Word: kwai
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After conscientiously mulling over 1957's output of movies, the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures-the weightiest U.S. cinematic arbiters-announced their "best" choices, found themselves agreeing more than usual. Both groups marked The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sam Spiegel; Columbia) as the year's finest U.S.-produced film, Bridge's Alec Guinness and David Lean as best actor and director. Other decisions were split. Best actress: Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Critics), Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (Board). Best foreign movie: Gervaise...
People who have recourse to fingernail-biting in moments of stress are advised to grow them long in preparation for The Bridge on the River Kwai...
...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...
...winner of a whole flock of minor awards and a leading Oscar candidate, The Bridge on the River Kwai has acquired an undeserved reputation for "significance." The only way it could "mean" anything very important would be as a 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...
When you come right down to it, The Bridge on the River Kwai is only a war melodrama. Its only valid "meaning" is as a glorification of human courage. Its primary appeal is not to the understanding or the esthetic sense, but to whatever in us is receptive to sheer physical action. But as such, it is a very fine movie, a highly effective blend of tension and irony...