90
PARTISAN REVIEW
that could possibly have been CI.mstructed without much greater material
resources than would have been available under the conditions of
the story.
Nor was the landscape that of the Siam I had known. Not only
because the climate of the river Kelani in Ceylon, where the movie was
shot, is a good deal hotter and wetter, more tropical in fact, than that
of the river Kwai, but because the camera was only allowed to rest
on the most satisfying combinations of luxuriant vegetation and beauti–
fully modeled cliffs and boulders. The virtuosity of modern cinema–
tography, it appeared, was not to be wasted on the scenes of
our
reality, a formless and colorless amalgam of a prison camp that was
a chaos of sagging huts, foul latrines and decaying bedding, and a rail–
way track that gored the earth with spoilpits and made a desolation
of nature. Any sustained documentary starkness would have been com–
pletely out of the question merely for financial reasons; and, equally
obviously, a good many things had had to be brought in which had
nothing to do with either the actual building of the railway or with
Boulle's novel.
The biggest change in Boulle's cast which had resulted from the
world-wide audiences the makers of
The Bridge on the River Kwai
had
been forced to take into consideration, was obviously the introduction
of a big boxoffice star, William Holden. He had to be given lots to
do, and as there was no American in the novel, an essentially new char–
acter had to be created for Shears with an important role on both sides;
Holden, in fact, had to be both a prisoner and a commando, and yet
stay within the limits of his established screen personality as a good–
hearted no-good. There followed as a consequence of these fortuitous
imperatives a completely miraculous escape (no prisoner on the railway
had actually succeeded) involving the accidental help of some jungle
villagers and a British seaplane that just happened along.
Holden himself did wonders with an improbable sequence of roles;
he managed to be both convincing and infinitely engaging; and for
their part Spiegel and Lean handled the implausibilities of the Holden
script with great tact: the escape to the sea was frankly presented as
a thrilling and yet somehow distant and dreamlike adventure, while the
final rescue by the seaplane was wisely left altogether to our imagina–
tions. Spiegel and Lean also ingeniously succeeded in using Holden to
unify the two separate parts of the plot, and to fill out the ideological
picture by making his stand for the forces of life and reason as opposed
to the unthinking devotion to duty of both Nicholson and Warden
(J
ack Hawkins). Still, the criticism of muscle-bound militarism in the
