Bridge On The River Kwai – Collector’s Edition (1957/Sony Blu-ray w/DVD)
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras:
B+ Film: B+
David
Lean was a sometimes tough but very respected
filmmaker in his time, as well as very critically and commercially successful,
yet too many film fans and especially filmmakers today do now know him or
enough about his work. Part of it is simply not seeing the work.
Now, another Lean classic (following Dr.
Zhivago) is on Blu-ray, his 1957 watershed success Bridge On The River Kwai.
While
changes like color, stereophonic sound and widescreen filmmaking may have
thrown other filmmakers off of doing their best work,
all these changes did for Lean was offer new challenges, possibilities and
chances to innovate. Add how bold he could be and you start to understand
how he came to make so many classics. In this case, the film is known for
its legendary script credit. The screenplay was not only credited to the
author of the book, Pierre Boulle (also know for Planet Of The Apes), but was written by
two great writers who had been blacklisted by the Hollywood Witchhunts of the
1950s: Carl Foreman (High Noon) and
Michael Wilson (A Place In The Sun, Salt Of The Earth). However,
Boulle had nothing to do with the script version and that is because he could
not write extensively in the English language.
The war
genre was alive and well at the time like the Western, both of which would soon suffer form the real-life Vietnam fiasco among other
things. However, Kwai is one
of the grandest statements in the history of the genre about war and though it
is not necessarily an anti-war film like Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory made the same year
(reviewed on Criterion Blu-ray elsewhere on this site). It has some of
that kind of content, but is making a statement about loyalty and how making
the best decision is not necessarily the best thing, that sticking to your
standards should not be seen as written in stone because survival is about
adaptively and not dogma. You can see why its smart writers were targeted
by darker political interests.
The film
is set in a Japanese internment camp with Allied officers (especially American
ands British) forced into labor to build the title object. Alec Guinness
is the nationalist colonel determined to get that bridge built no matter what,
but what he and few of the people involved on both sides know is that Allied
spies are part of an operation to destroy that bridge and make sure the Axis
cause cannot benefit from it.
It then
becomes a ballet of nerves, tensions and integrity while the Japanese could
kill anyone at anytime. For all the WWII films about the German Nazis,
this reminds us that WWII was more than just about them, but a certain
political correctness has revised things in a disturbing way that also shows
the fatigue of the War Genre in its revived form. Needless to say Saving Private Ryan would have been
totally impossible with out this picture and will always be in Kwai’s superior shadow.
Performances
are great all around from Guinness becoming another classic character to Sessue
Hayakawa, Heihachiro Okawa and Keiichiro Katsumoto offering strong opposing
militarist characters that are among the most vivid portrayals of Japanese
Militarism in cinema history. The great William Holden (not that long
after Wilder’s Stalag 17), André
Morell (Barry Lyndon and TV’s
classic Dr. Quatermass), John Boxer
(Hitchcock’s Frenzy), James Donald,
Percy Herbert, Geoffrey Horn, Peter Williams, Harold Goodwin and Ann Sears are
among the great supporting cast.
Lean just
had a strong natural talent for making everything work and the most interesting
thing about this film is how it plays at first like a conventional WWII film,
but slowly, in bits and pieces, something more develops until its brilliant,
classic climax. If you have never seen Bridge On The River Kwai or been unhappy
about the previous home video editions, now we have a version you can really
enjoy and watch.
The 1080p
2.55 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer can show the age of the
materials used, but this is far superior a transfer to all previous releases of
the film with the best color and definition reproduction you will see outside
of a good film print, though some shots are not always as good as others.
Too bad this is not a total representation of a dye-transfer,
three-strip Technicolor version of the film, but you can see in many places how
good it must have looked in such copies. Director of Photography Jack
Hildyard (Summertime, Anastasia, The Living Idol, 55 Days At
Peking) uses the very widescreen frame to its fullest extent, remaining one
of the greatest uses of earlier, wider CinemaScope and very memorable at
that. Thanks to Blu-ray, you can see the depth intended and despite some
flaws, you can now experience the look and feel intended pretty much
throughout.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is towards the front speakers, but
this was a film originally designed for 6-track magnetic sound with traveling
dialogue and sound effects, so that is to be expected. With that said, it
is as good and full a mix as could be expected for this kind
of film coming from its time period, with Malcolm Arnold’s music score a
sonic highlight. I still wonder if some of those sound effects are the
way they were supposed to be in the original release though.
Extras in
this great slipcase packaging include a DigiPak with a nicely illustrated
booklet on the film including informative text, bonus DVD version and miniature
reproductions of the lobby cards, while the Blu-ray adds BD Live interactive
functions, William Holden & Alec Guinness on The Steve Allen Show and Crossing
The Bridge: Picture-in-Graphics track, while the DVD features a Making Of
Featurette, USC Short introduced by William Holden, Rise & Fall Of A Giant
vintage featurette on the making of the film and An Appreciation of the film by
John Milius.
For more
on Lean, try this link to the Dr.
Zhivago Blu-ray:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9878/Dr.+Zhivago+(1965/Warner+Blu-ray)
-
Nicholas Sheffo
