BRIDGES OVER THE KWAI
"
name of "living like a human being" didn't come with much authority
from a character who had previously been shown as conspicuously im–
pervious to the most modest notions of duty or honor; and while the
whole narrative line concerning Holden strengthened
The Bridge on
the River Kwai
purely as an adventure story, it tended to undercut
whatever seriousness it could claim as a presentation of Boulle's ideas.
The most unconvincing and gratuitous change from Boulle's story
was also the one which was most obviously a matter of giving the public
a little of what the augurs of the box office know it wants: sex, in fact,
had to be smuggled into the regrettably monastic life patterns of prison
camps and jungle commandos; and so, after an embarrassing but brief
affair between Holden and a nurse (Ann Sears) in Ceylon, we were
given the four toothsome Siamese girls who left their jungle village to
help the commandos with their heavy baggage. Holden certainly took
the words right out of my mouth when he asked one of them "What's
a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" Later, there was the
memorable and exciting scene when the two prettiest porteresses smeared
camouflage paint onto the bodies of Shears and Joyce with eloquently
lingering palpations: "Messages from Jungle Maidens" might well tum
out to be Thailand's answer to the Hawaiian lei for the international
tourist trade ; but whatever happened afterwards in the mOVIe was
bound to be an anticlimax.
The same episodes, incidentally, were a good example of how the
film world's international perspective is characteristically accompanied
by a stupefying indifference to the facts of geography or politics. It was
bad enough when Warden, a professor of oriental languages at a repu–
table university (Cambridge, England) pointed impressively to Burma
on the map and called it Thailand; but the whole treatment of the
Siamese villagers was exactly the sort of thing that fosters our general
ignorance of what the rest of the world really thinks and feels. It's not
that there aren't plenty of beautiful girls in Siam, or that the lot of
its people isn't in general the most enviable one in all Asia, or even
that the Siamese weren't on the whole markedly hostile to the Japanese
and very friendly to allied prisoners during the war; but still, girls who
carry heavy loads through the jungle don't look perfectly groomed, and
certainly the poor villagers of Asia were not and are not waiting to
sacrifice themselves to a purposeful political allegiance to the West.
Their whole way of life inevitably imposes on them a much more
limited and self-centered horizon, and if we need their help we must
first give them ours: in all the little jungle settlements I saw the re–
sults of primitive conditions were only too evident-there were very few
