Word: kwai
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True, Ryan is a hopeless martinet-like Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai. He even establishes a gentlemanly rapport with the camp's commandant, who at heart is as decent as Erich von Stroheim in Grand Illusion. His troubles are with his own men-tough guys like William Holden in Stalag 17, wise guys like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, irrepressible Englishmen like Dirk Bogarde in The Password Is Courage. But Ryan is in this-man's-army, and in the end he proves it by freeing singlehanded all 964 prisoners after joining...
...Victors. Dismayed by Hollywood's handling of The Bridge on the River Kwai, which he wrote, and The Guns of Navarone, which he wrote and produced, Carl Foreman wrote, produced, and this time directed an epic he calls a "personal statement" about the futility of war. Both victor and vanquished are losers, Foreman says. Then he says it again. His film delivers not one statement but a whole barrage of them, all strung together in newsreel clips and hit-or-miss dramatic vignettes that pound, pound, pound...
...savored and detailed. $1,725,000 in salary. Then 10% of most of the gross. This is not just the most money that anyone has ever been paid in the history of show business, more than doubling the $3,000,000 that William Holden siphoned out of the River Kwai. It is the most money that any employee has ever been paid for anything...
...with regular types like Robert Taylor and Betty Grable, but with a combination considered far-out indeed-Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Queen became the first Spiegel film to get an Oscar (Bogart's), and others trod hard on its golden heels: Waterfront won eight, River Kwai brought the total to 16. Lawrence made...
...explore the variations on the theme of a man being basically in conflict with his own destiny, asserting his instinct for constructiveness, conflicting with the destructive forces around him." But his search for motion-picture reality is earnest: he built miles of roads in Ceylon while making River Kwai, hired 16 elephants to haul the 30,000 cu. ft. of timber used to build the bridge. "One Hollywood joker," says Spiegel, "said that 'If you like Palm Springs, you'll love Lawrence,' but the point is that Lawrence was great largely because it was obviously not made...