A wonderfully, entertaining film which exhibits very little resemblance to reality and in many ways, somewhat of an insult to the real victims of the Japanese.
Interesting how the Brits, once again, find themselves being saved from themselves by a glamorous, yet reluctant, American hero who manages to fashion his bush hat as a Stetson.
well maybe you’ll feel better knowing that hero is dead.
As you probably know, the American presence wasn’t prominent on the real railway, nor were either of the bridges over the ‘Kwai’ destroyed by any commando action by any Allied force.
The British suffered worst in numbers and proportion on the Burma Railway. They lost more than ten times as many dead as the total number of Americans employed on the railway, and over twice as many as either of the next two largest national forces on the railway.
The Asian slave labourers suffered worst of all, largely because they lacked the cohesion and organisation of the Allied military units and were treated worse by the Japanese, who often were Koreans in Japanese service.
http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/death_rr/movements_1.html
last month they ran a documentary on this on TV. and the survivors to a man claimed the real experience was nothing like the movie. at the start of the war i heard the japanese had over 200,000 pow’s for labor here. it was quite a story.
I was aware that said hero died, as I saw the film. If I hadn’t, I would have no comment on it.
However, no good person’s death would please me for:
…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
As for William Holden, I rather envied him his love scenes with the gorgeous Nancy Kwan (an old family friend of my wife’s), and his later partnership with Stephanie wotsit, whom I quite fancied when she starred in ‘Washington Behind Closed Doors’ way back in the Seventies.
Personal friends of mine were a part of the Thai-Burma Railway slave gangs. They were rather upset that a British battalion could be portrayed as collaborators with the Japanese.
At the National Memorial Arboretum, there is 30 meters of the original rails from the Burma Railway. It took a little time to get it here but those chaps that put so much of themselves into it are pleased with the efforts, and now we have a permanent reminder of their pain and the futility of war.
For picture scroll down to the second page of the first link:
http://www.nationalforest.org/document/newsroom/factfile03.pdf
http://www.nationalmemorialarboretum.org.uk/content/Plots-at-the-Arboretum-1136.shtml
This film is the British film industry’s concession to Hollywoodism in war pictures. National stereotypes abound, and Alec Guiness as Col. Nicholson takes the longest time period in human history to die and fall on the plunger…
An entertaining film that is unfortunately divorced from reality as the historical record tells it…
This film is, what? 50 years old? And yet it’s so much better than much of Hollywood’s output today! A true classic, shame to see someone vote for ‘sucks’.
“What code? The cowards code!”