A FILM MASTERPIECE

...Each of them therefore appeared to me miraculously like the model I had created, but also animated and transfigured by the unique spirit of the actor...

...In The Bridge, director Lean brings out the personalities of the characters gradually, so that we learn about them in a manner somewhat like that whereby we get to know people in everyday affairs...

...Director David Lean has drawn magnificent portrayals from the cast, led by Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, Jack Hawkins, William Holden, James Donald, and Geoffrey Home—and fitted these so deftly into a rhythmically-ordered whole that the characters have an unforgettable actuality...

...We never see "real" people on the screen, of course—except in news-reels and some documentaries, where the camera is actually a spectator, and not an eye intruding itself so deeply into what is happening that what it sees is completely changed...

...What we mean when we speak of the "reality" or "actuality" of characters in a dramatic movie Hke The Bridge is that they are complex, rounded persons in themselves...

...In this recognition of the separate identity of the cinematic transformation of his literary work, Boulle reveals a sensitive appreciation of the essential differences between the movies and other forms of art...

...Rarely have all the elements of a film been so artfully coordinated and fully realized upon the screen...

...The Bridge on the River Kwai A FILM MASTERPIECE by MARTIN S. DWORKIN The real explosion of The Bridge on the River Kwai began even before the cameras started turning, late in 1956—and we may be sure that we will hear the noise from now on, in any talk about the outstanding movies of our time...

...We know them, but we do not know with absolute certainty how they would act in any case, as in the usual movie of the good guy and his girl...

...Such a device would have been a commonplace artificiality on the screen, as Boulle is certain Lean would have pointed out, and would have weakened rather than strengthened the climax...

...The force of the characterizations has had no impact more significant than that upon Pierre Boulle, who created the book from which the film is taken, and collaborated on the screenplay with director Lean and producer Sam Spiegel...

...In a Parisian magazine, La Nef, Boulle wrote of having his doubts about the transformation of a work that has "a special place in my heart"—and of seeing them dispelled from the moment the first images flashed upon the screen...

...From then on, it is fairly clear how they will act in various situations, the only possibility of variety arising out of the different styles or mannerisms of the actors playing the roles...

...This pervasive irony has its greatest impact through some truly remarkable characterizations—people who are presented with such creative vigor of direction and performance that they become superbly real...

...Whether we agree with Boulle or with Lean and Spiegel, we must also recognize that making literary images come to life on the screen demands much more than simply trying to photograph what an author has described in words...

...The character of Shears actually enriches the meaning of the satire of strictly military thinking, particularly in its peculiar British form...

...Their overall qualities and their different quirks emerge in the ways they behave in various circumstances, following the painstaking attention to numberless details, the "series of little touches," by which Lean believes a director and an actor achieve the illusion of reality upon the screen...

...But the seriousness of the film is animated in its profound ironies, the bitterness of which is pointed up by actions and situations of high comedy, edged always by revelations of cruelty and suffering...

...and Home's clerk testing his •3$bility to kill in cold blood...

...In most movies, the characters are so one-sided, as heroes or villains, that they can be presented from the start as fully-outlined figures...

...There is no doubt that the intentions of the film are serious, from the very opening shot of doves wheeling over the thick, green expanse of jungle—which is repeated at the end, after the great bridge that had cost so much in pain and sweat has been destroyed, and almost all the leading figures in the futile enterprise have been killed...

...Hawkins' almost boyishly enthusiastic professor-turned-commando, Holden's unwilling, unmilitary, yet heroic fighter...

...not just pasteboard figures advertising ideas or speaking memorized speeches, but people who are seen vividly to feel, think, and behave—whether well or badly—as separate, distinctive individuals...

...In fact, the meaning of Shears' American character is bril...

...But here again, it is a mistake to think that this is just more movie willingness to make any change, no matter how outrageous, in order to guarantee a little more vulgar appeal...

...Hayakawa's arrogant yet pathetically bewildered Japanese prison-camp commandant...

...From the sound of it, The Bridge was bound to be a "big" movie, in the tradition of screen spectacles guaranteed by hoopla and ballyhoo to be "colossal" and "stupendous" at the very least, with a skyful of stars, a "cast of thousands," and maybe even a story somewhere in all the epic entertainment...

...One of the loudest, longest pre-production publicity bombardments since Gone With the Wind kept up a drumfire of announcements about the location shooting in Ceylon, tidbits of anecdotes about the actors and crew, and statistics on everything from the miles of jungles cleared in building the bridge and the replica Japanese prison camp to the quantities of "succulent leafy fuel" fed to the working elephants...

...Donald's humane, sensibly outraged doctor...

...If their words were not exactly those I had given them to say, the essence of their speech was fully respected, and this is what counts...

...The crucial point is that the changes made in bringing The Bridge to the screen were not made to dilute its intention...

...At one point, he bitterly expresses the true civilian's virtue of respect for life, in refusing to go "according to the book," which says that the wounded commando leader, played by Jack Hawkins, should be abandoned...

...He is a nice, courageous guy— but an incorrigible civilian, who wants nothing better than to angle and goldbrick his way out of the War...

...Guinness' righteousness in proclaiming that his officers will not do manual work is played, in expressive close-ups, against Hayakawa's incomprehension that defeated soldiers can have codes of conduct...

...Boulle points ridicule at a suggestion he himself thought of making to Lean: that there might be a "compromise" in having the bridge appear blown up in the fancies of one of the characters...

...What must be said about it, without in any way substituting words for what is essentially cinematic, has to do with appreciative criticism of how it was made...

...But he respects the reasoning of Lean and Spiegel in choosing to give the audience the emotional release of seeing the symbol of absurdity shattered...

...Without difficulty, I recognized their features, the way they bore themselves, their silences, and the deliberate intonations of their voices...

...A shot of Guinness proudly planning the building of the bridge is cut to one of Hawkins happily planning to blow it up—with an immediate sense of the irony of these two quite different men pursuing opposite purposes, each in the name of the highest military values...

...His "I'm not going to leave you here to die," states the civilian's case for life, for sanity—even as it rejects that proverbial British gallantry, that can accept death in a "good show," because it is the thing to do...

...By the end of The Bridge, we know Guinness' absurdly conscientious British colonel...

...Boulle would have left it, as in the novel, standing as a monument to military futility, in the midst of the chaos of the climax...

...On the screen, The Bridge on the River Kwai is big, without question...

...But there is so much more to the picture than its gigantic size that the adjectives conventionally used to boom out approval of movies are made pitifully small—and some critics even lost all their words, ending up with the truest praise of anything graphic: that it is impossible justly to describe it...

...If it is remarkable that such a film has been made at all at this time, it is perhaps even more remarkable that it has been made so well—that it is actually a major event in the course of our thinking about matters of war and peace, as well as in the history of the movies...

...It is the recognition on the part of one artist of the problems of another in a different medium —not in any way a surrender to easy cheapening of intentions...

...It is an added irony of the film that the civilian Shears later dies just because Guinness' colonel, that most soldierly of soldiers, is too stupidly soldierly to see that the bridge he has been building for the enemy has to be destroyed...

...The characters" (translating freely) "sprang into life and without any effort on my part identified themselves with the abstractions, the imaginary beings that had been created in solitude and silence behind closed doors...

...There has been some comment, by critics in several countries, about the conversion of one character, "Shears," into an American, in order to accommodate the services of William Holden, who wields considerable box-office appeal...

...Boulle expresses certain reservations about some of the things in the film —most importantly, the matter of the destruction of the bridge...

...More than this, Lean creates in his editing, his montage, a deliberate counterpoint of characterization, wherein the individual figures are played against one another like contrasting and blending melodies...

...And, for once, the qualities of lavish spectacle, suspenseful action, and star performances have meaning beyond immediate entertainment...

...The Bridge on the River Kwai is not only a pleasure to see in the theater, but is a profoundly serious work, saying a great deal about the ironies of modern warfare in ways that are striking and thought provoking...