“If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy.”
Late in the third act of David
Lean’s astonishingly intimate epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, (opens
Friday for a week at the Castro) a troupe of British soldiers – whom we
have spent the previous 150 minutes ogling naked to the waist – don green
skirts and bras and proceed to serenade their blissed out and possibly mad
commanding officer, one Colonel Nicholson (Alex Guinness/1957 Oscar: Best Performance
by an Actor), with an old music hall standard written to ward off the horrors
of WWI. The soldier boys mime kisses and jump into each other’s arms to
celebrate the completion of a railway bridge that will allow the Japanese Army
to extend its supply lines from Bangkok to Rangoon. As their voices waft out
into the night and out over the water, we observe an Anglo-American commando
team (William Holden/Jack Hawkins/Geoffrey Horne) preparing to blowup the
bridge and with it a train load of the Emperor’s top advisors. It’s May 12,
1943 and time is running out.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is
one of those must see first at the Castro film experiences – it would be a sin
to download this beauty on any Steve Jobs commissioned device. Of all the great
TV bashing Cinemascope epics from 50’s/60’s this is one of a handful that are
both as wildly entertaining as originally intended and capable of teaching us
something about our own confounding times. It – along with its David Lean folly
of empire follow up, Lawrence of Arabia, -- would prove vital to
convincing the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that they too could
create their own mythological parallel universes.
|
|
Adapted from a novel by Pierre
Boulle -- by Michael Wilson and one of the most famous blacklisted
screenwriters Carl Foreman: both men would received posthumous Oscars following
the film’s restoration -- The Bridge on the River Kwai is based on
events that unfolded during the unimaginably brutal attempt by the Japanese
military to create a railway passage to India between 1942 and 43. There was a
bridge (actually two bridges), a river, a railway, a British officer and a
Japanese camp commandant who was named Saito, but most everything else was
altered by the filmmakers to give us a better story and to avoid depicting the
one hundred thousand or so lives lost during the hideous war’s least romantic
chapter.
As the story begins Lean’s camera
(guided by Oscar winning cinematographer Jack Hildyard) glides down, as if from
a bird’s eye perspective, into a jungle clearing where two gravediggers – led
by an American, Major Shears: a still lean and fit William Holden, a last
minute replacement for Lean’s first choice Cary Grant – are burying the most
recent casualty of Saito’s bridge brigade. Major Shears is a variation on
Holden’s camp survivor/con artist, Sefton, a role he had pulled off with aplomb
for Billy Wilder’s darker dip behind barded wires, Stalag 17. In Bridge’s
first act Holden’s Shears is caustic, dodgy, cynical – anything but a hero:
the guy who tells everyone the bitter truth, as one British officer puts it, “a
queer bird, even for an American.”
Enter next British Colonel
Nicholson (Guinness) an officer who has been force marched hundreds of miles
through the jungle with the rag tag remnants of his engineering corps,
following a humiliating surrender to the Japanese after the fall of Shanghai.
The drama escalates when Nicholson brazenly and inexplicably refuses Saito’s
orders that he and his officers perform manual labor on the bridge alongside
his men.
Calling the Japanese officer’s
bluff and coming a hair’s distance from execution, Colonel Nicholson defies the
Japanese officer’s attempts to first break his will and then seduce him into
surrendering his definition of an honorable captivity. The showdown between the
men climaxes with a preposterous meal in Saito’s hut where the Japanese officer
reveals his own weakness for such trappings of empire as British corn beef and
the finest malt Scotch. Nicholson refuses the bribes and forces Saito into a
shame inducing capitulation.
“Do you know what will happen to me
if the bridge isn’t built on time?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
“I’ll have to kill myself. What would you do if you were me?”
“I suppose if I were you I’d have to kill myself.
(Nicholson lifts up previously refused shot of Scotch) Cheers!”
Following this surreal toast the
tables are literally turned and the prisoner Nicholson contrives for Colonel
Saito to become a kind of prisoner in his own camp, setting up an almost
unimaginable showdown as Nicholson’s men build the Japanese a better bridge
than they could ever have built themselves.
Powered by world class acting, spot
on witty dialogue and a precise attention to the smallest detail: Saito’s
office hut is cooled by a Burmese native who keeps the fan moving even during a
monsoon; for a manly epic the actual bloodshed on screen is modest, the real
mayhem occurs in proud and stubborn men being forced to surrender some
essential part of their souls for the sake of a greater goal.
Of particular note is the
consummate turn by veteran Japanese actor, and one-time Hollywood silent screen
leading man, Sessue Hayakawa for whom the role of Saito (and its accompanying
Oscar nomination) became both a career revival and redemption.
The Bridge on the River Kwai represents
the moment when the British began to make serious hay out of mythologizing
their now lost empire. A few of the British stars, including Guinness,
considered the picture to be annoyingly anti-British.
Watching it at the Castro, bare in
mind the model it still presents to young American filmmakers bent on
mythologizing our own prickly past, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will
Be Blood, where two lost souls battle each other to a stand still: Daniel
Day-Lewis’ Oscar winning mad oilman and Paul Dano’s duplicitous, wily boy
evangelist.