The trek to this year's Best Picture honor is well under way; exactly half a decade ago, it took place to the sound of dusty boots keeping time to The Colonel Bogey March.
Back in 1957, David Lean's The Bridge On The River Kwai took the world the way William Holden and company, in the film's memorable finale, took the bridge. Kwai, which marked Lean's transition from tasteful British petit-maitre to unabashed international showman, was based on a swift, readable novel by French writer Pierre Boulle.
Comparisons between book and film are most revealing:
Boulle, for all of his love of adventure, was at heart a satirist. Kwai, published five years before the release of the film, is clearly a Frenchman cocking a snook at the English and the Japanese, exaggerating each culture's insularity, civility, dedication to order, and inflated sense of purpose. The fun, for Boulle, is as much in pitting these two well-matched opponents against one another, simply to better expose their folly, than it is in describing the building of the bridge and the secret plan to take it down.
It's a formula - the cheeky collision of closely linked worlds - that dictates Boulle's other work of note, Monkey Planet, the playful twist on evolution that inspired another great cinematic success, Planet of the Apes.
Lean, a no-nonsense Brit and a very commercial minded artist, excised any trace of the satirical, of course, finding something genuinely honorable - if lunatic - in the English Colonel Nicholson, and reducing the Japanese commander, despite a few genuine moments, to the lesser role.
He and his scenarists - which included the blacklisted Michael Wilson, whose credit wasn't restored 'til decades later - added some cinematic show pieces (the aforementioned march, Nicholson's long stay in the hot box, the nerve-taxing climax) and that ultimate concession to commercialism, the all-American hero, in the form of escapee-returnee Holden.
The film, then, is Boulle-Lean, a rather even split. But it's more than clear that the reason it won the Best Picture Oscar, and continues to impress generations, is Lean. The man's innate understanding of the cinematic form, his ability to please a crowd, and his respect for characters of color, dichotomy and intelligence not only make Kwai a classic, but place Lean high among such practitioners of the epic past and present as DeMille, Spielberg, and Peter Jackson.
Other war films have since gone on to win the coveted statuette - Patton and <i>The Deer Hunter</i>, for instance - but those played as part parody and/or political commentary. Lean's is the one war flick that is pure entertainment.
For that, the man gets an award all to himself.
