Screenshot for the Week of 19 October 2020: "THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI" (1957)

 

Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  C: Jack Hildyard.  D: David Lean.

[SPOILER ALERT!]  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) has been a controversial film in the UK since its premiere.  British film critics and war veterans excoriated it for its portrayal of a British officer who collaborates with the enemy under the delusion he's actually advancing the British war effort.  British audiences, however, loved the film, making it the box-office winner in the UK in 1958.

The film was based on a French novel by Pierre Boulle and told a fictional version of the real-life wartime saga of British Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey and the forced construction of the Burma-Siam railway.  Survivors of the brutal project swore that any senior allied officer who behaved as Nicholson behaves in the film would have been "eliminated."  Toosey in fact made it his constant goal to sabotage the project, one way or another, even resorting to planting termites in the bridge stanchions. [END OF SPOLIER ALERT!]

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Jack Hildyard won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  It was his only Oscar.  He had worked for director David Lean three times before, and I'm curious why the pair never made another movie together.  Lean's next three films won Oscars for his new cinematographer, Freddie Young—Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Ryan's Daughter (1970).

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Alec Guinness was reluctant to make this movie.  There are all sorts of stories out there that other actors had first been offered the role of Colonel Nicholson, including Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles, all of whom turned it down before it was offered to Guinness.  But there's another story which I choose to believe, namely, that Guinness was always the first choice for the role of Colonel Nicholson, the role that earned Guinness his only Oscar (Actor in a Leading Role).

And Guinness himself initially turned it down.  He thought the French novel on which the film was based was anti-British, which by all accounts it was.  He also thought no one in their right mind would sit and watch a stiff-upper-lip British officer for 2½ hours.  Producer Sam Spiegel, a born salesman, took Guinness and David Lean to dinner, and by the end of the meal, Guinness was sold.

Even after filming began, however, Guinness continued to have doubts.  Lean invited Guinness and his family to watch some rough cuts of the early footage.  After having watched them, the group stood up and walked out of the screening room without saying a word.  Lean didn't know what to think.  Later, Guinness returned to Lean and told him that he and his family agreed Nicholson was the finest work he had ever done.

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William Holden was brought into the project to give it a solid box-office earning potential and to bring a little sex appeal to the film.  Holden was apparently the only person on the film shoot in Ceylon—cast, crew, extras—who got along with director David Lean.  And by Lean's own account, Holden was the only person there that he liked.

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Sessue Hayakawa was a legendary silent film star and producer, in America and Japan, before William Holden had been born and while Alec Guinness was still in nappies.  In fact he was one of the highest-paid film stars between 1910 and 1920.  In the early 1920s, with the rise of racism in Europe and the U.S., the flow of Hayakawa's career slowed to a trickle.  He went back to Japan for a several years, acting in and producing films and staging Japanese-language productions of Shakespeare's plays.  His career never again reached the heights of the period 1910-1920.

While filming that scene near the beginning of the movie, when Nicholson meets Colonel Saito and Saito strikes him with a pocket-size copy of the Geneva Convention,  Hayakawa did in fact accidentally strike Guinness and draw genuine blood.  Guinness never broke character, the camera kept rolling, and the footage stayed in the film.

C: Jack Hildyard   D: David Lean