The Bridge on the River Kwai Review: The Folly of Duty

Is The Bridge on the River Kwai worth watching?

Yes. The Bridge on the River Kwai is one of the great war films, a large-scale adventure that is really a study of pride, and it still holds its tension across nearly three hours. David Lean stages the clash between a British officer and his Japanese captor as a battle of wills with enormous stakes, and Alec Guinness gives a performance that grows more unsettling the longer you watch. The one reservation is structural: the parallel commando storyline is looser and more conventional than the prison-camp drama at the film’s heart.

What is The Bridge on the River Kwai about?

In 1943, a battalion of British prisoners of war arrives at a Japanese camp in the Burmese jungle, where they are ordered to build a railway bridge across the Kwai. Their commanding officer, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), insists that the Geneva Convention forbids officers from doing manual labour, and he refuses to yield to the camp commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), even under severe punishment. Their standoff becomes the axis of the film, and it leads Nicholson somewhere neither man expects.

Running alongside it is a second story. Shears (William Holden), an American prisoner who has lived through the camp’s brutality, finds himself drawn back into the war when a British officer, Major Warden (Jack Hawkins), recruits him for a mission into the jungle aimed at the bridge.

The Bridge on the River Kwai was directed by David Lean from Pierre Boulle’s novel. It is a British production in English, with some Japanese dialogue, and it runs 161 minutes. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with further wins for Lean and Guinness.

Alec Guinness and the logic of obsession

Guinness makes Nicholson one of cinema’s most fascinating officers. At first he seems heroic: a man who holds to principle under conditions that would break most people. As the story develops, the same rigidity begins to look like something else, and Guinness never signals the shift. He plays Nicholson’s pride, decency and blindness as a single trait, which is why the character is both admirable and alarming.

Sessue Hayakawa is equally important. Saito could easily have been a stock villain, and in some early scenes he is harsh and threatening, but Hayakawa gives him the anxiety of a man whose own career and honour depend on the bridge. The duel between the two colonels becomes a portrait of two military codes that mirror each other more than either would admit.

David Lean’s jungle epic

Lean’s control of scale is already formidable here, a few years before Lawrence of Arabia. The camp is laid out with clear geography, so the audience always understands where the prisoners, the guards and the river sit in relation to each other. The jungle is humid and oppressive, and the photography uses vast landscapes to make the men look fragile.

The film is also full of sharp small touches. The whistled Colonel Bogey March, as the prisoners march into camp, has become one of the most recognisable moments in war cinema, and it perfectly captures the defiant, slightly absurd spirit of Nicholson’s men. James Donald, as the camp’s medical officer, offers a quiet voice of doubt that grows in importance as the story develops.

Where the commando strand loosens

The Shears storyline gives the film movement and suspense, and William Holden’s cynical, self-interested American is an effective counterweight to Nicholson’s rigid sense of duty. But the scenes away from the camp, including a stretch of recuperation and romance, are softer and more familiar than the rest of the film, and the pace dips before the mission picks up again.

Viewers should also know that the film is a work of fiction built around a real railway. The real history of the Burma railway was far grimmer, with enormous loss of life among prisoners and forced labourers, and the film’s focus on officers’ codes sits at some distance from that suffering.

Who should watch The Bridge on the River Kwai?

It is essential for fans of classic war films and for anyone interested in large-scale filmmaking at its most assured. It suits viewers who enjoy character-driven moral drama as much as action, and the violence, though present, is restrained by modern standards; teenagers with an interest in history can watch it comfortably. The 161-minute runtime is a real commitment, so this is one for an evening with no distractions.

Two modern British war films that make natural companions:

• Dunkirk, a far more fragmented, sensory account of the same war.
• 1917, which shares this film’s interest in a single mission and the landscape that tests it.

The verdict

The Bridge on the River Kwai remains a superb piece of epic filmmaking with an unusually sharp moral intelligence, anchored by Alec Guinness and Sessue Hayakawa at their best. The looser commando storyline stops it short of perfection, but its study of pride and duty is as gripping and unsettling as ever.

Rating: 4.5/5