David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai is an achievement in war movie making. It stars Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa who all give great and convincing performances. This film is about soldiers in a prisoner of war camp struggling to build and destroy a bridge in Southeast Asia during World War II. The films art direction and sets are so convincing that you believe you a looking through a time machine. Most films in this scale usually had a few scenes of a green screen, but David Lean was well-known for not using green screens and shot on location. This method makes his films so convincing as it gives the audience more to see and how the actors relate to the area around them.
Alec Guinness and William Holden’s portrayals of their characters as Sheers and Colonel Nicholson are memorializing because of their distance relationship throughout the film. We only see them together for a few minutes at the beginning of the film and spend the majority of their screen time on opposite ends of Southeast Asia, and then they slowly make their way back to each other with their situations changing in the process. It all adds up tot he last five minutes of the film where everything literary “blows up”. This type of story telling makes the audience an active participant because we know something that the characters don’t. Another movie with this type of story telling is Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) about two moles trying to smoke the other out. The Bridge of the River is similar in that it involves a military demolition operation.
My last take on the Bridge on the River Kwai is on the performance of Sussue Hayakawa. Alec Guinness gave a performance of a lifetime, but it was Hayakawa that adapted and changed his character throughout the film. Hayakawa plays Colonel Saito who at first is the ruthless dictator of a prison camp who would murder prisoners if they didn’t obey orders. Throughout his screen time with Guinnes (Nicholson) he changes his demeanor and his attitude toward the prisoners and obtains a type of charity as he got to know Nicolson. He turns from a tyrant to a cooperative ally, which adds friction to the plot because he is supposed to be the enemy. It’s great that David Lean can do that on-screen and be successful.
Alec Guinness (R) in The Bridge on the River Kwai
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