The Bridge on the River Kwai

Rating:
Summary: Compelling tale and framework for a classic movie
Review: Boulle's Bridge Over the River Kwai is a passion play and insight into the moralities of senior British officers and a Japanese commandant using a remote Japanese P.O.W. camp in Siam during WWII as a backdrop.

Camp commandant, Colonel Saito, a drunken, loathsome miscreant of unfulfilled expectations is fond of using starvation and torture to keep prisoners in line. He has been ordered to build a bridge spanning the Kwai river which will link up a Burma-Siam railway in 6 months time. Colonel Nicholson, the ranking British P.O.W. is a "by the book" throw back to British colonial times. He is highly motivated to bolster the morality of his men by building a bridge which will be a testimony to British ingenuity. Under horrendous conditions, Nicholson's men put their backs into their work much to the dismay of the more moderate Major Clipton, the camp medical officer.

The prisoners and Japanese are both unaware of a commando mission lead by British Force 316 which will attempt to destroy the bridge once it is completed along with the train it will be supporting. Led by Major Shears we see the mental interplay between the commando team bent on destroying the bridge versus the British officers and Saito who are proud of it construction.

Although the book differs slightly from the superb movie, Boulle in concise, succinct writing style, somewhat reminiscent of Hemingway pens a very good psychological study of men in times of war.

Rating:
Summary: Less was...less
Review: Less is more--usually. So I admit with some shame that this is one of the rare occasions where I actually enjoyed a film more than the book that was its inspiration.

Ironically, the film's screenplay, although credited to the book's author, Pierre Boulle, was written by two uncredited blacklisted writers, Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. This was not corrected until decades later, so when the screenplay won an Oscar, Boulle (who did not speak, let alone write, English) accepted the award.

The film took liberties with the plot. It was released in 1957, which meant that not only could writers still be tarred by a McCarthy-era brush, but it was also a time which demanded a big-name American star in a lead role as a box-office draw. So a British commando character became an American played by William Holden. The great actor Alex Guinness played the role of the gung-ho British colonel with his usual distinction. In the film the individuals, even the volatile and incompetent Japanese colonel, all come across as better than they might have been.

But the same people in Pierre Boulle's original account were not so quite so stylishly spirited. Even while Boulle praises a character on the one hand, he cuts him down to size with the other. Boulle's book reads "true," yes, and touches on interesting moral dilemmas. As a former prisoner of war in South-East Asia himself, Boulle has only the lowest of opinions for his brutal captors, no doubt justified, but there is no tempering of his characters. And even while he recognizes admirable British qualities, he has equal quantities of disdain for aspects of their ethos. It is too bad he has no French characters in the book to see if he would be as merciless with his own countrymen.

Despite his clear bias, Boulle's writing has a grand sense of socratic irony to it. At times, even through the filter of our contemporary mores, we may still marvel at his brilliant and scathing depiction of human nature.

Unfortunately, the story's structure is plodding and ponderous. Whether or not this is due to the English translation, it can be a somewhat convoluted "read." And while Boulle is clever, his characters lean to the archetypal and they are somewhat two-dimensional.

Yet, sadly, his story is probably more like life really is than the rather sugarcoated but splendid film that was made of it.

Rating:
Summary: size is no substitute for substantial ideas
Review: We live in an age when "art" has become horrifically bloated. Every major movie is three hours long, even the insipid Summer blockbusters. Authors from Don DeLillo to Tom Clancy crank out enormous doorstop-like novels of 700 to 1,000 pages. The artist Cristo doesn't just paint pictures, he wraps entire islands in pink cellophane. It is as if artists had lost confidence in their capacity to say anything meaningful and so they opt instead to try to bury us in pure volume. Heck, Bill Clinton's State of the Union message this year--a message which until modern times President's were content to simply write out and send up to the Hill--resembled a Fidel Castro harangue, lasting over an hour and a half. Apparently, if you're not sure about the quality, make up for it with quantity.

The results have been predictably uneven--on the one hand, the perfectly adequate 1934 comedy Death Takes a Holiday, which ran under 80 minutes, was recently turned into the interminable vanity project, Meet Joe Black. But on the other hand, Tom Wolfe's terrific A Man in Full (see Orrin's review) actually had one of the best set pieces he's ever written, Ambush at Fort Bragg (see Orrin's review), excised from the final novel. It seem that, just as we would expect, the sheer size of these projects bears no relation to the quality of the finished product. It is still the case that great writers and directors can produce outstanding longer works, but mediocre artists can not salvage their's, no matter how they inflate them.

All of which brings us to Bridge on the River Kwai. I'm sure that everyone is familiar with the story from David Lean's 1957 masterpiece, starring Alec Guiness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins and Sessue Hayakawa. Lean was the undisputed master of the movie epic--with films like River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, Passage to India and Lawrence of Arabia to his credit--and his film version of Boulle's novel is a mammoth, 2 1/2 hour, panorama. It is unquestionably one of the greatest movies ever made.

Boulle's original, while every bit as great, is a spare, economical novel, which compacts vexing moral questions and ethical confrontations into a small but powerful package. It stands as sort of a demonstration that artists who actually have something to say need not resort to gigantism. The only major element that differs from the movie is that Lean needed an American actor for promotional purposes, so the whole scenario with William Holden escaping the camp and then returning with the demolition crew was added. All of the moral quandaries that make the story so memorable and timeless remain, despite the brevity of the book.

In fact, some of the themes emerge more forcefully. Pierre Boulle was himself captured, imprisoned, set to forced labor and then escaped from such a camp in Malaysia and one of the strongest undercurrents in the book is the author's obvious contempt for the Japanese. This is in many ways one of the most racist (I mean that in a non pejorative sense, if such a thing is possible any longer) stories ever told. The underlying assumption is that the two colonial powers find these places in a state of primitive savagery. The Japanese merely seek to exploit them for their own purposes and do so in an accordingly slipshod way. The British, meanwhile, attempt to bring the highest standards of civilization to bear and try to reengineer the wilderness so that it will stand as an eternal monument to British values. Boulle uses the construction of the bridge to demonstrate that the Japanese are brutal incompetents and that the British, while they are the world's master builders (both of engineering marvels and of civilizations), are so warped by their own rigid codes of duty and honor that they are blinded to ultimate issues of the propriety of their actions.

I must have read this book or seen the movie dozens of times since I was a kid. One of the really remarkable things about the story is how different facets stand out each time, or is it just that at different ages or in different social circumstances certain themes seem more important than at others. When you're a callow youth, the whole thing is just a bang up military adventure. In the late 60's and early 70's the point of the story seemed to many to be simply anti-war--"Madness! Madness!" as Clipton says. Today, I read it and see a Frenchman dissing the Japanese and the British. That Boulle achieves this kaleidoscopic effect with such brevity is a remarkable accomplishment and should serve as a reminder to all that increased size is no substitute for substantial ideas.

GRADE: A+