 Starring: Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa
Director: David Lean
Year Of Release: 1957
Plot: Colonel Nicolson is the top officer amongst a group of British prisoners of war in the Second World War. While their Japanese captor, Colonel Saito, is adamant the officers must work on a bridge across the River Kwai, Nicolson is just as resolute that this goes against the Geneva Convention (he’s not so worried about the enlisted men chipping in, however). What starts as a battle of wills between the two officers, develops into Nicolson wanting to build the best bridge he and his men can, to keep morale up and show what the Brits can do. Elsewhere Major Warden is put in charge of a mission, which includes American soldier Shears who escaped the prison camp, that intends to blow the bridge up and ruin all Nicolson’s work. |
The Bridge On The River Kwai is one of those movies where the stars seemed to align against all odds to create one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s one of those cases where from beginning to end, it nearly didn’t become the film it eventually was, and in most cases it’s difficult to imagine the movie being as good if it had turned out any other way.
For a start, while David Lean is now known as one of the greatest epic filmmakers in history for the likes of Kwai and Lawrence Of Arabia, back then he was more of a British arthouse director, who may have had success with Oliver Twist and Brief Encounter, but had done nothing that would have made Hollywood think he could make a movie like Bridge On The River Kwai. Before they turned to Lean, bigger names like Fred Zinnemann (who’d made From Here To Eternity only a couple of years before) were approached, but he didn’t get the novel the film is based on. Others considered (some of whom were courted and some of whom weren’t) include Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray. Producer Sam Spiegel later said that the decision to hire Lean was taken, "In absence of anybody else."
Alec Guinness may have been the first choice to play the role of Colonel Nicolson, but he initially turned the part down, because he didn’t feel anyone would want to watch a stuffy British officer for two and a half hours, especially after the character was described to him as being a bit of a bore (it probably didn’t help either that Lean and Guinness had fought on the set of Oliver Twist). After Guinness turned it down, the producers looked at Charles Laughton, who was announced but withdrew because he didn’t understand the role, while everyone from Noel Coward to James Mason were also considered before Guinness was finally convinced to sign up.
In fact casting was a problem for all the major roles. American solider Shears was written with Humphrey Bogart in mind, although he was never officially offered the role. The makers also had a meal with Cary Grant to discuss the part with him, before deciding he was wrong for the part. William Holden only came on-board after getting a massive paycheque (at the time one of the largest ever) and 10% of the film’s box office takings, which ended up as his retirement fund. The role of Major Warden, which eventually went to the peerless Jack Hawkins, was originally offered to John Gielgud, who turned it down because he thought it was a minor part that anyone could play.
Even after the cast was put together, there were problems on set. For example Sessue Hayakawa, who ended up giving a stunning, Oscar nominated performance as Col. Saito, could barely speak any English, which caused endless problems. Lean is said to have spent a lot of the shoot shouting at Hayakawa, in order to ‘challenge’ him to give a better, and easier to understand, performance.
Even the script process wasn’t straightforward, and by the time it got to the Oscars the whole thing had become downright bizarre. The screenplay was officially credited to Pierre Boulle, the man who’d written the original French novel the film is based on (he also wrote the book that was turned into Planet Of The Apes). However in reality he couldn’t speak English and had never put a day’s work into the screenplay. The reason he got credited was because the people who actually wrote it, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted during the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, and therefore weren’t allowed to be credited on screen. As a result, Boulle won the Best Screenplay Oscar for a film he hadn’t worked on at all. Unsurprisingly he didn’t turn up to the ceremony to collect it.
This was only rectified in 1984, when the Academy amended their records and handed out awards to Wilson and Foreman. As 27 years had passed since the film was made, it was too late for Wilson, who was already dead, while Foreman passed away only a couple of days after the announcement. Not long after, when the film was restored, the two real writers of the movie got an on-screen credit for the first time. (Incidentally, giving screenplay Oscars to people who didn’t have anything to do with the film they won for was popular at the time, as both Ian McLellan Hunter, who won for Roman Holiday, and Robert Rich, who got the award for The Brave One, were both actually the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo).
There were also problems over the film’s historical accuracy. One of the reasons Alec Guinness was initially reticent about appearing in the film was because he felt Boulle’s original novel was anti-British. Similarly the UK War Office refused to co-operate with the making of the film because they felt it was insulting to the real British prisoners of war. Others felt the film ignored the hundreds of thousands of non-military people the Japanese forced to work on the railroad, and there was also some resistance to Alec Guinness’ character.
While Colonel Nicolson was a fictional character based on people Boulle knew when he was a prisoner of war himself, there had, or course, been a real British officer in charge of the men who built the bridge over the River Kwai. The real top officer, Philip Toosey, certainly didn’t collaborate in the way Nicolson did, and actually tried to deliberately to sabotage the project. In fact, some ex-POWs said that if someone as stuffy and anal as Nicolson had really been around then, it’s likely the prisoners would have quietly killed him, because the actual conditions were far worse that depicted in the film, and no one would have put up with someone like Guinness’ character.
Conversely, while Saito is presented as a bit of a tyrant in the film, in real-life he was known as a comparatively compassionate man who was always willing to do deals with the prisoners. Indeed Toosey testified at Saito’s trial after the war and saved him from execution. It’s also true that while the filmmakers felt that the film had to end with the bridge being blown up, in reality it never happened, and both a wooden and a later concrete/metal bridge were built and operated for two years before being destroyed by aerial attack.
However despite all these problems and the fact that most of the story is made up, somehow everything came together to create a truly remarkable piece of cinema, which won seven Oscars and has gone down as one of cinema’s greatest achievements.
While many have tried over the years to make films that show the madness of war, The Bridge On The River Kwai is one of the very few that truly succeeds. It creates a situation that is oddly absurd, where everyone is working against everyone else (even when those people are technically on the same side), and yet at the end everybody manages to both succeed and fail at the same time. Saito has his bridge and even got the British officers to work on it (which was the major bone of contention). Nicolson has also achieved his aims to keep morale up by building a bridge that the Brits can be proud of and which shows the Japanese the prisoners won’t be broken. Both men think they’ve beaten the other and succeeded in their aims while not compromising their moral codes, even though their goals are completely different.
Unfortunately for both of them, the bridge then gets blown up, so their battle of wills and their justifications of their actions were all for nothing. However the people who’ve come along to destroy the bridge don’t actually succeed in their mission either, because they get killed before they can do it, partly because of Nicolson, who’s meant to be on their side. It’s only the Colonel falling on the trigger (and whether that’s deliberate or accidental has been debated since the film first came out) that destroys the bridge.
It is an incredible ending, which brings closure to every piece of the plot by creating a situation of utter madness, where everyone simultaneously succeeds and fails, while most of them die utterly pointlessly at the same time. By the end, all sides and viewpoints, from Nicolson’s stiff upper lip and Warden’s Boy’s Own attitude, to Shears’ seeming cowardice and Saito’s adherence to the Bushido code, have been shown to be hollow and arrogant. It’s not so much an anti-war film, as a movie that says that whether a conflict is justified or not, and no matter what reasons different people use to justify their actions during war, the results on the ground is insanity. Few films have succeeded in presenting it as well.
If you haven’t seen The Bridge On The River Kwai, go watch it now, as it is one of the best films ever made. It’s a truly remarkable piece of cinema, even if the endless problems it faced and the different directors and actors who could have been involved, mean it’s a film that succeeded more because the stars aligned than because it was always destined to be a classic.
TIM ISAAC
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