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

Colonel Bogey March~Mitch Miller - The Bridge on the River Kwai

Along with The Ten Commandments (1956), The Bridge on the River Kwai is arguably the most famous film of the epic trend from the 1950s, often being considered one of the most classic and greatest films of all time. It’s held up as a pillar of the closing years of the Golden Age of Hollywood and is usually one of the few pre-70s films that the average person today is likely to have seen. It was rated as highly back then as it is now, winning both the Academy Award and being the highest grossing film of that year and the year after that. But what made it so excellent? What made audiences want to keep coming back for more and more? What still resonates about it today?

The Bridge on the River Kwai has several plot threads throughout its 3-hour-long running time so I may have to give some spoilers about some aspects of it but I’ll do my best to keep them as mild as possible. The film is set in a Japanese prison camp, focusing primarily on two POWs, American Commander Shears (William Holden) and British Colonel Nicholson (Sir Alec Guinness), who has been captured alongside his entire brigade. The camp’s commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), has been ordered to build a bridge over the River Kwai and intends on using the POWs as slave labor. Nicholson, after butting heads with Saito over the minutiae of the matter, ends up agreeing to build the bridge. Shears, meanwhile, escapes the camp before eventually running into some other British officers who have discovered the existence of the bridge’s construction and, intending to destroy it, recruit Shears into their posse.

That’s the best basic gist of the plot as I can give it: one man who is Hellbent on building this bridge, the other who is determined to destroy it. It’s a great set-up for a thriller, creating three characters who have their values that are laid on the line in this situation and how they react to it says a lot about who they are as a person and, by extension, the culture they represent. With this in mind, while the other two leads are great, and we’ll address them shortly, the big draw is Alec Guinness’ masterful performance as Colonel Nicholson and how the character’s portrayal provides a scathing commentary on the British Empire.

Colonel Nicholson is very much a prototypical British officer: he’s pompous, arrogant and, above all, a stickler for the rules. When Colonel Saito orders Nicholson and his brigade to build the bridge, Nicholson is initially apoplectic. Not because of the fact that he and his men are going to be used as slaves in a malaria-infested, 100-degree plus humidity jungle but because the Geneva Convention quite clearly states that all commanding officers are exempt from prison labor and the code must be followed to a T. When the matter is resolved, Nicholson then takes on the construction for himself as a morale-building exercise, taking charge of the project and even altering the blueprints to make the bridge that much more well-built. Why? Because when the war is over, Nicholson wants to leave a mark of the might of British engineering.

This is the alpha and omega of what makes The Bridge on the River Kwai such a great movie and helps give it such a unique identity so many years later. Most war films are usually either explicitly anti-war or pro-war but The Bridge on the River Kwai isn’t really either of those things. Rather, it seems to be against the British point of view towards the war. The type of people who think of war as a gentleman’s game, with rules and codes and honor. War doesn’t have any of these things. War is brutal, Hellish and results in a lot of people being killed or getting hurt. When you think about it, treating something so destructive as a sport is complete and total (in the movie’s own words) madness.

Colonel Nicholson is by far the standout performance of the piece and is one of the great villains of cinema, which is a difficult label to give to him since he doesn’t offer many symptoms of the archetype. He’s not exactly evil or mean to his men or willing to hurt innocent people. What he is, however, is an arrogant ass whose honor is so warped that he seems completely oblivious to the fact that he’s undermining his own country’s position in the war effort by building this bridge. The movie does a great job at making him seem like he's wrapped up entirely in his own world. For example, look at his introductory scene. Look how pleased with himself he is as he proudly struts his men into the POW camp while all the other prisoners seem miserable and beaten down.

In any other movie, this would be a heroic scene, showing how our main character won't be broken even if everyone else is. Instead, here, he's the one who's a fool.

If Nicholson is a reflection of British arrogance, Commander Shears seems to reflect American culture though this isn’t necessarily the American soldier commonly portrayed in most WWII propaganda films up to this point. Shears is a lot more grounded in reality and is mostly concerned with trying to figure out how to get out of the war alive. While Nicholson is constantly trying to bring civilization to the jungle, Shears looks for any small comfort he can get. Weirdly enough, this sentence makes him seem more unlikable than he actually is as he is clearly portrayed as the moral compass of the film. Unlike Nicholson, Shears has no illusions about the reality of the situation that he’s in. He comes off as a guy who has done his service, did his time in a prison camp and would now just like to spend the rest of his days drinking margaritas on a beach. What I find amusing comparing this to previous WWII films is how much he clearly does not want to be the film’s good guy. When he is tasked with demolishing the bridge, he makes it very clear in every scene that he would prefer to be almost anywhere else.

Rounding out this trio of main characters is the Japanese camp head, Colonel Saito. This character is the more overt villain of the piece as he is a cruel man who doesn’t shy away from torturing prisoners. Yet Sessue Hayakawa delivers a very understated performance that gives the character depth. Both Nicholson and Saito are spawned from uber-nationalistic empires but the difference is that Saito seems to loathe his lot in life and doesn’t have any illusions about the barbarism of the Japanese Empire and how it causes suffering for innocent people. What makes it great is that this is all in the subtext. Saito never actually really complains about the war but you can tell he’s not happy about it or the fact that he’ll have to commit seppuku if he fails to complete the bridge on time. Every time Nicholson goes off about his pride in his nation and how the bridge is a testament to that pride, Saito looks at him like he has two heads.

“You’re a stupid idiot but you’re making my job easier so I’ll roll with it.”

The greatness of The Bridge on the River Kwai could also be attributed to the timeliness of then-current events. The film came out shortly after the Suez Crisis wherein the British (and French) Empire(s) was publicly humiliated after American President Eisenhower pressured them to abandon their invasion of Egypt. This is often regarded as the key event when the British (and French) were finally forced to acknowledge America as the world’s preeminent superpower, officially bringing Pax Britannia to a close. Consider alone just how much movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood revolved around British adventure and the British way of life. The Bridge on the River Kwai was one of the first movies that was so clearly anti-British. But it’s not showing any of the easy tricks with the British being so overtly evil. It’s specifically attacking the very idea of British supremacy that was so thoroughly destroyed by the Suez Crisis and showing this culture for being moronic, not flat-out evil.

The movie moves at a very good clip, not feeling at all its 3 hours, and special attention should be given to the look. The scale and cinematography are great, of course, but The Bridge on the River Kwai does a great job at making the environment seem so thoroughly unpleasant. Historically, jungle settings in movies are equated with fun adventure movies like Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and King Kong (1933). In The Bridge on the River Kwai, a lot of focus is given to the sweat pouring out of the characters’ foreheads, the steam rising off the ground and the sun beaming down through the jungle ferns. The whole place feels very hot and Hellish. Special mention needs to also be placed towards the climax of the film. I won’t give it away but where most big film epics usually ended with epic battles or preachy soliloquies, The Bridge on the River Kwai’s climax feels more like something out of a Hitchcock film. It’s a big setpiece but it's much more suspenseful than epic.

So that’s why the film was great back then. But does it hold up today? While The Bridge on the River Kwai is progressive in regards of moving cinema forward and being willing to challenge social mores of the establishment, it has come under attack in recent years for some of its portrayals though, unlike Gone With the Wind (1939), I think this one is a little easier to excuse even by the standards of its own time. Kinda. Sorta. Let’s analyze them.

First off, the film is based on the construction of the actual Burma-Siam Railroad during World War II wherein British POWs were subject to much worse conditions during its construction than what was portrayed. The preeminent officer of this episode was Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Toosey who, unlike Colonel Nicholson, actively sabotaged the construction of the railroad. As a result, members of Toosey’s family have considered the character an insult to the real man’s memory though I think this complaint is a bit of a reach. We’ve discussed historical accuracy on this blog when depicting real events and we can (and will) debate the ethics of fictionalizing biopics but this is a pretty clear case of historical fiction. All the characters, events and even the bridge itself are fictional; its setting just happens to be in a real historical event that the filmmaker is using to analyze his theme. Nicholson clearly has nothing in common with the real-life Toosey beyond their rank (and it’s not even clear if Nicholson is a Lieutenant-Colonel or an actual Colonel) and, while you could make the argument that the film undermines the real POWs who suffered on this railroad, I don’t think the movie is stating that all British POWs were traitors, just this one fictional one was.

Pictured: an actual POW and honorable servant to his country.

More pertinently, the film has been attacked by Japanese viewers for its ethnic stereotyping which is something that could be debatable. There is probably no easier way to see the casual racism of American culture than by watching a lot of the action movies that came out in World War II. What do I mean by this? Well, any movie set in the European theater or featuring the Nazis as the villains would usually have an almost Bond villain-esque antagonist who was a fun-to-hate mastermind. Any movie set in the Japanese theater or featuring the Japanese Empire as the villains would be reduced to an anonymous “other” or monster to be vanquished. In other words, the white characters were allowed to be actually intelligent villains while the Asian characters portrayed stereotyped monsters with less depth than Tom Tyler’s Mummy.

Bringing it back to The Bridge on the River Kwai, Colonel Saito is the only Japanese character of note and he is a major step forward in this regard. He’s a very 3-dimensional character in a time when even having 2 dimensions in an Asian character would’ve been impressive. Hell, even compare this to contemporary films that are about accepting Asian culture, such as Japanese War Bride (1952) and Sayonara (1957), which feature the Asian characters in question barely talking and you can see the difference.

Another plot point that has garnered a complaint in recent years is the scene where Nicholson improves upon the design of the bridge which implies that apparently Japanese engineering was inferior to British engineering as pointed out by our main character. This one I would consider more of a reach as it’s clearly the point of the movie that Colonel Nicholson is racist and arrogant and just because he says that British engineering is better doesn’t mean that it actually is. Even assuming that his design actually is better, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the original design was ipso facto bad, it could’ve just used some improvements.

I’m not going to pretend that The Bridge on the River Kwai is the most enlightened film ever made as Saito does eventually fade into the background during the back half of the movie and most of the locals that Shears meets in the jungle are somewhat exoticized but I think its step forward should still be acknowledged for its time. And none of the portrayals ever detract from the story. Hell, the fact that the film is willing to morally equate the British with the Japanese Empire was insanely risky.

According to WWII veterans, if Nicholson was real, he most likely would've been killed in his sleep by his men which would've been an interesting turn if the movie ended like that.

If there is any actual problem with The Bridge on the River Kwai, it does admittedly spell out its moral a little too much, so much so that it feels like the filmmakers don’t have the greatest amount of respect for its audience. For example, during Shears’ journey through the jungle, he’s paired with another British officer, Major Warden (Jack Hawkins). Warden bears several of the same mannerisms as Nicholson, which reinforces the moral of British pomposity. But they ruin the bit when Shears explicitly says out that Warden is exactly like Nicholson, as if the audience wouldn’t have figured that out several times over by the time he says it. There’s a lot of little dumbbell lines like that can kick you out of the film at times but none of them overtly ruin the movie.

The Bridge on the River Kwai’s creative power was a damn near dream team of the era. It was directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel, two men who are individually responsible for some of the best movies of all time and had a very similar ethos of filmmaking. (Rounding out the trio of creativity was Carl Foreman, the screenwriter of High Noon (1952), who was blacklisted at the time and didn’t receive credit for writing the film until many years later. The film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, which was accepted by Foreman's frontman, Pierre Boulle, who didn’t speak, let alone write, a single word of English.) No matter how big or epic the film had to be, both Lean and Spiegel felt that all of that wouldn’t be worth a damn if there wasn't a good story to back it up. In this time of the great big film epics, there were so many that just clearly put the spectacle first (e.g. War and Peace (1956)) or were maybe 2-hour stories being egregiously spread out over 200 minutes (e.g. Giant (1956)). The Bridge on the River Kwai is neither of those things. It is exactly as long as it needs to be and is an excellent character study, social satire and war drama that perfectly builds to its intense climax that is one of the most suspenseful sequences in cinematic history. In a time focused on cinematography, The Bridge on the River Kwai never once forgets the screenplay.

But could all that combine to make it the movie of the year?

 In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2

14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2

15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2

16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2

17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2

18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2

19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2

20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2

21st Academy Awards (1948): Hamlet: Part 1, Part 2

22nd Academy Awards (1949): All The King's Men: Part 1, Part 2

23rd Academy Awards (1950): All About Eve: Part 1, Part 2

24th Academy Awards (1951): An American in Paris: Part 1, Part 2

25th Academy Awards (1952): The Greatest Show on Earth: Part 1, Part 2

26th Academy Awards (1953): From Here to Eternity: Part 1, Part 2

27th Academy Awards (1954): On the Waterfront: Part 1, Part 2

28th Academy Awards (1955): Marty: Part 1, Part 2

29th Academy Awards (1956): Around the World in 80 Days: Part 1, Part 2