Brilliantly ironic war film.

Rating: 9/10 (17 September 2006)

Few film directors enjoyed such acclaim as the great David Lean. Somewhere between Hobson's Choice and Lawrence Of Arabia, he made this rousing war film set in the steaming jungles of the Far East and featuring many fine performances from a stellar cast.
In a Japanese prison camp in the Far East, American POW Shears (William Holden) witnesses the arrival of a team of captured British soldiers, led by the rigid Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness). Nicholson is a man of enormous national pride who refuses to give his captors the satisfaction of seeing him demoralised, and whose stubborn attitude immediately sets him at odds with the Japanese head officer Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Saito is determined to build a railway bridge spanning the adjacent River Kwai and knows that the British soldiers imprisoned in his camp have the engineering skills required to complete such a project. However, since the building of such a bridge would aid the Japanese war effort by providing them with a supply line for their munitions trains, Saito also realises that it will be hard to get them to build it willingly. He plays a psychological game with Nicholson, first subjecting him to prolonged isolation and degradation, then later challenging him to construct a bridge fitting of the British name. Half-mad by now, Nicholson accepts the challenge to build the bridge. but decides to prove that the British can do such things better than anyone else by making it the finest, sturdiest construction imaginable in spite of the punishing conditions and the limited resources. In the meantime, Shears escapes from the POW camp and eventually finds his way to an Allied hospital many miles away. When the British officers learn of the construction of the bridge, they send Shears back to its site so that he can guide a team of saboteurs  among them Major Warden (Jack Hawkins)  whose job it is to destroy the bridge at all costs.
The film is heavily ironic throughout, showing Nicholson to be a man so determined to prove the superiority of the British that he blindly leads his men into constructing a near-perfect bridge for the enemy. Guinness is incredible in the role, going through a full gamut of complex emotions. Hayakawa is almost equally as good as the Japanese colonel who cynically and masterfully manipulates his prisoners. The film is brilliantly shot on location in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), with Lean once more proving that he is the master of the widescreen epic as he and his camera man Jack Hildyard capture the awesome vistas splendidly. At almost three hours, the film is slightly overlong. Also the final sequence, in which the sabotage party face a near-disastrous hiccup in their efforts to destroy the bridge, come across as rather cluttered. Apart from this, however, The Bridge On The River Kwai is an excellent film. It scooped seven Oscars, was a huge box office hit, and cemented Lean's reputation as one of the leading movie makers of all-time. It's a shame they don't make 'em like this any more.