"Madness, Madness"

Rating: 10/10 (1 September 2006)

Let's face it - war is organized madness, and although the stakes in World War II were tremendous for whichever side lost, the individual effects of the war on the men and nations involved caused madness on several levels.
Pierre Boule's short novel brilliantly discusses the madness in the crazy situation that sweeps up Colonels Nicholson and Saito. Under normal circumstances, the two men might never had been friends but they might have had a degree of respect for each other. Both come from nations that have long histories and traditions, and whose officer corps prided themselves on leadership and withstanding privations. The Japanese formalized these traditions in the code of Bushido (which was twisted, unfortunately, in World War II). It included sharing privation with one's men and was similar to the concept of noblesse oblige that the aristocratic officers of Britain's army tried to maintain. Nicholson's stoicism when put into the isolation box was as much in his tradition as Saito's tradition would have included willingly reducing his own share of his rations for the benefit of his men in a siege.
The situation that develops is a racial rivalry. The Japanese, in 1943, have won so many of the campaigns, and witnessed the surrender of Allied (i.e. Western - American, British, French, Dutch troops) that they really have a contempt for them. As we now know was true, the Japanese soldiers frequently fought to the last man (think of Saipan and Okinawa in the last stages of the war, where flame throwers were frequently used to force Japanese soldiers and civilians out into the open). Westerners could do this too, but traditionally the western states saw no shame in surrendering after putting up a hard fight. Not so the Japanese military.
Saito is identifying with this tradition. In the novel, he is also disappointed that he is in charge of a prisoner of war camp - he'd prefer to be back in the fighting. But they need the prisoners to build the railroads throughout the new Japanese empire (as mentioned on another comment, the "Greater East Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere") that can have men and material race from one end of the empire to the other.
In reality this frequently ended up more like slave labor than what Boule arranges (or what Saito probably had in mind). Nicholson insists on treatment under the Geneva convention for P.O.W.s, but Saito thinks it's typically Western and wimpish. As punishment for his presumption he puts Nicholson in a hellish underground cell in solitary. But Nicholson's men refuse to cooperate until he's released, and when he is he sneers at the Japanese engineers and their mistakes, and insists on the English army engineers taking control of the building - and this works well for the Japanese Army but not for Saito, who seriously feels like he has lost face and should commit suicide.
Director David Lean wisely shot the film on location, capturing the heat and disorientation of a humid jungle war front. His wide screen film manages to make the locale of the prison camp and the Kwai River (and the bridge) look like it is the entire world, and that escape is impossible from it (indeed the one man who escapes - Holden - has to return eventually).
The novel does not include the character played by William Holden, one of his typically laconic Americans who retain a clear sightedness when compared to the British. Holden's "Shears" sees the prison camp as a massive graveyard (he's on the burial detail) and hates it to the point of escaping. He reaches safety in a recovery hospital in Ceylon, but he's forced by Jack Hawkins to return to the campsite to destroy the bridge.
Hawkins' too seems a realist - he is trying to destroy an enemy target that is nearly completed, and will make the enemy's war effort far easier. But his resolve to do this involves blackmailing Holden into assisting him, and forcing himself to continue on his mission after being seriously injured. At the end the mission kills hundreds of men. Hawkins has succeeded, but the local natives who assisted him look at him like he is a mass murderer.
Guinness' Nicholson is one of the most myopic soldiers in film (or fiction for that matter) totally forgetting the purpose of himself and his soldiers even in a P.O.W. situation but thinking solely in terms of oneupmanship and morale. It was a splendid performance. One might make a case that he behaved like a man who was hallucinating after an illness, and indeed he does (accidentally) get back to reality at the eleventh hour - too late to save himself, but in time to save his military honor.
Sessue Hayakawa had a film career in Hollywood that went back to the silent period (even appearing opposite Gloria Swanson in a Cecil B. DeMille movie), but the coming of sound and the deterioration of Japanese-American relations caused him to leave American movies. Like Swanson's sound comeback in Wilder's SUNSET BLVD., Hayakawa's appearance as Saito, a harsh foe but ultimately sympathetic given his code of behavior and how he is humiliated, brought him belated recognition and an Oscar nomination.
Finally there is James Douglas, a highly useful, plain looking British actor who frequently brought dollops of common sense to his films. His P.O.W. Major Clipton tries to rouse Nicholson's sense of reality, but fails (in fact he soon sees that Nicholson's unreality is far more catching with the rest of the British P.O.W.s than he imagined). He sees natural foes, British and Japanese, joining together building a bridge of friendship in a time of war. And the final result is just destruction, confusion and death from that war. Is it any wonder that at the end, he mutters the two words in the "Summary Line" as the story's conclusion.