Be Happy in Your Work!

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2018)

If you watch The Bridge on the River Kwai and find yourself simultaneously admiring the spirit, the cheer, and the competence of the English, and finding it strangely insufferable, you are meant to do just that -- because this is a movie ultimately about the strange contradictions in the human heart. Alec Guinness is beyond superb, and I choose the word "beyond" advisedly: You cheer for him as he outlasts the hapless Japanese commandant, and yet it is all for what to the Japanese must seem a frivolous rule, a distinction between officers and men that should not have any purchase upon ragged soldiers in such a sweltering malarial hole as the valley of the Kwai. And the bridge, which is meant to transport Japanese supplies in occupied southeast Asia, the bridge, quite an impressive little feat of engineering, is built. Why? What is it for?
All the principals in the film are at their peak: Guinness, the overmatched but deeply human commandant (Sessue Hayakawa, who won an Oscar for his role and deserved every gilded ounce of it), William Holden as the cynical American who detests Guinness more than he does Hayakawa, Jack Hawkins as an English don with a taste for explosives, and the young Gregory Horne as the all-in English schoolboy; and that's not to mention the beautiful and haunting-eyed Burmese women who lead Hawkins, Holden, and Horne through the jungle back to the Kwai.
I'm an admirer of David Lean's films. This one has all the broad grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia, without the latter's occasional lunge into the baroque.
"My God, what have I done?" Mr. Lean, what you have done is create a nearly flawless movie about some of the most important existential questions in human life.