The Bridge on the River Kwai

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The Bridge over the River Kwai (French:Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai) is a novel by Pierre Boulle, published in 1952, that won France's "Prix Ste Beuve." Its a historical drama about the plight of Allied prisoners of war during World War II forced to build the 258-mile Death Railway by Japanese forces.


The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was a Anglo-American war film based on the book. The film portrays a group of British captives in a Japanese POW camp forced to build a railway bridge spanning the River Kwai in Thailand. It was filmed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and England.

The story is based on the building in 1943 of a railway bridge over the Mae Klong in the Thai town of Kanchanaburi. This was part of a project to link existing Thai and Burmese railway lines to create a route from Bangkok, Thailand to Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar) to support the Japanese occupation of Burma. About a hundred thousand conscripted Asian labourers and 16,000 prisoners of war died on the whole project, which was nicknamed the Death Railway.

Primary cast:


The Bridge over the River Kwai taken in June 2004. The round shaped spans are original, the others have been replaced after demolition.

The destruction of the bridge in the film was accomplished by blowing up a full-sized bridge as a real train drove over it. This may have been the first time such a scene had been attempted without model shots since the silent film era. (Buster Keaton's The General includes an almost identical scene.)

One memorable feature of the movie is the tune that is whistled by the POW's—the "Colonel Bogey March"—and is now widely associated with the movie, and even sometimes referred to as the "River Kwai March." Besides serving as an example of British fortitude and dignity in the face of privation, it suggested (whether or not intended by the screenwriters) a specific symbol of defiance to many movie-goers of the period: WW II veterans (and many of their baby-boom sons) thought of the tune as that of a mockery of Japan's principal ally.


Fiction versus fact

Although the suffering caused by the building of the Burma Railway and its bridges is true, the incidents in the film are entirely fictional. The real allied camp commander at the bridge was Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Toosey, who was a remarkable officer. The film is thought by many to be an insulting parody of a great man. It is unlikely that any man like the fictional Nicholson could have risen to the rank of Colonel. If he had, he probably would have been quietly eliminated by the other prisoners.

The full true story is in the article on Philip Toosey.


Famous quotes from the film

Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa): "Do not speak to me of rules. This is war! This is not a game of cricket!"

Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa): "Be happy in your work!" in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)


Award wins:


Award nominations:


The screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were on the Hollywood blacklist and could only work secretly. Pierre Boulle, who did not speak English, was given screen credit for adapting his own novel, and the Oscar was awarded to him. Only in 1984 did the Academy rectify the situation by awarding the Oscar to Foreman and Wilson retrospectively (and posthumously in both cases, although Foreman did live long enough to know that it was going to happen). At about the same time a new release of the film finally gave them proper screen credit.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. See also AZON.

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