BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE 49
Reel History Versus Real History
Though based on a real incident as noted earlier, Die Brücke, both the film and the
novel it closely follows, concentrates the action to one bridge, adds two more Volkss-
turm boys, makes them all classmates and friends, provides backstories to par-
ticularize them, and greatly embellishes and complicates the action. All of these
fictional ele ments were added on to the original and rather banal incident in order
to attain maximum irony and pathos and to underscore the senseless futility of
the boys’ deaths in a war that was long lost and almost over. De cades since its
original release, the ersatz tanks and ramping up of melodrama may strike more
sophisticated audiences as somewhat jejune, but Die Brücke still works because its
anti- war message remains imminently valid. A made- for- German- TV remake of Die
Brücke, directed by Wolfgang Panzer, appeared in 2008 but is widely regarded as
inferior to the original version.
Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957)
Synopsis
The Bridge on the River Kwai is a British- American war epic directed by David Lean
and starring William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Alec Guinness and featuring
Sessue Hayakawa. Based on the novel Le pont de la Rivière Kwai (1952) by Pierre
Boulle (also the author of Planet of the Apes), the film is fictional but uses the con-
struction of the Burma Railway in 1942–1943 for its historical setting.
Background
A Frenchman working on British rubber plantations in Malaya, Pierre Boulle (1912–
1994) enlisted in the French army when World War II broke out in 1939. In 1941,
a year after the fall of France, Boulle served as a secret agent with the re sis tance
movement in China, Burma, and French Indochina (Vietnam). In 1943, he was
captured by Vichy loyalists on the Mekong River and spent the rest of the war in
forced labor as a prisoner of war (POW) in Hanoi. In 1949 Boulle returned to France
and wrote Le pont de la Rivière Kwaï (1952; English- language edition: The Bridge
over the River Kwai, 1954). A fictional story placed in a historical setting, Kwai was
inspired by the building of a bridge, but actually there were two parallel bridges:
a bypass bridge made of wood (designated Q-654) and another bridge made of steel
and concrete (designated 277)— and they were situated on the less poetically named
Mae Klong River, near the city of Katchanburi, Thailand, in the province of the
same name. These bridges were erected during the construction of the Burma- Siam
Railway (aka “Death Railway”), a 415-km (258- mile) rail link between Bangkok,
Thailand, and Rangoon, Burma, used by the Empire of Japan to move troops and
supplies. More than 180,000 Southeast Asian civilians (“romusha”) and 60,000
Allied POWs were conscripted by the Japa nese to work on the railway and its
bridges. Of that number over 100,000 Asian workers and 12,621 Allied POWs died
during its construction (15 September 1942—17 October 1943). After Boulle’s novel
became an international bestseller, Carl Foreman (High Noon), a blacklisted