Word: kwai
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...night last week 60 million Americans, according to the Arbitron Ratings, tuned in ABC to watch a nine-year-old movie. True, it was a movie of presold quality-The Bridge on the River Kwai-but there was no mistaking the meaning of it all: when it comes to television entertainment, movies are better than everything...
...BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (ABC, 8-11 p.m.). Alec Guinness, William Hoiden and Jack Hawkins in the splendid 1957 Academy Award winner about the heroes, reluctant and otherwise, in a World War II Japanese prison camp...
...knock a dozen American P-38s or Wildcats from the skies. Plastic-model Zero fighters and picture books are bestsellers from Hokkaido to Kyushu, while adults are now reading a book called Glorious Records, which praises the wartime Burma-Siam railway project that built the bridge over the River Kwai. A new series of junior high school history textbooks, approved by the Ministry of Education, implies that the blame for World War II lay not so much with Japanese aggression but with economic pressure exerted against Japan by "the ABCD Ring" (America, Britain, China and the Dutch). General Hideki Tojo...
That's about the only surprise in the new novel by Pierre Boulle (Bridge Over the River Kwai). A shallow attempt at fictionalizing the space age, it traces a handful of Axis rocket engineers from Peenemünde, where they "romantically" built Hitler's V-2s, into the diaspora of the postwar world, where they end up glumly competing with one another in the U.S.-Soviet space race. There is Stern, a faint carbon copy of Wernher von Braun who talks like a cross between Tom Swift and Astroboy. There is Nadia, his luscious White Russian assistant...
Orientally polite, India, Pakistan and Ceylon studied their fingernails, and said no thanks. Thailand, home of the River Kwai, and Malaysia, which remembers the ignominious defeat of Britain's bastion at Singapore, explained they needed engineers, not volunteers. Indonesia snarled at Ikeda's men as "cat's-paws of American imperialism," and in the Philippines the Japanese were actually pelted with stones. His good works nipped in the bud, Ikeda last week resignedly admitted he was "postponing indefinitely" any further discussion of a Japanese peace corps...