#The Bridge Over the River Kwai

[classichollywoodarchive]

WILLIAM HOLDEN AND NGAMTA SUPHAPHONGS IN THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

images from imdb

[paleobeastentertainment]

Double bill for the day: The Great Escape (1963) and The Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957), two great films set during the second world war focusing on the men captured and held as prisoners of war.

[20th-century-personalities]

Jack Jennings was drafted into the British Army and sent to Singapore to fight the Japanese. Weeks later, Britain surrendered the island and Mr. Jennings was taken prisoner / Jennings Family Photograph

A private in the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three-and-half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).

As a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,”

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

What’s the best piece of media you’ve experienced in the last 2 months?

I rewatched Bridge Over the River Kwai, so I guess that's the winner.

[guhhhhhhhhhhh]

Resisting the urge to watch all of David Lean's hit films. The only thing holding me back is time and Sleepy. And the fact that I no longer have the stamina that 18 year old Me did to stay up until 4 am watching 3+ hour long movies

[yike-a-hooty]

Recently found out that my long-held belief that there is a well-known classic war movie called “Pontoon” is a lie, and that I was conflating “Platoon” with “Bridge over the River Kwai” and the card game Pontoon. Devastating news.

[goodpix2021]

And, Then I Went To...

T hailand. That’s where I spent my holidays when I lived in Hong Kong. Getting there took a longish flying time of six hours. But, it was worth it. I flew into Bangkok, that is just another Southeast Asian city, but it has a different vibe than anywhere else. It’s hot, humid, steamy and sensual. In fact, most of Southeast Asia is like that. Sometimes I’d stay in Bangkok, but often I traveled…

[indiekidsupremacist]

Ao3 down. what am I supposed to do? get a hobby??

[thailandobsession]

[notaplaceofhonour]

I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes when it first came out, but hadn’t seen the other two movies in the trilogy until just this week (prompting a return to Rise), and this time around the Jewishness of the narrative & references to Moses in the character of Caesar really struck me—especially in War for the Planet of the Apes, where Caesar leads his people as they wander through the wilderness to a better land, attacks a taskmaster for whipping one of his people when he sees them enslaved, and climbs to a high place at the end of the film to look out over the promised land as his people enter, unable to go with them.

I was unsurprised but delighted to find the parallels to Moses were 100% conscious, The Ten Commandments being one of several films they watched for inspiration while writing the screenplay. Matt Reeves even directly talked about War being about Caesar’s journey as he becomes a “biblical” foundational figure, “like Moses”.

Additionally, despite the fact that the camp in War was most directly based on the WWII POW camps in The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and not necessarily Nazi concentration camps, it’s difficult to deny there are still some parallels to Jewish experience, especially given the Alpha-Omega Colonel’s eugenic bent and the sentiments of racial (spec-ial?) superiority that infuses his regime’s cruelty, as well as the kapo-like role of the “donkeys”.

And of course, watching Rise again, the parallels there became evident as well: a baby hidden & sent away to evade an order to kill him, raised by his mother’s captor, who comes into his own as a leader after being exiled for spilling blood, leading his people in an exodus, even crossing a body of water while being pursued by their captors as they escape to freedom in the wilderness.

I wouldn’t want to overextend the Jewish elements of the narrative to suggest Caesar is meant to be Moses or that the movies are equating the apes with Jews (much less, heaven forbid, the other way around); there are plenty of aspects of the stories that would break any attempt to make them a 1-for-1 allegory for any person, group, or conflict. But I know at least a few people on the creative team (including Amanda Silver & Rick Jaffa, who co-wrote Rise & Dawn, & have been producers on every movie in the reboot series) are Jewish or have Jewish family members, and it’s exciting to be able to clock that shining through. It really shows in the Jewish elements of the story not just being there, but having a surprising complexity I wouldn’t expect from most movies, even ones directly about Jews—much less the action blockbuster sequels to a reboot of a sci-fi series from the 60’s/70’s about ape people.

[theniftycat]

My waking up thoughts were about cracking why David Lean isn't a film bro favourite or doesn't have Hitchcock-like glamourous status.

The most famous films of his, Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge over River Kwai, are war epics that feature no female characters. These films are great, they make you think, they are easy to love, they are grandiose and beautiful.

When you go further though, you get to Doctor Zhivago, a film about a man who was ready to live a happy life, but got stuck in the wheels of revolution and was destroyed by it. It's not an easy story to summarise or even understand. I've read the book and it was hard for me to pinpoint its meaning, the film helped with that, but it's a lot of work. It's marketed as a love story, but it's not one. It's not a hero's journey either, the protagonist is too passive, he's almost like a child. And that's the point. It's a story of innocence destroyed by the world. Not a very marketable thing.

Then, all of his later films are centered on women. Which is a film bro no-no and as for people who like stories about women, they were lost back at Lawrence of Arabia. And his films about women aren't glamourous romances either.

Summertime is about an older woman going to Venice and finding a short and unserious love affair there. Where was the Hays code looking.

Ryan's Daughter is a tragic story of a village girl who fell in love with her teacher and got to live that unhealthy fantasy to the fullest.

A Passage to India is about a frustrated English woman coming to India full of expectations of something romantic happening to her, never getting what she wanted and then accusing an Indian man of assaulting her just because she was bored.

Yeah, those aren't very mainstream sounding films, except for Summertime that stars Katharine Hepburn.

Too unconventional to be liked, I guess.

[queenlucythevaliant]

Story ask game for Lawrence of Arabia, if you please, with a 4, 14, and 21 (for that, assume the "author" is David Lean).

Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!

4: assign the story a hyper-specific genre name

Epic historical wartime adventure biopic tragedy. With camels.

14: how likely do you think the story is to break the reader's heart?

I think it's very much a matter of personal buy-in. If you're the sort of person willing to invest emotionally in four-hour epics from the 60s, then it 100% will break your heart. This movie is devastating. I can quote chapter and verse of all the lines and scenes and moments that wreck me, if you want, but really what it comes down to is Lawrence in the empty Arab Council saying "And that would have been something." Ahhhhhhh. It's a story about reaching and failing to grasp, and those are always the most effective tragedies imo.

21: based on this story, would you be interested enough in the author to read their other work?

I would love to watch every David Lean movie over the course of my life. I've already made a pretty big dent in it! Doctor Zhivago is my next favorite after Lawrence, being a better literary adaptation than 99.9% of amazing novels get. Zhivago is such a literary favorite of mine, and it should be high praise that I love Lean's movie almost as much as I love Pasternak's bittersweet beautiful heartbreak of a novel. Ask me about the book sometime, if you're interested.

I also recently watched Brief Encounter for the first time, which I just loved to pieces. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. The best tragedy of timing that I've experienced in a long time. Will definitely be revisiting in the future.

I will admit, I giggled my way through Bridge Over the River Kwai. It was an excellent movie, but I think the whole "we are BRITISH we are going to build THE GREATEST BRIDGE EVER" thing, which is supposed to be a sign of a semi-broken mind, was just too funny for me to move past in favor of the serious tragedy. Having already seen Tom Hank's The Volunteers, which parodies Bridge Over the River Kwai, didn't really help either.

I will probably give A Passage to India a try next. That's also an adaptation of a novel I thoroughly enjoyed, albeit not in the way I love Zhivago. I'm sure I'll get to his Dickens stuff eventually too, although those will be a harder sell for me. It's a shame he never directed A Tale of Two Cities. I know he's got a bunch of other, lesser known movies too, and I will definitely get to those eventually as well.

So, in short, a resounding yes to the question. I'm not, like, a film person in the way that many people are, but I think I can say with some confidence that Lean is my favorite auteur-director.

[jungle-angel]

Adopting a pet with Bob headcannons (Bob Floyd x Reader)

Notes: Rest in peace Jimmy Buffett, your music was a huge part of my life and was always a little piece of the Florida sunshine whenever it was freezing cold

You and Bob have alot of places where you love to split your time, but you were a little surprised when you found out his family had a little beach cottage down in Islamorada, Florida

The house had actually been where his mom grew up going as a kid (Irene grew up in Tallahassee but her father was mostly stationed in Pensacola) and it's where she and Joe spent their honeymoon

So when you and Bob ended up taking on the place as your own, you two spent quite a significant amount of time there, especially with the rest of the squad (and especially when Mickey's family descended en masse when the Hurricanes would play)

You were down at the cottage one day, fixing it up after a hurricane had blown over. Thankfully, the damage wasn't too horrible, but it still needed some good repairing

You were out in the garden one day replanting some really pretty, and rather fuzzy, red and yellow flowers when a blue and yellow macaw landed next to you and started whistling

You and Bob were a little bit weirded out but the bird didn't mean any harm. You even gave him some mealworms from the garden and oh did he eat them up

And every day he'd come back begging for more mealworms

You'd even give him the leftover fruits that were a bit too ripe in the fridge and he'd chow down right at the kitchen window

But you and Bob also found he was the most gentle little bird you had ever met

You took him down to the animal shelter one day to see if he happened to have a chip and the vet did indeed find one. The animal control officer ran the numbers and found out he had belonged to a bartender who couldn't keep him anymore

But you and Bob felt terrible and didn't want your new feathered friend to end up in the shelter

So you worked it out with the officer and the macaw's original owner and in no time at all, he was yours

It was yours and Bob's idea to name him Jimmy since he reminded you of the parrot on the covers to his dad's Jimmy Buffett albums

Any time you played "Knee Deep", "Margaritaville" or "Cheeseburger in Paradise", Jimmy would start dancing and flapping his wings on his little perch and you thought it was the funniest thing in the world

Bob even taught him how to whistle "Bridge on the River Kwai", you sent the video to the Daggers, his family and even put it up on Tik Tok which got a ton of laughs

Jimmy is also incredibly protective of your kids. One time Auggie encountered a group of kids who weren't so nice and Jimmy ended up scaring the shit outta the kid, much like Smokey the family rooster

That damn bird once flew off with one of Rooster's Hawaiian shirts. It wasn't the best one in the closet and Jimmy had shown his distaste by pulling it off the clothesline and flying up into the jacaranda tree in the garden

But you and Bob were happy beyond words to have adopted Jimmy into the family

Because you both know that you'll have many laughs in the years to come

[loving-n0t-heyting]

when i 1st watched the bridge on the river kwai as a child, i instinctively interpreted the conflict of the first arc in the camp (over the use of officers for manual labour) as basically a struggle between two potent but singular personalities, saito as the unstoppable force and nicholson as the immovable object, with maj clipton as the "voice of reason" trying and failing to mediate between them. this is obviously a natural reading, which the text deliberately invites

but this sort of requires ignoring the actions of the enlisted men, which in fairness are more stated than depicted. factoring them in, its less a clash of personalities than a conflict between a highly organised association of workers on the one hand (including but not at all limited to an extremely charismatic leader commanding intense loyalty) and their hostile manager on the other, whom they successfully slowdown strike. its striking from this pov that at two crucial points its clipton, not nicholson, who apparently prevents saito from simply liquidating-by-death the officers or the enlisted troops en masse by appealing, not so much to anyones overpowering moral resolve, but to the simple fact that the men responsible for actually building the bridge would then not be available (either thru outrage or thru death). meaning he is less failing to mediate between two intransigent commanding officers than successfully mediating between a dedicated base of labourers plus their charismatic figurehead and a manager over whom they collectively enjoy considerable leverage

[docholligay]

The Bavarian band is now playing 'Bridge over the river kwai' please don't ask me why