Famous but not necessarily amazing

Rating: 5/10 (3 November 2018)

There are two parts of The Bridge on the River Kwai most audiences take away after watching it: the music and the famous scene in the end, which I won't describe for sake of spoilers. In the two-and-a-half hour movie, there's actually a lot more that happens than whistling the "Colonel Bogey March" and the ending. This is a pretty tense war movie involving prisoners of war and their quest to break free and continue to fight against the Japanese in WWII. William Holden stars, with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins as the other main "good guy" soldiers, and Sessue Hayakawa as the head of the Japanese POW camp. If you remember Sessue from Three Came Home, you know that he brings a lot of depth to his roles.
Alec Guinness won the Academy Award for Best Actor, even though he wasn't really the lead. He happens to be instrumental in the most memorable scene of the movie, but that has no bearing on the wrong category of his award. He also didn't "own" the role as many actors who give award-worthy performances do. Any number of actors could have played his part in this movie and done just as competent a performance; my choice would have been David Niven. He would have owned the role, and he would have actually deserved a nomination, if not a win.
Still, this is a pretty famous movie to come out of the 1950s, so if you like to study cinema from that time period, you'll probably want to watch it. More likely than not, if you've seen a lot of other classic war films, you won't be that impressed by this one.