STACK #181 Nov 2019

Xxxxxxxxxxx Director David Lean, Alec Guinness and Sessue Hayakawa (who played the camp commander Colonel Saito) take a break whilst filming on location

The Bridge over the River Kwai is completed

Hollywood blacklisted writer, Michael Wilson, who together with Lean revamped Foreman's screenplay. There were numerous changes in the casting. Spiegel wanted Humphrey Bogart for the role of the American commando ordered to blow up the bridge, but he was already committed to another production for Columbia. Spiegel then tried for Cary Grant, who was also unavailable. It was then offered to William Holden, who accepted the part. Charles Laughton was Lean's first choice for the part of the military correct but maniacal Colonel Nicholson, but Laughton was too unfit to secure insurance. Sir Laurence Olivier was next but was too busy filming with Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). Lean then suggested Noel Coward – an idea that was not too absurd after his brilliant performance playing a surrogate Louis Mountbatten in Lean's film In Which We Serve – but he too declined. A determined Spiegel now pursued Alec Guinness, then primarily known as a comedy actor in the Ealing Studio pictures. Guinness rejected the part three times as he found the fanatical bridge-builder Nicholson too blinkered for audiences to take seriously. Furthermore, he and David Lean did not like each other having clashed on Oliver Twist nine years earlier. But Spiegel did what he always did best: he persisted. A worn down Guinness finally relented and signed up for the part. When the cast and crew arrived on location in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) the initial relationship between Lean and Guinness was indeed decidedly frosty, as the actor knew that Lean would have preferred Charles Laughton for the role. But as the production progressed Guinness came to admire Lean, describing him as "a man of genius cocooned with outrageous charm". (They would go on to make a further three award-winning motion pictures together and

William Holden as the American Shears, who escapes from the camp but is ordered to return to blow up the bridge

in building a real railway bridge at a colossal cost, only to destroy it in half a minute. He addressed his critics that everything had to be in proportion, stating, "There is no story in Kwai without a bridge and the bridge acquires a meaning only when it's destroyed. The question of the money spent in building the bridge is only a number on the cost sheet." He then had a furious argument with Columbia chief Harry Cohn over the film's extreme length of two hours and forty-one minutes. The fact that Spiegel had made the film his own way and his refusal to cut a single minute of it was proof of the growing power of independent producers and the diminishing control exercised by the heads of the Hollywood studios. Following the film's premiere and its subsequent success, Columbia Studios was keen to enter the film for Academy Award recognition. Spiegel realised that any hint of the blacklisted writers he had employed would be a disaster for his production. He believed the least incriminating way to handle the problem was to credit the author Pierre Boulle for Best Screenplay, which was exactly what the brazen Spiegel did. The Bridge on the River Kwai received eight nominations and won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture for Spiegel, Best Director for Lean, Best Actor for Alec Guinness and sure enough, a Best Screenplay Oscar for Pierre Boulle – who couldn't speak or write a word of English. This injustice was finally resolved in 1985 when the Academy made amends in a private ceremony, at which the widows of the now exonerated Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson were presented with the

Fact: None of the major characters has a first name. They are all referred to by their rank and surname only. Bill Holden's character, Shears, is an alias that he stole from a dead fellow serviceman because he thought he would get better treatment as an officer.

Guinness came to recognise that he owed much of his international film career to David Lean.) Shooting began in Ceylon in October 1956 and continued for eight arduous months. Lean was slow and meticulous and ran well over schedule and budget. Although the cast grumbled at the excessive number of takes, they sensed that the film was going to be special. The famous opening scene of the tattered PoWs, led by Colonel Nicholson marching into the Japanese prison camp defiantly whistling the "Colonel Bogey March" was suggested by character actor Percy Herbert, who played the part of prisoner Grogan. Herbert had been a real-life PoW, captured by the Japanese in Singapore and imprisoned for four years in the infamous Changi Prison. He told Lean that the Allied prisoners would sometimes whistle "Colonel Bogey" to annoy the Japanese guards. The grand finale of the film was the blowing up of the bridge, which had taken over six months to prepare and build. Spiegel was later reproached for his extravagance

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Oscars that their late husbands should have received almost thirty years before.

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