The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 war film in which a group of British captives in a Japanese POW camp are forced to build a railway bridge. The film was based on a novel by Pierre Boulle, is directed by David Lean, and stars Alec Guinness, William Holden, and Jack Hawkins.
The story is based on a real event, the building in 1942 of a railway bridge in the Thai town of Kanchanaburi for the Thailand-Burma railway. About a hundred thousand conscripted Asian labourers and 16,000 prisoners of war died on the project, which was nicknamed the Death Railway. The plot of the film is built around the destruction of the bridge, but in reality the bridge was not destroyed and remains in existence. The bridge in the film is high and wooden; the real bridge is low and made of concrete.
One memorable part of the movie is the tune which is whistled by the POW's--the "Colonel Bogey March" which has become associated with the movie.
The film won seven Oscars:
- Academy Award for Best Picture - Sam Spiegel, producer
- Academy Award for Best Actor - Alec Guinness
- Academy Award for Best Cinematography - Jack Hildyard
- Academy Award for Directing - David Lean
- Best Film Editing - Peter Taylor
- Best Music, Scoring - Malcolm Arnold
- Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium - Pierre Boulle - Carl Foreman - Michael Wilson
- Sessue Hayakawa was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.