Probably the most impressive war movie ever to come out of the 50's

Rating: 8/10 (22 May 2009)

I am by far not a connoisseur when it comes to war movies. It's not even my favorite genre. But recently I've been catching up with a lot of classics my father likes so much. I had seen THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI before as a little kid, and now revisited it through a bit more experienced eyes. A lot of great reviews are written here on these pages, and maybe this film really comes close to being 10/10 material. But since I haven't really watched that much old war classics, I'm not going to attempt to write an in-depth review and just provide some random impressions in this user-comment instead.
How many times have you seen deleted scenes on a DVD where the director explains it was cut out "for pacing issues, really"? Well, I'm convinced half of the time they're actually trying to say "the producers were afraid audiences might find our movie boring if we left too much in it". A lot of these deleted scenes "cut out to improve the pacing" could have easily been left in the film. But last week, I felt quite differently while watching THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. The first hour of the movie actually felt too long (mind you, not too slow, but more like certain scenes went on too long and the plot didn't really progress like it should have). We're talking a movie here that runs about 160 minutes and I'm 100% sure if this film would have been made today, they would have cut out more than half an hour of footage from that first half. And not only because films have changed so much over the years and everything has to go fast. At first, the stretched out first half of THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. felt like a flaw, but the movie's second half made me reconsider this. The plot shifts focus, and concentrates on an escaped Prisoner Of War, who fled from the camp and becomes part of a team sent back in to go and blow up the bridge. Suddenly, during the part of his recovery at a military hospital, the screenplay injects quite a bit of humor (the conversation between Warden and his superior officers about him not receiving parachute-training was a wonderful highlight) and from then on, when their mission starts, the film gets much more exciting. It made me appreciate the first hour more for the establishing reasons it was used for, and also because - to my surprise - the shifting in tone and pace worked wonders.
There's so much you could go into if you're looking to praise this film. Needless to mention what a fine performance Alec Guinness and other cast members gave, so I'll just point out how impressed I was when I saw the movie's climax. They way the script builds up to it, is one thing. Taking the time to lay out a strategy and incorporating the notion that this whole mission might even go terribly wrong at one point, successfully increases tension during those final scenes. But the fact that the filmmakers completely destroyed a real bridge and a real train...? No use of miniatures or other special effects. Now which movies made today would actually have the courage to show us something like that? Simply none. Those days are over.
The only thing I would have preferred, is having seen the first half of the film injected with a slightly more grim mood, because frankly, that cheerful (and very famous) whistle-tune of the prisoners and some of the fanfare-esquire parts of the musical score got on my nerves a bit. I'll just blame that on the fact that this foremost still is a Hollywood movie. And that's just the way anyone will have to take this film, regardless it was based on (and altered) real facts of war. From a historical point of view, the film might be insufficiently accurate, but it really feels like one of the greatest and most entertaining war-movies ever made.