As part of my research for the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, I’ve been devouring a slew of classic flicks. Last night’s homework assignment was David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I hadn’t seen in over a decade. To say it stands the test of time is an understatement—a true epic in every sense of the word, with killer lead performances by Alec Guinness and William Holden. And, of course, there’s the famous ending, in which (SPOILER ALERT!) the bridge is blown to smithereens and an entire train’s worth of Japanese dignitaries plunge to their doom.
If you read the production backstory, the ending is all the more remarkable. Lean was a stickler for historical accuracy, so he wished to build a bridge from scratch that was virtually identical to the one that British POWs had constructed in the jungles of Thailand. Early on, he caught a break:
One day, while Lean and Ashton were scouting locations, a man came to them with a faded scrap of rice paper, which had been smuggled out of Burma during the war. One the paper was a sketch of a bridge on the Death Railway, to be passed on to commandos, to help them seek out and blow up the bridge. (The real bridge was never destroyed.)
Lean had the bridge built about 60 miles east of Colombo, using 45 elephants and an unrecorded number of native laborers. Despite requiring eight months of constant work, the bridge only cost a bit over $52,000 ($379,000 in today’s dollars). That makes me think that Lean was extraordinarily stingy with the Sri Lankans. Perhaps the workers weren’t exactly slave laborers, like the Brits in the movie, but how much better was their lot in life? I hope the irony wasn’t lost on Lean.
Still, great, great movie. Tough to imagine such gargantuan effort going into a flick in the CGI era. Why build a bridge when you can code one instead?
Dave Wasser // Mar 6, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Alec Guinness was such a great actor. His best role may have been as Adolf Hitler in a 1973 film called
“Hitler: The Last Ten Days.”
You can watch a clip of it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLLq59EH5mo
Brendan I. Koerner // Mar 6, 2009 at 1:01 pm
And yet whenever I see Guinness in anything, all I can think of is him saying: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
I’m sure Sir Alec would spin in his grave if he knew that. Rumor is that he HATED “Star Wars”.
Zoey Byrd // Mar 8, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Do you happen to know where Herman Perry is buried here in DC?
Dave Wasser // Mar 10, 2009 at 1:27 am
I don’t think he hated Star Wars. I think he said that all the hysteria over the film made him uncomfortable. And he didn’t want to be type cast in that role. But I seem to recall reading an interview in which he praised the film. (It was many years ago, so my memory is hazy.)
Have you ever seen “Hitler: The Last Ten Days?” What did you think of it?
Lingvo de Paco // Mar 13, 2009 at 11:49 am
[…] the ballgame, I finally got around to watching Lawrence of Arabia last night, as part of my ongoing David Lean tour. An utter classic, of course, but one with significant flaws—chief among them the fact that […]
The Bulldog and the Birthmark // Mar 26, 2009 at 10:33 am
[…] recent movie diet has mostly consisted of classy fare—I doubt Bridge on the River Kwai played many double bills with the likes of Switchblade Sisters. But Microkhan is by no means a film […]