Title: Bridge On The River Kwai
Rating: 4 Stars
This was one of the films on the AFI list that I was least looking forward to watching. It was on commercial television pretty regularly as I was growing up. I was remembering a somewhat ponderous epic (it’s over two and a half hours long) that was going to tell a pretty simple story. There was an oppressive Japanese prison camp commander that would violently force British POWs into slave labor to construct a bridge. Concurrent with that would be an Allied commando operation to detonate the bridge after it was completed. The highlight of the film would be the commandos successfully blowing up the bridge.
Well, it turns out that none of that is true. Shockingly enough, it turns out to be a significantly more nuanced film than the ten year old me remembers.
Colonel Saito, the camp prison camp commander, is brutal. When he’s first introduced, he seems pitiless. Colonel Nicholson, the British POW leading officer, tries to discuss Geneva Convention violations with him and Saito promptly throws him into the hot box as punishment.
After this battle of wills, Saito is discovered not to be pitilessly evil. He makes accommodations with Nicholson. They have 1:1 discussions where Saito reminisces about his time in England. Saito explains the pressure that he’s under. He must finish the bridge by a certain date or the disgrace of his failure will require him to commit ritualistic seppuku. He is behind schedule on its construction and is determined to finish it. All of this does not make Saito a nice guy, but it does help to explain his motivations. He is not a one dimensional evil character.
Similarly, Nicholson could easily have been another, albeit completely different, one dimensional character. As the leader of the POWs, he could easily have been painted as the selfless, sacrificing hero determined to do his best by his country.
In fact, Nicholson is significantly more complex. When debating the Geneva Convention law with Saito, the rule that he fixates on is whether or not officers can be forced to work. That is (apparently) outlawed by the Geneva Convention, but in a camp where disease and death is running rampant and workers are essentially worked to death, is that really the hill that you want to die on? Keeping the officers’ hands clean? Apparently, Nicholson does. He nearly dies during his time in the hot box. Even then, on the point of death, he refuses to concede.
Saito and Nicholson come to a rapprochement. Saito, now desperate to get the bridge built, agrees to yield day to day direction of the bridge’s construction to Nicholson and his officers.
Now this is where the film takes a turn that I completely missed / don’t remember. Nicholson, remember is a British POW fighting a desperate war against the Japanese in the Pacific theater, really gets into building the bridge. Despite the fact that it will be part of a main transportation effort to feed the Japanese war effort, he takes it as somehow a badge of British honor that he must build the best possible bridge possible.
Instead of just going through the motions of creating a middling bridge, Nicholson drives his men hard. During the later stages, he cajoled POWs from the sick bay, many of whom barely able to walk, to help out. To make it even more ironic, there are scenes of British officers actually get down and dirty and doing real work. Nicholson ends up forcing his men to do the very things for which he condemned Saito. In his narcissistic zeal, Nicholson does in fact create a superior bridge.
As the bridge is being built, a commando team is sent to blow up the bridge upon its completion. This part of the story is much more traditional. Shears, an American officer, has previously escaped from the POW camp and so is the perfect choice to lead the team to the camp. Shears is a layabout only interested in his own survival. Forced to lead the team to the camp, the question that inevitably arises is, will Shears rise above his cynical self interest to make the ultimate sacrifice when the time for action comes? Unless you’ve never seen a war movie, you’ll probably already know the answer.
The final interesting point comes after the commandos have laid the charges on the bridge. Nicholson, doing a final inspection, notices the charges. Now completely wrapped up in the successful construction of his bridge, he becomes determined to save the bridge from destruction. Only after the commandos have died and Nicholson looks down on the face of a young dead British commando does the the veil of his obsession drop. Now dying himself, he redeems himself with one last act by falling onto the explosive plunger, destroying the bridge that he worked so hard to build.
I still kind of think that this story could have been told in something less than two hours and forty minutes, but all in all, this was one of those films on the AFI list that exceeded my expectations of it.
dorkenstein 