The Bridge on the River Kwai

The film is rather misshapen, particularly in the sections featuring William Holden, and the action that detonates the explosive finish isn't quite clear. However, Alec Guinness is compelling as the English Colonel Nicholson.

This gripping tale will keep you tied to your seat thanks to the brilliant effectiveness with which Director David Lean has tied together script, casting and technical demands.

The madness of war has never been shown more graphically than in this Pierre Boulle screenplay from his own novel, set and filmed on location in Ceylon.

This is a picture of so many excellencies it is difficult to enumerate them, but audiences will discover the various beauties and virtues for themselves during the two hours and 40 minutes which the story runs.

Not only is the portrayal of Guinness superb. The work of Hayakawa, Holden and Hawkins is also splendid and contributes strikingly to the impact of what is essentially a director's triumph. This is one of the great pictures of movie history.

For most of the footage, the film has an engrossing validity. Director David Lean proves once again that he's a master of his art, and the photography takes the viewer into the heart of a teeming island in the jungle.

There are very few examples each year of cinematic enterprises that are carried out with such intelligence and above all with such care. But the quality of this film must ultimately be put in its artistic place, and that place is not the highest.

One of the great, action-packed epics of the late 50s, The Bridge on the River Kwai is an exceptional case study about the hysteria of war and the pride that comes before the fall.

One of the greatest and most satisfying endings in all film history...

For all of its grim setting and tragic conclusion, The Bridge on the River Kwai becomes a slyly humorous study in the limitations as well as the stoical splendors of the British “military mind."