I have always considered The Bridge on the River Kwai a great tale, well told. I saw it again yesterday and came to a different conclusion.
The story opens with a healthy, robust pair of American malingerers burying the last member of a prison workforce. The entire workforce has been killed by Japanese cruelty, all, that is, except the two crafty Americans who have avoided beatings, starvation, and jungle disease by shirking work and stealing from the dead.
Enter the British with stiff upper lips whistling the Col. Bogey march. The starchy Guinness confronts a crusty, but benign, Hayakawa with the most pressing prisoner of war issue – British officers do not work. Beriberi, dysentery and starvation be damned, officers do not work. Director Lean responds by dredging up a scene from The Great Escape. In reality Guinness would have been beaten to a pulp by Korean flunkies, beheaded for practice by a junior officer and his body parts left lying around as an example to others.
Hayakawa backs down. The prisoners turn the place into summer camp. Guinness convinces Hayakawa that his Japanese engineers are incompetent, so the British take over the project. The bridge is built without help from the Japanese. British officers stroll the completed bridge with swagger sticks and ironed uniforms. No one has died. All are well nourished. There is even a celebratory performance. Just like summer camp.
In spite of the setting, there is no connection to actual persons or events. The message is that Americans are self serving, the Japanese are stupid and the British are morally and intellectually superior to both. The movie is a racist, propaganda set piece that insults those who lived and died horribly as prisoners of the Japanese.
Firstly it isn’t only the Americans who are shown to have the survival instinct, many of the Brits clearly have it too and are portrayed as equally crafty.
As for Guinness being beaten to a pulp, it ain’t necessarily so. Not all Japanese POW commandants during the war were bloodthirsty devils. The Japanese are human after all and just as with all humans some are good and some are bad. Sure, the Japanese army had its share of ruthless martinets but as I say not all were like that.
Your comment about well-nourished prisoners somewhat undermines your first point that only Americans are seen as survivors. Yes, the film is unrealistic and in reality thousands of prisoners died building bridges for the Japanese but the film isn’r a documentary. It’s telling a particular story and tells it superbly.
And why should there be a “connection to actual persons or events”? The movie is fictional apart from the background of WWII. Propagandistic? No more than practically every war movie ever made. As for the British thinking themselves superior, of course they did. As did the Americans. As did the Japanese. That’s completely accurate and in fact things are much the same now. It’s called nationalism. ‘America is the greatest country on earth’ ring a bell?
To sum up I think the film holds up brilliantly and is as watchable now as it was then.
Not sure where you find benevolent Japanese commanders. On occasion they assassinated each other to get promoted. The Japanese did not simply ignore the needs of prisoners, they actively denied prisoners available materials. Prisoners were beheaded as a training exercise for junior officers.
Malnutrition was endemic along the railroad. The portrayal of well dressed, well fed prisoners is a travesty.
The story is fiction, but it does not fit the chosen setting. Perhaps it could have been Boer captives in a British concentration camp.
This is a great movie with deeply running themes. Every character is seriously flawed, and all are victims of the war and their own selfishness. I don’t see the racism or any message of superiority. It is all about the futility of war.
The only character in the movie worth a damn is Lieutenant Joyce, the Canadian.
Someone like the character played by Guinness wouldn’t risk just being casually killed by the Japanese. If he tries to prevent the prisoners from subtly sabotaging the effort to build the bridge, the prisoners themselves would have eliminated him as a collaborator.
I feel that I merit an award for ultimate getting wrong message / missing the point, concerning this film. First saw it at school (my school’s Film Society showed various film classics, four times a term) circa 1960, when I was aged twelve. I have been pretty well from infancy, an impassioned railfan, particularly fond of charming little narrow-gauge railways. It happened at any rate for – British – me in childhood, that stuff about the quite recent World War 2 which registered with me, featured “us and the Jerries”; things from that era on the opposite side of the globe, involving Japan, had somehow never shown up on my personal radar.
Seeing for first time, TBOTRK – with no preliminary informing about it: I was just enchanted with the sweet little narrow-gauge railway with whose construction the film was heavily involved; and got the impression that a country whose war effort partook of something so totally delightful, could not be all bad. The cruelties / interpersonal drama / tensions between nations, and all the rest, flew right over my head: I just loved the railway stuff (I later learnt, filmed in Sri Lanka – then Ceylon – using redundant equipment from a recently abandoned very-narrow-gauge branch of that country’s rail system) and the magnificent bridge; and was upset at the culminating wrecking of same, and destruction of the train then crossing it.
I have subsequently, as an adult, seen the film a couple more times, and basically got things into perspective as to what this cinematic / dramatic offering is really about. Can’t help, nevertheless, feeling a bit sorry that the wartime Thailand – Burma “Death Railway”, built with such suffering for so many, has not greatly been able to flourish and give useful service, in subsequent less-hellish times.
Years ago I read a book who title I thought was The Book of Military Lists, but I couldn’t find it on Google. It was filled with lists of greatest generals, most important battles, worst losses, etc., and was of course very subjective. The author (can’t remember his name either) said he had dozens of retired officers read it, and despite all the possibilities for criticism, the one thing that every reader yelled at him for was saying that The Bridge on the River Kwai was the worst military film ever. (He said his FIL still wasn’t speaking to him because of that.)
Wow. I never realized people could come up with such opposite interpretations of the events of a film.
I think the main thing a lot of people are missing, is that this is an artwork. Not a documentary. Not even a story that is supposed to be a tru-“ish” aspect of the actual war.
It is an ARTWORK. A story that is told to describe human frailties and interactions , and reveal how complex they can be, how intricate motivations can be, and how useless it is to assume the simple.
Psycho. That was a film that was loosely based on some real events as well. In the same way, what the ARTWORK of it was really about, required that factuality be sacrificed in all kinds of places.
Over focusing on details in criticizing ART, is a FAILURE of perception, not an accomplishment.
I see no such message in the movie. Worth noting: the book (which the screenplay follows fairly closely) was written by a French author who was not known for any themes along the lines of “the British are morally and intellectually superior.”
As others have said, throughout the film people of varying nationalities are variously praiseworthy or cruel or deceptive or honorable or kind or vicious–without any clear labelling of any one nationality. I’ll grant you that the Japanese military culture is not depicted admiringly, but the Japanese characters are not cartoonish.
The film is enormously critical of the British, married to good form and protocol, completely tied to rules to the point of being oblivious to their surroundings and the repercussions of their actions. Nicholson is delusional and myopic, and there is no ambiguity to how this is the message of the film. It’s easy to see something heroic about his hard-line position at the beginning of the film–a stringent form of integrity, perhaps–but he is soon revealed to be a hypocrite (forcing officers to work to meet their deadline) and consumed with national vanity.
There’s really only one significant American, and he’s the proxy for the audience–his “craftiness” is borne out of practicality and a need to survive. He may be a liar, but he also (along with the doctor) is the character with the most empathy for others and contempt for military formality. It’s that kind of formality that made WWI so devastating, and even though WWII may have been a “just” war, there were certainly plenty of leaders in that war who learned the wrong lessons from the previous one. Just because much of what he says is self-serving doesn’t mean it’s not laden with common sense.
Huh, and I thought you were reacting to Bryan Ekers’s comment.
I don’t see that it’s so hard to believe that an educated Japanese prison commandant would be willing to work prisoners to death but hesitate to shoot British officers. Holden’s character did not strike me as especially robust, nor were many of the British prisoners in great physical shape during/after construction of the bridge (the “hospital” seemed to be well attended). I do not see a “racist” angle.
Wonder how many fans of the movie have read the novel it’s based on, and which has a, um, markedly different ending. Still a good read.
I think the movie was intended as a commentary on two different ways people handle adverse circumstances. Some people try to reach an accommodation with the circumstances; they bend with the wind and try to protect themselves as best as they can - this was Shears’s way. Other people defy the circumstances and try to impose their own view - this was Nicholson’s way.
Generally speaking, we admire people who follow the second path (even though we often personally follow the first). We like to think heroes change the world rather than let the world change them.
But the movie showed that defying the world could end up having consequences just as bad as accommodation could have. Nicholson got so focused on imposing his way on the situation, he lost sight of the larger consequences of what he was doing.
