"This is war! This is not a game of cricket!"

Rating: 9/10 (10 July 2009)

"This is war! This is not a game of cricket!" yells Japanese POW camp administrator Col. Saito to his British counterpart, Col. Nicholson, during an early scene in THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. In actual fact, noted British epic movie director David Lean (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DR. ZHIVAGO, RYAN'S DAUGHTER) turned one of the darker episodes of World War II, in which 12,000 Allied prisoners of war died while performing slave labor to build a bridge to aid the Japanese war effort, into something almost as buffoonish as the 1960s American TV show about a German POW camp, HOGAN'S HEROES. Normally I give winners of the Best Picture Oscar (which KWAI copped in 1957) a semi-automatic rating of "10," which I had done here from memory of a first viewing years ago. However, upon seeing it again tonight, I realized the ending is so muddled (as in, who killed who?) that I had to revise my vote to a "9." That, of course, is as a FICTIONAL story featuring psychology, action, suspense, and a killer soundtrack dominated by Kenneth Alford's "Colonel Bogey March" from 1914. But as history, KWAI seems to merit a "6" at best.