The bridge over the River Kwai

The Bridge on the River Kwai (original title: The Bridge on the River Kwai) is a 1957 British-American film of the genre epic-war, directed by David Lean and with William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins and Sessue Hayakawa in the main roles. It is based on the homonymous novel by Pierre Boulle.

The story told is fiction, but it tells the true story of the construction of the Burma railway line from 1942 to 1943. It was the winner of seven Oscars.

The authors of the script, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were on the blacklist of the witch hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, accused of belonging to communist organizations, so they had to work in secret and their contribution was not credited in the first version. For this reason, Pierre Boulle, author of the original novel, received all the credit when he was awarded the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. In 1985, the Academy awarded the award posthumously to Foreman and Wilson, who are today credited with Boulle.

In 1997, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Plot

Chandran Rutnam and William Holden during the shooting of the film.

During World War II, British prisoners are ordered by the Japanese to build a railway bridge over the River Kwai in the jungle in Thailand. Colonel Nicholson, who is in charge of the prisoners, refuses to do so, citing the Geneva Convention that prohibits the forced labor of officers. The Japanese commander Saito despises Colonel Nicholson's attitude and forces him to remain formed in full sun, along with the rest of the officers.

After being locked up in a metal hut, the colonel is freed, to the joy of the imprisoned soldiers. Colonel Saito decides to continue with the construction, but fails. Nicholson, who is a typical British officer looking for a way to raise the morale and physical condition of his men, sees the bridge as a way to achieve it, keeping them busy building it and feeling proud of the work. He manages to convince Saito with technical arguments, who, forced by the delay, accepts. The prisoners, who had tried in many ways to boycott the construction of the bridge, are ordered by Nicholson to collaborate.

For his part, an American major, Shears, a prisoner in the same camp, only thinks about fleeing. He succeeds and manages to reach the allied lines. Against his will, he returns a few weeks later leading a unit of British commandos, under the orders of Major Warden, whose mission is to blow up the bridge built by the prisoners, before the first Japanese train passes, thus cutting the line. of the railway, vital for the transport of supplies of the Japanese army.

Colonel Nicholson's obsession with finishing the bridge in the best possible way prevents him from seeing that it is, in fact, a work that the British Army has to blow up.

Cast

• William Holden - Commander Shears
• Alec Guinness - Colonel Nicholson
• Jack Hawkins - Major Warden
• Sessue Hayakawa - Colonel Saito
• James Donald - Major Clipton
• Geoffrey Horne - Lieutenant Joyce
• André Morell - Colonel Green
• Peter Williams - Captain Reeves
• John Boxer - Major Hughes
• Percy Herbert - Pvt. Grogan

Production

Howard Hawks was initially offered the direction of the film, but was ultimately directed by David Lean. The film was shot on the island of Ceylon and in the United Kingdom.

The director, in his zeal for perfection, built a bridge instead of using a model as part of the plan to make the film. The bridge cost $250,000. To haul the logs needed for its construction across the riverbed Kelani in Ceylon, 500 operators and 35 elephants were needed and when it was time to blow up the bridge and cause the actual derailment of the train, five cameras were filming the action in order not to lose any detail of what was happening on that moment.

Music

The film helped popularize the Colonel Bogey's March, a British military tune whistled by Colonel Nicholson's soldiers as they marched. It has become a classic of film music. This melody was selected by Malcolm Arnold for the soundtrack that he composed for the film and for which he won an Oscar.

True story

The Kwai River Bridge in 2011

The bridge over the River Kwai existed and exists today. The construction of the railway line claimed the lives of 100,000 Malay, Burmese, British, Dutch, American and Australian prisoners, and was destroyed by US aircraft guided bombs in 1945. After the war the bridge was rebuilt.

Pierre Boulle's anger

Pierre Boulle never accepted that the ending of his novel was altered in the film, regardless of other licenses (minimizing the brutality of the Japanese or Nicholson's racism). In the original novel, Nicholson's character, maddened by the idea of destroying the bridge he created, tries to kill Joyce and manages to prevent the blowing up of the bridge, although the Warden mortars the area where the action takes place, partly to give a quick death to his two fellow commandos (Shears and Joyce) and as revenge on Nicholson; but the bridge never falls.

Boulle never forgave his ending being omitted, as he considered that it was what gave meaning to his work, because at the end of the film it could be interpreted that Nicholson changes his mind about blowing up the bridge while in the novel there is no doubt.

Oscar controversy

The film won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, among others, but it did not reach its real owners, since in 1985 when they would have been able to receive it they had already died.

The reason was that, due to the black lists of the 50s, when Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman formed part of them, they could not appear in the credits as screenwriters, so it was decided to put Boulle. The funny thing is that Boulle had a minimal notion of English, so it was obvious that he had not written the script. Who the actual authors were was an open secret in Hollywood.

Anyway, it just so happens that Boulle didn't pick it up either. Partly out of anger at the alteration of his work, but also because he found out what had happened to the original writers and he did not consider himself a scriptwriter. Even when he picked up the BAFTA award, still not knowing that he was given the award because screenwriters "didn't exist", he declared that they were giving it to him for his novel, not because he wrote any script, something that the studio justified to get out of trouble by alluding to to the modesty of Boulle.

Therefore, the person who collected the Oscar was Kim Novak on behalf of the studio, neither the screenwriters nor the novelist —the former had died when they were recognized in 1984 and the latter did not want to go— obtained a statuette for their work.

Awards

Oscar

The film was the winner of seven Oscars during the 30th gala. He was also nominated for "best supporting actor" (Sessue Hayakawa). Received awards for:

Golden Globes

Other awards