As I Grow Old

Rating: 10/10 (27 June 2009)

A longtime friend with a shared interest in movies lately asked me to identify films that I appreciate more with age.
You can guess that gave me pause. I could think of only two. Bridge was one. The other appears among my IMDb user comments. I will likely think of and report more with time...
The climax and martial music notwithstanding, as a younger viewer I thought Bridge interminable and Colonel Nicholson a caricature if not a loon outright. Now I feel I know him and some of the other lead characters better.
Both he and Colonel Saito are duty-bound and presumably near the end of their respective service. They are consummate professionals. Yet in my view the true focus of either is not the bridge but each other.
Nicholson either instinctively represses the opportunity or purposely chooses to not want to understand Saito. Either could be for any number of reasons. The film provides no clues beyond an occasional and unsettling crescendo in the musical score. And David Lean knows better than to tell us.
For his part Saito comes to acknowledge and very nearly accept Nicholson, yet remains almost physically incapable of fully understanding him, not out of some cultural gap but with full realization that to do so is to lose face, which in his place is unthinkable.
In the above context the performances of Alec Guinness and Hayakawa Sessue are magnificent, and they converge in the sunset view from the bridge.
Though neither meets Major Warden, they all mirror each other. Warden too is duty-bound. The big difference is that his focus truly is the bridge. He ultimately attains his goal, and almost instantly recognizes what he has lost with that. Though an excellent actor Jack Hawkins never impressed me with a range of expressions...except here.
Shears is the joker in the deck. Self-preservation is his focus, and that's eminently understandable though not necessarily out of sympathy. But at the end of his day he is arguably the most duty-bound of all. The key to the portrayal is William Holden's apparent effortlessness.
Truly a screenful of superlatives, Bridge is not so much a film in which I see something new with each viewing as simply recognize more.