Among the Best.

Rating: 9/10 (2 September 2004)

This may be the best war movie -- if that's what it is -- that was ever put together. I don't think it would be made today. It was expensive and there were no women in it to speak of, and any committee member with an MBA reading the script would wonder why there wasn't more action. Further, the movie hasn't got any magnificent computerized graphics going for it. And we hardly see any blood. And nobody's head gets blown apart. And there's not a foul word in it.
David Lean has pulled off a neat stunt, making a superb film with a good script, great performances, effective location shooting, a subtext that provokes thought, a marvelously believable set of characterizations -- and no gimmicks.
It begins traditionally enough, with red mud and brilliant green foliage, and an authentic prisoner of war camp into which Nicholson's captured battalion marches proudly. The first real hint we get of the film's originality is when the men are marching in place to Colonel Bogey's march and we get one or two shots of feet stomping up and down on the wet gravel. One pair of feet wears only half shoes. The toes are pointing out of the right shoe. On the left shoe, the upper has separated from the sole, and it flaps up and down as the foot inside it drives into the earth. Not only is the shot THERE but it's lingered over, just long enough.
William Holden is running through the bushes, trying to escape from the camp, disturbing flocks of bird that chirp madly at him. One of his Japanese pursuers shoots him and he tumbles into a turbulent river. In any Hollywood movie, the drop would be done by a stunt man in the usual manner -- head over heels, arms flailing, off the cliff. Not here. Holden falls feet first, hands and palms held out at his sides, as if expecting to land on a trampoline. He simply doesn't FALL like a professional.
The film is loaded with grace notes like this. It's difficult to imagine a director willing to take the time to fine tune his film like this today because both the people making films and the viewers themselves are impatient to get on with the story and reach the next scene that has sex, blood, or comedy in it. I wonder if it's coincidental that people now categorize themselves as fans of one or another basketball team instead of a baseball team. Watching a baseball game calls for patience while the batter digs his cleated shoes into the dirt around the plate. Basketball is all momentum and no patience is required.
I won't go on about the movie except to say that it's masterly in almost every respect. But I guess I will mention one more thing of the sort that impressed me, dealing with characterization. Throughout the movie, we've been told and shown that Nicholson cares for nothing so much as the bridge itself. He began by thinking of it as a way to keep up the men's morale and a reason for keeping discipline, but it has come to have functional autonomy, eclipsing everything else in importance. Note the way Guiness's eyes light up in the day-for-night scene when he's told that similar bridges built of English elms have lasted for three hundred years. "Three hundred years!", he marvels.
Likewise, the supporting character of Joyce, on the commandos, is shown as being uncertain of whether he could use his knife in hand to hand combat or not. When an armed Japanese soldier appears at arm's length, Joyce freezes and Jack Hawkins dashes in to kill the man.
These two traits -- Nicholson's obsession with the bridge and Joyce's inability to use a knife -- are set up so that the final (and only) confrontation between Nicholson and Joyce can take place the way it does. Nicholson screams, "Blow up the BRIDGE?", grabs Joyce's legs and pulls him down to the sand, preventing Joyce from reaching the detonator. Commandoes be damned, nobody is going to destroy his bridge. Hawkins and Holden shout from the opposite bank of the river, urging Joyce to "kill him!" But Joyce can't kill him without using a knife, which we know he will be unable to do.
It's a perfect payoff for what we've learned about the two men.
Did Nicholson deliberately throw himself on the detonator as he was dying or did he fall on it by accident? Who cares. If he did it deliberately it would be a heroic act since he finally "came to his senses." But an accident would be more in keeping with the ironic tone of the rest of the film. At the end, everyone and everything of importance is dead except Clipton the humanitarian doctor who tells us unnecessarily that this is "madness" -- and those floating vultures with their Olympian view of these goings-on.
It's a gripping movie from beginning to end, a magnificent job by everyone involved.