Word: kwai
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Farewell to Arms, starring Rock Hudson as the World War 1 American ambulance driver working with the Italian army, Jennifer Jones as Catherine, the English nurse, and Vittorio DeSica as an Italian army officer. ¶ Director David Lean's eye-filling The Bridge on the River Kwai, the story of a British officer (beautifully played by versatile Alec Guinness, ably supported by William Holden and Jack Hawkins) who builds a bridge for his Japanese captors, to restore his fellow prisoners' self-respect, then helps destroy it. ¶ Warner's Sayonara, an adaptation of James Michener...
...created by French Novelist Boulle, the most interesting sight is a special stream of Gallic irony. His heroes drown in it before the reader's eyes, but even as they go down it is obvious that they all know how to swim. In The Bridge Over the River Kwai it was a British colonel whose fight for honor gave aid and comfort to the Japanese. In Not the Glory, it was a German spy whose best efforts aided the British. In his new novel, laid in a sleepy Provencal town among ordinary people...
...BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, by Pierre Boulle (224 pp.; Vanguard; $3), is a superb, ironical study of a minor British Don Quixote who insists on fighting for code and country-even though it is yesterday's code of yesterday's officers and gentlemen. When Colonel Nicholson is captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, he tries to hand over his pistol with an air of "quiet dignity," having earnestly practiced the gesture. But he is allowed no dignity at all: the Japanese order him to build a railroad bridge. Huffing and puffing about the Hague...