Word: colonel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pierre Boulle's screenplay, the bridge on the River Kwai is built by the Japanese during World War II, using British prisoners as a labor force. The British colonel who commands the prisoners eventually falls in love with the bridge. He builds it better than the Japanese could have done without him, as a symbol of what can be accomplished by British "soldiers, not slaves." So infatuated is he with his wooden love-child that he nearly frustrates an attempt by Allied commandoes to blow...
...this big, wide-ranging movie, scope is stressed at the expense of depth, and there is no time to develop any very complex characters. The most interesting of the lot is the fanatic British colonel, all of whose actions stem from one trait: conscientiousness carried to the point of mania. Alec Guinness plays him with deft stiffness. His torture scenes are appropriately ghastly, and he resists the temptation to clown. William Holden gives his usual performance as a soldier who escapes from the prison camp and returns to blow up the bridge. Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne are his fellow...
...comment on various attitudes toward war or toward fine points of law and principle. But since the spokesman for one attitude is unspeakably stupid if not downright insane, the "issue" which the film discusses is no issue at all. We are expected to feel a grudging admiration for this Colonel Nicholson as he suffers, and makes his men suffer, for his little point of principle. However, anybody who hates the waste of pain and misery is likely to find his admiration somewhat more grudging than the author expects...
...without bias to "sound military ideas and to the elevation of the public service." The weekly, which expanded its name to the Army, Navy, Air Force Journal after the Air Force became a separate arm, was willed to Washington's famed Gridiron Club of newsmen in 1949 by Colonel John O'Laughlin, its longtime publisher (and onetime Assistant Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt). The club turns its profits over to a fund for indigent newsmen...
...Married. Colonel John Paul Stapp, 47, the U.S. Air Force's rocket-sledding space surgeon, now head of the Air Force's "Man in Space" committee; and Lillian Lanese, 33, El Paso ballet teacher; both for the first time; in El Paso...