The Bridge on the River Kwai Review

Alec Guinness's Colonel Nicholson defies Sessue Hayakawa's Colonel Saito over the Geneva Convention, endures the metal punishment box the prisoners call the Oven, and wins. Then, appalled by his men's shoddy work, he commits them to building the enemy a proper bridge as a monument to British discipline. Guinness plays him without a wink, all regimental decency and blindness, and Hayakawa matches him as a commander watching his authority drain away.

David Lean and Jack Hildyard shot in Ceylon, and the bridge feels like engineering rather than a set. Malcolm Arnold, given ten days to write the score, paired the prisoners' whistled Colonel Bogey with a march of his own, jaunty and grotesque at once. The weaker strand belongs to William Holden's American escapee, a star-sized role with a beach romance Lean called a very terrible scene, added after Columbia complained there was no white woman in the picture.

Historians note that the real senior officer there worked to delay the bridge, and that conditions on the Burma Railway were far worse. The blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson went uncredited and their Oscar went to Pierre Boulle; the Academy corrected that in 1984, after both had died. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture and best actor for Guinness, and its final minutes remain pointedly ambiguous.