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Bridge on the River Kwai, TheDirector David Lean made his name with smaller, more intimate movies like Brief Encounter and Oliver Twist, but by the time of The Bridge On The River Kwai his epic cinema output was in full swing. The story takes place in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, where the Japanese are building a railway line between Malaysia and Rangoon. Or, rather, where British Army prisoners are building it, amid conditions of utter brutality and slavery.
For Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) the broad canvas of the war narrows to this particular task - and he and his men pour their energy into it as a means of maintaining their discipline, but also holding on to their marbles. The question is, how far will Nicholson go to protect his bridge, which stands as a symbol of British military efficiency and excellence, even as it makes a vital contribution to the Japanese war effort? In the meantime, the Japanese camp commandant Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) is privately humiliated by his captives' superior engineering skills: the British are building a better bridge than the Japanese Army could - ironically thanks to the extra efforts of the British officer in charge.
But further irony - there's an Allied plan to blow it up, which poses a terrible dilemma for Nicholson: will he expose the sabotage and save the bridge, or see it destroyed? As a soldier, the choice is clear, but incredibly he seems ready to ignore his duty to Allied interests.
Whether this is really a film about the complex reality of war, or a melodramatic scenario tacked on to real events is a moot point, but Nicholson's dilemma certainly makes for compelling, spectacular cinema. And Guinness and Hayakawa are excellent as the Japanese and British colonels at odds with each other, but united in their goal of completing the bridge. It's the ironic complexities of the story, together with Lean's trademark epic visual style that places The Bridge On The River Kwai among the best British war films.
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