A Film Canon

This adaptation of Pierre Boulle's classic novel explicates the prisoner of war film as an essentially ahistorical genre, concerned less with the parameters of a particular conflict than with the collision of different military and social codes. As a result, the relationship between camp superintendent Colonel Saito's (Sessue Hayakwa) conception of bushido, and prisoner Colonel Nicholson's (Alec Guinness) conception of duty, takes on a primal, Shakespearean universality, transforming them into a single, mutually dependent agon, and ensuring that the bridge upon which they collaborate takes on a distinctly elegaic quality; an embodiment of the beauty and sadness of a military career. Unfortunately, this symmetry is disturbed by the clumsy addition of an American mediator (Wiliam Holden) - a pragmatic, demotic recognition of the implications of total war - as well as a lengthy subplot away from the bridge and camp courtyard that prove the most fitting subjects for Lean's panoramic, widescreen aesthetic. Nevertheless, this digression represents the most poetic instance of Lean’s preoccupation with on-location shooting, as well as clarifying the natural world as the film’s most threatening, brooding presence, thereby gesturing towards the radically amorphous, fundamentally unknowable antagonism of the Cold War. It also contributes to one of the most exquisitely timed and constructed conclusions in classical Hollywood, in which the viewer’s sympathies are equally torn between at least four parties, as well as providing a blueprint for later, more contemplative incarnations of the war film.