David Lean’s war drama earns its long running time through Alec Guinness’s quietly alarming Colonel Nicholson and patient, well-built suspense. The detours are less compelling, but the central performance is reason enough to give it an evening.
David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai is a gripping war drama with an unusually troubling central performance. Alec Guinness makes Colonel Nicholson’s devotion to military discipline credible enough that we cannot dismiss him as a fool, even when his judgement is plainly suspect. Lean gives that devotion room to become uncomfortable, and the surrounding adventure holds our attention. At 162 minutes, he also asks for more time away from Nicholson than the film always repays.
Guinness works through reserve: the controlled manner, the certainty that rank should settle an argument, the reluctance to consider that a principle might be doing harm. We found ourselves admiring Nicholson’s composure, and that made us uneasy. In his confrontation with Colonel Saito, played by Sessue Hayakawa, an officer’s insistence on maintaining standards can seem admirable before we have asked who benefits from his resolve. The man’s snobbery emerges through the same controlled delivery.
Hayakawa is essential to that contest, giving Saito enough force to make Nicholson’s obstinacy feel costly. The exchanges between the colonels are the film’s most compelling passages, with both actors making the demand for respect uncomfortable to watch. Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson’s screenplay, drawn from Pierre Boulle’s novel, understands how easily a professional standard can harden into a private obsession. Nicholson’s concern with the bridge makes the practical work difficult to separate from his need to be right.
Jack Hildyard’s wide-screen colour photography makes the scenery inviting enough to distract us from what the men are doing there. The landscape’s appeal makes the officers’ quarrels look smaller and more unreasonable. Peter Taylor’s editing keeps the competing perspectives legible, though clarity cannot entirely solve the problem of leaving the strongest character behind. The film is patient enough to let an encounter develop, and its suspense depends on our understanding of the people involved.
Malcolm Arnold’s music belongs to a soundtrack that knows when to leave space for natural sound. Those quieter passages make us listen for disturbance instead of waiting for the score to tell us how anxious to be. Lean uses that attention well: suspense grows from an environment that seems to continue regardless of military plans. It is an effective choice in a war adventure, where constant musical encouragement can make danger feel safely rehearsed.
William Holden’s Commander Shears supplies a useful counterweight to Nicholson, and Jack Hawkins’s Major Warden helps keep the film from becoming a contest between two colonels. Yet the Shears strand also stretches the running time without consistently deepening our understanding of Nicholson’s predicament. Some dialogue pushes an interpretation we have already reached, and the screenplay briefly seems less confident in its actors than it should be. These are irritations worth naming when Guinness can communicate so much through his composure alone.
This is a war film for viewers interested in the people giving orders, and prepared to spend time considering why anybody obeys them. The adventure is substantial, but Guinness’s calm insistence deserves the closest attention. Allow for a few stretches when Lean’s patience may exceed ours. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and resist the temptation to decide too quickly that Nicholson is simply ridiculous.
