The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
British soldiers build a bridge and different British soldiers blow it up.
So you think this movie’s about the heroism of quintessentially British Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness) upholding duty and honor in a Japanese POW camp during WWII. The callous Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) needs a bridge built and orders all prisoners to help, but Nicholson refuses, pointing out the Geneva Convention forbids using officers for manual labor. Though he’s technically correct, Saito locks him and the officers up until they relent1—but Nicholson holds out, asserting that it’s a matter of principle.
Nicholson’s principles carry the day and Saito eventually frees the officers, hoping it’ll speed up the bridge construction. Watch the scene where he’s released and note how it’s like the end of a sports movie. Nicholson then tells Saito he’ll motivate his men to build the bridge, since he wants to demonstrate to his captors the British can-do spirit.2
That’s half the movie. The other half follows an American POW, Commander3 Shears (William Holden), who escapes from Saito’s camp and makes it through the jungle to Burma4 where he’s rescued. He’s then recruited into a group of commandos who want to blow up the bridge the POWs are working on. That’s when Shears tells the leader of the squad, Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) what the movie is actually about:
This is just a game, this war. You and that Col. Nicholson, you’re two of a kind. Crazy with courage! For what? How to die like a gentleman. How to die by the rules. When the only important thing is how to live like a human being!
But Shears leads them through the jungle to blow up the bridge. The morning the commandos are going to do the deed, Nicholson notices the lead wire from the explosives running off the bridge. Sabotage? Of his bridge?? He notifies Saito, which leads to a firefight between the Japanese and the commandos. That’s when Nicholson realizes he’s committed treason in the name of honor.
So at the end, what’s left? Saito’s dead, Nicholson’s dead, Shears is dead. The bridge gets blown up in an almost farcical way. The last line goes to medical officer Clipton (James Donald): “Madness.”
Rating: 9/10, a thriller about the utter pointlessness of war.
Cast and Crew
William Holden is making his fourth appearance in this column and he’s basically regurgitating his cynical POW role from Stalag 17.5 Alec Guinness, on the other hand, is unrecognizeable: when we saw him in The Lavender Hill Mob, he was milquetoast and nebbish, but his Col. Nicholson is an upright, unbreakable army man. Guinness worried the character was humorless and dull, but director David Lean insisted Guinness play him straight. That decision netted them both Oscars.
Speaking of David Lean: Lean at this point was known for his collaborations with Noël Coward (including 1945’s Brief Encounter) and his Dickens adaptations (including 1948’s Oliver Twist6), but he was not yet David Lean, titanic British director of epics.7 The Bridge on the River Kwai helped start that narrative. We’ll see Lean’s next effort in this column, and it’ll have Guinness in it as well.
Sessue Hayakawa received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role as Saito. It’s a great villain role, at turns boisterous, empathetic, sadistic, and cowed. Hayakawa had a real Hollywood career in silent film (!) with a famous role in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915). You might never be asked his name8, but seriously, the dude was a trailblazing Asian actor.
The Trivia
Some of the action in this film takes place in the medical ward at a POW camp, so let’s talk about what was ailing those soldiers!
Beriberi is a deficiency of Vitamin B1 (thiamine). Its name comes from the Sinhalese for “extreme weakness.” These days, flour is enriched with thiamine, so beriberi is less common. Don’t mix it up with pellagra, which is a deficiency of B3 (niacin)9. Also don’t mix it up with B12 (cobalamin) deficiency, which is associated with pernicious anemia.10
Malaria, once called “Roman fever,”11 is caused by a single-celled parasitic organism (Plasmodium12) transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. The modern name “malaria” comes from the Italian “mala aria,” or “bad air.” Historically, it’s been treated with quinine.
Beyond the “big three” of tropical diseases (tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria) are the thirteen “neglected tropical diseases.” One of them is leprosy, a bacterial disease also called Hansen’s disease. You should know Alice Ball, a Black Hawaiian woman who developed an early treatment for leprosy.13 You should also know Father Damien, a Catholic priest who worked with lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.
I was hoping to write way more about tropical diseases but, just as they’re neglected in terms of research, they’re also neglected in trivia. I’ve put the thirteen neglected diseases in the following footnote,14 but I’d recommend actually reading the paper “Neglected Tropical Diseases” by Nick Feasey et al. since this stuff is pretty interesting. Just, uh, don’t look at any of the pictures.
Odds and Ends
A refrain in the movie is the whistling of “Colonel Bogey’s March”…Saito mentions that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”; the first appearance of this proverb is from 1659 (and not The Shining)...Saito asks what Nicholson knows about “bushido,” which is the Japanese “way of the warrior”…the commandos hear some of a Tokyo Rose broadcast; Tokyo Rose was a catch-all name given to the all-female Japanese English-language propaganda broadcasts used to demoralize U.S. troops in occupied areas15...Charles Laughton was strongly considered for the role of Col. Nicholson, which is insane…the movie was filmed in Ceylon, which is now called Sri Lanka16...the movie is an adaptation of a French novel by Pierre Boulle; Boulle also wrote “Planet of the Apes”…the commandos work for Lord Louis Mountbatten, the “Uncle Dickie” of Prince Philip; he was the last Viceroy of India17.
And remember: This is just a game, this trivia. Crazy with knowledge! For what? How to quiz like a gentleman. How to quiz by the rules. When the only important thing is how to live like a human being!
You’re reading a trivia blog, so perhaps you’ve suffered your own slings and arrows for being “technically correct.”
His key assertion: “One day, the war will be over, and I hope that the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers—British soldiers […] even in captivity.” He also explicitly orders his soldiers to not try to escape, since his troops had been ordered to surrender. Though you always feel like Nicholson is following his moral compass, these decisions culminate in…well, you’ll see.
He’s not really a commander. It’s a long story.
Hey, we’ve talked about Burma on this blog before!
Holden is first on the marquee here but it’s Guinness who snags the Oscar nod. Between The Country Girl and Bridge, Holden had two performances we touched on in our 1955 Wrap Up: Picnic and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.
Alec Guinness (considered David Lean’s “good luck charm”) portrayed the villainous Fagin in Oliver Twist. His heavy makeup and prosthetic nose led to calls of antisemitism and the version released in the U.S. had twelve minutes cut from it. Lean argued that he was going for the appearance of Fagin from George Cruikshank, Dickens’ illustrator.
In fact, producer Sam Spiegel chose Lean to direct Bridge as a last resort after Fred Zinnemann, Orson Welles, William Wyler, John Ford, and Howard Hawks all passed.
Yeah, because his name is tricky and because of bias in cinema trivia.
To get niacin, Native Americans nixtamalized corn, which made the corn’s niacin available to the body. When we started eating corn that wasn’t nixtamalized, pellagra became more common.
Do the other B vitamin deficiencies have names? Sure, but they’re just called, like, “folate deficiency,” if you’re lacking in folate (B9) or whatever.
ChatGPT also suggested “jungle fever” as a historical name for malaria (“due to its prevalence in jungle environments”), but that’s something else now.
There’s a bunch of types of that parasite (falciparum, vivax, ovale, etc.), which leads to there being different kinds of malarias. One characteristic that distinguishes the varietals (that's probably not the word they use for it) of malaria is the periodicity of the fever, leading to the strains (also probably not right) getting historical names “tertian fever,” “quartan fever,” and “quotidian fever.”
Ball is a new addition to the trivia canon (first mentioned on Jeopardy in 2023), as the trivia community works to combat the historical erasure of the scientific contributions of minorities.
Here’s the thirteen neglected tropical diseases, broken into three broad categories.
Helminths (parasitic worms)
Ascariasis (roundworm)
Trichuriasis (whipworm)
Hookworm
Lymphatic filariasis (microscopic worms transmitted by parasitized mosquitoes; a symptom is elephantiasis)
Schistosomiasis (caused by flukes, a type of flatworm, that are released into water by parasitized snails)
Onchocerciasis (microscopic worms transmitted by parasitized black flies; the disease is also called river blindness)
Dracunculiasis (guinea worm)
Trypanosomes (unicellular parasites)
Trypanosomiasis (also called sleeping sickness, transmitted by parasitized tsetse flies)
Chagas disease (called American trypanosomiasis, transmitted by parasitized kissing bugs)
Leishmaniasis (transmitted by parasitized sandflies)
Bacteria
Buruli ulcer
Leprosy
Trachoma (also called granular conjunctivitis, it’s the most common infectious cause of blindness)
One woman who tried to return to the U.S. after the war, Iva Toguri D'Aquino, was arrested and convicted of treason as the Tokyo Rose; she was eventually pardoned by Gerald Ford.
It gained independence from the U.K. in 1948 but didn’t change its name until 1972.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s fine—British royalty stuff is boring. Watching “The Crown” isn’t the worst way to learn it, though. Notably, Lord Mountbatten had a fling with actress Shirley MacLaine and his wife had an affair with Nehru. Oh, and he was assassinated by the IRA. That stuff is kind of interesting.