'Bridge in River Kwai' is Great

...I found myself out in the street, grappling with the realization that I had just witnessed that rarest of phenomena, a very great motion picture...

...The principal participants are a heroic English colonel, a play-it-cool American gob, a fiercely dedicated British commando leader, and a militaristic Japanese prison camp commander...

...and Geoffrey Home, the tender young commando, would fall in love with the shy native girl, thus leaving us all basking in the warm glow of an enlightened racial message...

...Well, there were innumerable opportunities: William Holden would fall in love with the beautiful nurse who would redeem him and persuade him, for true love's sake, to help the British blow up the Japanese bridge...

...The story is based on a World War I incident involving an ambitious French general who, in order to secure a promotion, orders a suicidal attack on an impregnable German position...

...ringing in your ears, you will, I hope, feel as I did—overwhelmed...

...There are no heroes, no villains, no pat answers, no Panglos-sian homilies to blur the realities or soften the blows...

...A fairly interesting one was Paths of Glory, a low-budget effort produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, though it seemed a bit childish to me after The Bridge...

...It's a lot easier to be uncompromising when your production budget is low, but producer Sam Spiegel has had the courage to spend money in the cause of art and truth...

...The completion and possible subsequent demolition of the bridge are the two main pivots on which the action turns, and there's certainly plenty of excitement...

...Nevertheless, the movie has some excellent scenes, and enough driving force in the direction and the performances to keep you in your seat...

...Or perhaps he has discovered that the only way to make money out of art is to be artistic (a lesson Otto Preminger, for instance, might take to heart the next time he tackles Shaw...

...Kirk Douglas is properly outraged as the noble colonel who defends his men, and Adolphe Menjou and George Macready make wonderfully sinister staff officers, though in one or two of their scenes they come dangerously close to the comedy patter of Alphonse and Gaston...

...This is the stuff of great tragedy (which is not to say that the film is devoid of moments of comedy), and there is a fine Greek flavor to the holocaust at the end...

...Jack Hawkins would turn out to be a jolly good chap after all and not fire on his own men, even though it would mean a military failure...

...But in addition to its entertainment value, which is considerable, the film is a devastating indictment, not just of war and the military mind in general (that would be easy enough), but of the larger human failing of acting only from absolute concepts and rigid codes of honor, virtue and patriotism...

...The acting is broad but effective...

...At the very end of the film, with the English medical officer's "Madness...

...The added factor that makes the achievement of this film so extraordinary is, of course, its cost...

...This being the season of peace on earth and so on, I escaped from it by seeing one war movie after another...

...But (would you believe it...

...Each of these people is somehow directly involved with the construction of a railway bridge that might become strategically important to the Japanese armies then overrunning Southeast Asia...

...Madness...

...I am not going to waste time and space outlining the intricate plot (the movie is nearly three hours long), but it might be worth mentioning that the action takes place mostly along the Siam-Burma border during World War II...

...Kubrick's direction tends to be heavy-handed and shrill, but is, on the whole, quite suited to the grim story he unfolds...

...It is, in fact, an exercise in black and white, in which all the values are absolute, all the motivations over-simplified and everyone is either a good guy or a hound dog...

...When the attack fails, the general orders his artillery to fire on his own men, then later manages to have three of them, selected at random, sentenced to be shot in a court martial that makes the Dreyfus decision look like the judgment of Solomon...

...On SCREEN By William Murray Bridge on River Kwai' Is Great About halfway through The Bridge on the River Kwai, I suddenly realized that no big commercial movie, filmed at a cost of about $3 million, could possibly be as good as this one was turning out to be, so I confidently sat back to await the inevitable sell-out...

...The acting by a large cast is first-rate, the direction by David Lean is perfect, and the script, adapted by Pierre Boulle from his own novel, is the product of a fine French intellect at its sharpest...

...not one of these things came to pass...

...Alec Guinness would, at the last minute, realize the error of his ways and, dying gallantly with a smile upon his lips, save the day...