives)

which is often considered the greatest film in the history of Norway. With the European New Wave, we’ll be getting a lot of “greatest film in [insert country name here]’s history” records but they’re still worth acknowledging. Nine Lives is an excellent war story with some truly gorgeous winter cinematography.

Let’s go back to America and look at some of the more genre films that the Academy loves to ignore. The year saw the breakout movie of Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock.

Elvis Presley is often considered a pioneer in multimedia stardom, being a music performer who would branch out into movies. This isn’t really true as, before him, there was Bing Crosby and, if you want to go way back, there was Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1928). Presley would probably get more credit, though, just because of the rise of modern pop culture with rock-and-roll and post-WWII merchandising. The movie itself is solid and I am impressed that Elvis’ character comes off as a pretty unlikable anti-hero for most of it. For a breakout movie, it’s a pretty bold choice and it helps Jailhouse Rock age the best of all his films.

The last major film noir of the golden age of the genre came out in the form of Sweet Smell of Success.

While there would be some film noirs here and there afterwards, Sweet Smell of Success is often considered the last milestone in the American age of the genre. It revolves around a sleazy private detective (Tony Curtis in a nice change of pace for him) who works for a powerful tabloid gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster) and is blackmailed into committing increasingly unethical acts for the magnate. It bears all the hallmarks of everything great we associate with the noirs: the cool lighting, the anti-heroic protagonist, the dark chases, the commentary on greed in the big city, it’s got it all.

It also, unfortunately, falls into the trap that most noirs do by having a plot that’s a hair too convoluted. It’s a good movie but it took me about 3 watches to fully understand the climax, which is never something you want to say about the climax of a movie. Sweet Smell of Success also completely tanked at the box office, which would do a lot to explain why no more big budget noirs were made after this and why it got ignored by the Academy though I think Burt Lancaster’s steely performance as J.J. Hunsecker did deserve a nod. The movie’s worth watching for his character alone.

Two famous Westerns were 3:10 to Yuma

and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the weaker of these two movies as it feels like 3 movies (poorly) smooshed together, having a very labyrinthine plot that feels more like a soap opera than a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy epic. The actual gunfight itself is admittedly awesome though it has been shown up by other movies about the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and Tombstone (1993).

3:10 to Yuma is a much smaller-scale albeit much stronger film. Struggling rancher Dan Evans (Van Heflin) is recruited into a posse to deliver notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) to the 3:10 train to Yuma prison all while Wade’s gang is hunting them down to save their boss. The film gives a great conflict for its protagonist as they create a very identifiable conflict for him: he wants to help imprison Wade to leave behind a good role model for his sons but he also knows that if he’s killed, his family will be left destitute.

3:10 to Yuma is admittedly a bit of a pulpier ripoff of High Noon (1952), between the ticking time clock and the cheesy credits song, which would explain why the Academy ignored it, though Van Heflin should’ve gotten a nomination for his performance. Van Heflin was a character actor known mostly for playing these aging moral center characters in a lot of Westerns (see also: Shane (1953), Gunman’s Walk (1958)) and this was easily his best turn as this type.

Horror had a mild renaissance this year with the release of The Curse of Frankenstein

the first film released by Hammer Film Productions. Hammer was a British studio that had been around for some time but in the late 50s decided to start remaking many of the classic monster films in gorgeous Technicolor. As a result, these were the first horror films to actually show blood in bright, vivid red that made the films a lot more edgy. Nowadays, they’re pretty tame so it’s funny to think that this would’ve been pushing boundaries back then.

Hammer Horror would borderline monopolize the mainstream horror genre for most of the next decade as they also pioneered the idea of milking a horror IP for all it was worth with annual sequels of increasingly poor quality (The Curse of Frankenstein alone had six) but those first few movies were pretty great. The gothic imagery is gorgeous but what I think these movies really had that the Universal films never did was this almost regal respect for its source material. There was a slight winking to the camera in the earliest Universal monster movies that you never really feel in the Hammer movies. A lot of that I think can be traced back to the lead actors, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, who are two of the greatest actors who ever lived and starred in almost all of these movies. In this one, Cushing plays the titular doctor and he comes off as a much meaner and more morally bankrupt character than Colin Clive ever did.

While the monster has a much dumber design in this version, The Curse of Frankenstein is a superior film to the 1935 classic, which itself was already one of the best movies of its year, as well as one of 1957’s best films. Yet again, though, because it’s a horror film, that means that it could never be considered the best movie of the year. While it may be a bit more pulpy than, say, Sayonara, it sure as Hell is more interesting and artistic than it and contains much more memorable characters and performances.

The Walt Disney Corporation took a break from making animated films to release two major live-action films that are part of their catalog. More stereotypical was Johnny Tremain

a pretty Disneyfied take on the American Revolution, that has forever after been shown to American elementary schoolers to try to get them to understand their country’s roots. The film is a big ball of corn and Johnny Tremain (Hal Stalmaster) has a pretty narratively unpleasing arc (he finds out that he actually is related to a British aristocrat and his main arc is being torn between embracing his heritage and rejecting it to become an American; it takes him about 5 minutes to decide) but what is impressive about the movie is the set design. Major credit needs to be given to the production team in this movie as they went above and beyond for this project. The attention to detail to making Revolutionary-era Boston come to life is impeccable.

On the totem pole of Disney’s live-action films, Johnny Tremain is in the low medium section. Somewhat entertaining so it’s not as insufferable as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955) or The Shaggy Dog (1959) but also not nearly as good as Disney’s other movie that year, Old Yeller.

Old Yeller is set on a homestead in the Wild West, revolving around the Coates family: father Jim (Fess Parker), his wife Katie (Dorothy McGuire) and his two sons, teenage Travis (Tommy Kirk) and the younger Arliss (Kevin Corcoran). Jim has to go out for three months on a cattle run so he names Travis as the man of the house to take care of the farm while he’s away. Travis unfortunately gets off to a rocky start as a stray dog wanders onto the farm and starts raising all sorts of Hell. Travis’ initial knee-jerk reaction is to shoot the dog but his brother instead asks for the family to adopt him as he wants a pet and doesn’t have any playmates (on account of his older brother being the man of the house now) and Travis reluctantly agrees while vowing that he’ll never like the dog. Of course, he ends up eating his words and bonding with “That Old Yeller [yellow] Dog” (or Old Yeller for short) and the rest of the movie is about their adventures together.

Old Yeller is a major cultural touchstone for the baby boomer generation, being one of the most beloved films of Disney’s Silver Age, as well as probably the best live-action film ever released by the Walt Disney Company. In fairness, this isn’t exactly a high title to achieve as, despite the large volume of them, the only other ones that could be argued for the title are Mary Poppins (1964) and the first Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) (maybe Holes (2003) and Saving Mr. Banks (2013)). This is also the best and most famous example of the “boy and his dog” genre, a subgenre of family/kid films that was pioneered by Lassie Come Home (1942) and that I normally loathe due to their vomit-inducingly wholesome content, so, again, not exactly a high bar to achieve. Yet make no mistake, this movie is excellent.

What makes Old Yeller such a great film is that it eschews most of those sappy scenes and Disneyisms… kind of. There’s still some slapstick when Old Yeller is wrecking the farm, Arliss can be a bit annoying at times and the title song is God awful but the relationship between Travis and Old Yeller is very effective and mature. They don’t do a lot of those dumb things they do in the Lassie or Air Bud (1997) movies like anthropomorphizing the dog or having an evil villain who wants to steal the dog away. Old Yeller is just a dog. He doesn’t have a dog romance or a dog scheme or a dog villain that he has a rivalry with; he’s a companion who provides emotional support and love. Anyone who has owned a pet at some point in their lives, let alone grew up with one, will probably identify much closer with Old Yeller than Lassie.

This brings us to point 2 on why the movie is so excellent is that it gives a fairly gritty take of what life on the frontier was like. Tommy Kirk was one of the best child actors to have ever come out of Walt Disney Studios and gives a realistic performance for someone being forced to grow up in such a harsh environment. The film does a great job at presenting him with decisions that can be truly difficult to figure out. Decisions that are not very easy to make in an environment like this one, let alone when you’re so young and still technically a child. Despite the fluffiness of the title character, there’s a real grimness that constantly exists in the periphery of Old Yeller. The decision that Travis has to make at the climax is a very hard one and one of the riskiest scenes in any family film, let alone one made by Disney, but the whole movie feels like it has properly built to this moment and it feels earned.

Old Yeller was likely commissioned as Disney’s cash-in on the Western craze but it is so much better than it has any right to be. Of course, like every other great movie made by Disney during the first half of the century, it was completely snubbed by the Academy. While your first instinct might be that this was just a cult classic that got more recognition later on when the kids who grew up with it came of age, it actually was recognized back then by critics as one of the year’s finest films. Despite it not being animated, apparently the Disney moniker alone was enough for the Academy to refuse to even give Old Yeller any consideration. While I don’t know if I would say that this was the absolute best film of the year, it should’ve at least warranted a nomination for Best Picture and probably Best Leading Actor for Tommy Kirk. But because he’s a kid and doesn’t have the resources and money to schmooze the Hollywood elite, why would they ever consider him for a second? I mean, did you hear how sad Elizabeth Taylor is, we need to capitalize on that tragedy to make our show get more viewership!

But I digress, let’s move onto our feature presentation. While I don’t know if these were actually the leading contenders for the Oscar for Best Picture (The Bridge on the River Kwai, as mentioned, basically walked away with the award), these are the two nominees that are excellent and in a comparable level of quality and, luckily for my sake in terms of organizing this blog, both are courtroom thrillers! First is Witness for the Prosecution

which is one of the best in the genre. Both for its well-paced and tightly-written story but mainly because of its main character, played to perfection by Charles Laughton. Sir Wilfred Robarts is a seasoned lawyer who has just gotten out of the hospital after suffering a heart attack and is under doctor’s orders to retire or else risk suffering another one. Upon meeting Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), who has been accused of murdering a widow to seek her fortune and seems doomed, Robarts takes it upon himself to come out of retirement to save the poor man.

It’s pretty standard in most courtroom thrillers to give stakes by placing the accused’s life in danger but making the defense attorney also dangerously close to the grave adds a lot of suspense to the film. Every time something goes out of control for Robarts, we see sweat start pouring out of him and him counting his pills; we’re afraid that the stress of the trial might actually kill him. The character is a lot of fun too and could be argued as a pioneer of the funny lawyer archetype that we don’t see often enough in movies (modern examples: My Cousin Vinny (1992), Better Call Saul (2015-2022)).

It is a shame that Witness for the Prosecution is a film that’s comparatively forgotten about today, as it’s a great watch and well worth your time. Yet, it’s easily overshadowed by the other legal drama of the year, 12 Angry Men.

Similar to The Bridge on the River Kwai, 12 Angry Men is one of the few pre-60s movies the average person is likely to have heard of and seen. Also similar to The Bridge on the River Kwai, the movie is a glaring mirror up to the hypocrisies of contemporary culture. But while The Bridge on the River Kwai was a big 3-hour-long epic that spans the length of British Burma, 12 Angry Men is only 90 minutes long, has less than 15 characters and takes place almost entirely in one single location. Considering the film epic trend dominating Hollywood at the time, the fact that such a minimalist film was considered a frontrunner is really saying something. (Also, as an aside, I might have some trouble being truly objective here as this is one of yours truly’s personal favorite movies of all time. Top 10 easily.)

As you can guess from the title and poster, 12 Angry Men revolves around a jury that has just concluded listening to the closing arguments of a murder trial where the defendant (John Savoca) is accused of murdering his father. The jury is then sequestered and converse amongst themselves about whether or not they think the boy is guilty. At first, it seems like an open-and-shut case: there’s two eyewitnesses, the boy has a paper-thin alibi and a shopkeeper confirms that he sold the boy the murder weapon. All immediately vote guilty with the lone exception of Juror No. 8 (Henry Fonda), who states/demands that he doesn’t feel comfortable sentencing someone to death without talking about it first. The rest of the movie is one long conversation as the 12 jurors debate and recap the evidence in question, how flimsy it can or cannot be, how their own prejudices impact whether or not they can find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and eventually what a reasonable doubt even is.

There is so much to gush about what a great movie this is, that I honestly don’t know where to even begin. Should I begin with the acting? Almost none of the jurors are ever given any names but their characterisation is so strong that you can get the feel of them by their looks and mannerisms alone. Juror No. 2 (John Fiedler) is soft-spoken and easily bullied, Juror No. 7 (Jack Warden) is an obnoxious jerk who doesn’t want to be there, Juror No. 12 (Robert Webber) is an ad man who, despite his charismatic demeanor, has a backbone so soft that he constantly flip-flops. Or maybe I should talk about the script? The writing and dialogue is so natural that we feel that we understand the same trial that they all saw just from the way they talk about the evidence. The way that the film understands that the loud arguments are the action scenes of the film and how calmer moments are interspersed in between to give us a breather. Or maybe I should mention the cinematography? 12 Angry Men is a masterclass in how just because your whole movie is set in one location does not mean that you can’t have creative cinematography. When the movie begins, the camera usually rests above eye-level and in mostly two-shots. As the film continues, the camera steadily gets lower and tighter (and probably switches to a longer lens) so that, by the climax, the jurors’ faces are practically filling the screen as they’re shouting at each other while you see every bead of sweat pour down their faces.

Despite the set-up being a pretty clear battle of good and bad, the movie also eschews many clichés. While the film has its pretty clear cast of good and bad jurors, I like how the jurors who are most passionate for the guilty verdict (Jurors No. 3 (Lee J. Cobb), 4 (E. G. Marshall) and 10 (Ed Begley)) all tend to get annoyed with each other as well. Hell, not all of them can be called villains. One of the best characters in the film is Juror No. 4 who is a well-educated and intelligent man, has some smart points to make and truly believes that the defendant is guilty.

Most courtroom thrillers tend to rest its plot throughline on whether or not the defendant is guilty, usually giving a clear answer one way or the other. In 12 Angry Men, that is never the question nor is it ever clearly answered (a law professor at the University of Chicago wrote an essay stating that the cumulative evidence indicates that the boy in all probability is actually guilty). Instead, 12 Angry Men is the type of rare cinematic experience that can be used as a tool to examine many different aspects of ourselves without even thinking about it. The clear and most obvious example is that it was made as a response to McCarthyism, reaffirming the American belief of “innocent until proven guilty” for an entire generation. It also does this much more artfully than most other anti-McCarthy films as it feels like an engaging thriller first and a political statement second (as all allegorical films should). But 12 Angry Men can also be, and has been, used in multiple different avenues of cinematic studies.

The movie is a perennial favorite of many lawyers, with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in particular citing it as the movie that inspired her to go into law (although she and most other judges will state that real-life jurors shouldn’t be as proactive in investigating the case as Juror No. 8 is (of course, no one has to actually know)). Many high school and collegiate debate clubs will also use the film as a case study on how to effectively build an argument. It also serves as a good example of the flaws of the American justice system and how certain biases can impact who gets to die or spend the rest of their lives in prison (from biases towards race to just wanting to get things over with). As a result, even over 60 years later, 12 Angry Men is still used by many social reformers as a tool to spread their message.

But, even ignoring all of these messages, 12 Angry Men on its own merits as a film is just so good. The script is uniquely both of its time but also genuinely timeless. You could remake it, or re-enact it in play format, quite easily and lose almost nothing. Many people have but director Sidney Lumet got it so right the first time around that none of the remakes and adaptations have ever had the same cultural impact. (With this in mind, if I did have to place one flaw in the film, is that I do question whether it was a good idea to show the defendant’s face at the beginning of the movie. If you pay close attention, Juror No. 10’s racist rants never contain any specific slur and allow his dialogue to fit towards any race and show how racism is wrong regardless of who it’s being used against. By showing the defendant (who seems Italian or Polish), it does cheapen the universality of the moment a bit.)

In terms of whether or not this deserved to get the Oscar over The Bridge on the River Kwai, these are both such excellent movies that they don't really deserve to be compared. Either one is worthy of the award. Both are truly great, both are made by directors at the top of their games, both have a lot to say about the world around them, both are entertaining as Hell, both have phenomenal cinematography, both have some of the best movie characters ever and both are very rewatchable. The Bridge on the River Kwai was probably given the edge due to its epic scale and box office numbers but, regardless, you should watch both movies if given a chance.

Calling The Bridge on the River Kwai the best movie of 1957 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1957:

• 12 Angry Men (dir. Sidney Lumet)
• Old Yeller (dir. Robert Stevenson)
• Ordet (The Word) (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)
• Sommernattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) (dir. Ingmar Bergman)
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (dir. David Lean)
• The Curse of Frankenstein (dir. Terence Fisher)
• The Golden Age of Comedy (dir. Robert Youngson)
• The Incredible Shrinking Man (dir. Jack Arnold)
• Un Condamné á Mort S'est Échappé ou Le Vent Souffle oú il Veut (A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth) (dir. Robert Bresson)
• Witness for the Prosecution (dir. Billy Wilder)

Favorite Heroes:

• Dan Evans (Van Heflin) (3:10 to Yuma)
• Desirée Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck) (Sommernattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night))
• Juror No. 8 (Henry Fonda) (12 Angry Men)
• Juror No. 9 (Joseph Sweeney) (12 Angry Men)
• Morten Bergen (Henrik Malberg) (Ordet (The Word))
• Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) (The Curse of Frankenstein)
• Scott Carey (Grant Williams) (The Incredible Shrinking Man)
• Shears (William Holden) (The Bridge on the River Kwai)
• Sir Wilfred Robarts (Charles Laughton) (Witness for the Prosecution)
• Travis Coates (Tommy Kirk) (Old Yeller)

Favorite Villains:

• Baron von Frankenstein (Melvyn Hayes as a child, Peter Cushing as an adult) (The Curse of Frankenstein)
• Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) (3:10 to Yuma)
• Claude Frollo (Alain Cuny) (Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame))
• Colonel Nicholson (Sir Alec Guinness) (The Bridge on the River Kwai)
• J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) (Sweet Smell of Success)
• Juror No. 3 (Lee J. Cobb) (12 Angry Men)
• Juror No. 10 (Ed Begley) (12 Angry Men)
• Lonesome Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith) (A Face in the Crowd)
• Mr. Johnson (Paul Birch) (Not of This Earth)
• Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) (Sweet Smell of Success)