An Allegorical Epic About Responsibility; Artful, Colorful, Very-Well Acted

Rating: 8/10 (21 September 2005)

Critics' failure to comprehend this film was due to postmodernism. The film is not about its individuals; it is an allegory about 3 groups, U.S. amateurs, exemplified by William Holden as Shears; the British Empire represented by Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson; and the Japanese Empire represented by Sessue Hayakawa as Colonel Saito. The titular bridge is the center of the symbolism. Shears wishes he were not at war at all--the bridge has no meaning to him; Nicholson in building the bridge performs an "Elephant Walk" ignoring of the situation; and Saito wants to build the bridge to show the British the Japanese are as good imperial dynasts as they are, and fails miserably. The film by my lights is long, but logically plotted. Characters are not developed, as in most males' films; but the central characters are given values, actions, reactions, speeches, purposes. The epic can be summed up in three sentences; "A reluctant US warrior escapes from a Japanese prison camp just as newly-captured Brits led by a colonel arrive. He is forced to return, to blow up a bridge which the Brit, after refusing to allow involuntary work by officers on the bridge, has lovingly built, even recruiting his sick, wounded and dying men to show what British efficiency can do. The Japanese commandant was ready to kill himself if he failed to meet the bridge's deadline, so he reluctantly helps finish the bridge--which the U.S. soldiers and his team are sent to blow up, with the Brit's equally-reluctant eleventh-hour aid." The central battle in the film is one of wills. Nicholson refuses to ignore the Geneva Convention and have his officers work on the bridge; he is thrown into "The Oven", a tin-box baking in the sun. Once released, he becomes the charismatic leader of his men. And wanting to show the superiority of British methods over Japanese, he and his team choose a new location and agree to finish the bridge on time. Saito accepts though this almost kills him to do so. And the efforts succeeds. There is a fine railway bridge, which Nicholson hopes future users will appreciate--he puts up a plaque saying British soldiers built it; but it's to be used by the enemy in WWII to send troop and ammunition trains through to kill British and American soldiers! So when a demolition team led by a commandeered Shears arrives and Nicholson discovers their goal, he suddenly realizes what he is--a totalitarian aiding an even more barbarous empire than his own, no better than they; so even shot and dying, he cries, "What have I done" and detonates explosives planted by the team whose other members have been killed. The final judgment on the entire bridge-building project--symbol of a "bridge" from the imperial past to a human future--is spoken by the camp's doctor, James Donald, who calls the entire affair, "Madness, madness." (Postmodernism--the ignoring of reality to construct a plausible or enforced alternative--the Japanese ordering Saito to be able to build a railroad using reluctant conscripts on a swift timetable was insane; the Colonel's agreeing to construct it after having opposed the concept of officers working on the project at gunpoint is insane; forcing a realist like Shears to die at gunpoint to have to prevent its building which he knew was a wrong project for either of the empires' representatives is insane. As the US soldier, William Holden is quite good. Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson and Sessue Haykawa as Saito are both award caliber, as is James Donald, the lone British realist, a doctor whose men are urged from hospital to labor at completing a bridge whose name should have been "treason to humans' values". Others in the large cast include Heather Sears, Percy Herbert, Jack Hawkins, Andre Morell, Geoffrey Horne, Peter Williams and many others. David Lean directed very artfully from a script by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, developed from Pierre Boulle's French-language novel. Jack Hildyard's cinematography, Malcom Arnold's music (except for "The Colonel Bogey" March) used in several places, art direction by Donald M. Ashton all are first-rate. If as some note this is bad history,no one has problems following its points of view; given its modest and ironic source, author Boulle's distrust of human civilization in totalitarian hands (he also wrote "Planet of the Apes"), the most admirable feature of the film is how much was made out of a sketchy narrative basis