BRIDGES OVER THE KWAI
93
bit of action." So, on March 12, 1957, a special bridge that had cost
a quarter of a million dollars to build was blown up with a real train
crossing it.
In
the novel, of course, Nicholson's bridge, having taken the lives
of Nicholson and two of the commandos, remained to help the Japa–
nese in their fight against the Allies: Boulle wanted to show that a
tragic muddle must end in tragedy-and muddle. The movie, under
pressure from the presumed demands of the audience, offered the more
reassuring but less logical message that tragic muddle ends in tragedy,
yes, but also in triumph. By a series of very unlikely accidents the hero–
ism of the dead was gloriously rewarded: the saboteurs succeeded in
their mission because Nicholson, recognizing Shears, finally turned
his
back on his delusion, and even succeeded in blowing up the bridge,
helped by Warden's mortar shell which made him fall onto the detonator
plunger: and as the timbers blew triumphantly skyward the audience,
satisfied at last, could easily forget the men lying dead below.
The utter waste involved in building a fine bridge just to blow it
up again for the delectation of a public avid for sensational realism
seemed, on reflection, an ironically appropriate example of Boulle's
point about the West's misemployment of its technology; and so, per–
haps, was the movie as a whole. Certainly its mechanical techniques,
and the skill which had employed them, were of an immeasurably higher
order than the ends which they served : cause and effect, perhaps, the
virtuosity of the means distracting attention from the need for a valid
end, for an illuminating interpretation of human experience. On the
one hand there was Lean's beautiful precision of visual statement, and his
artful co-ordination of all the narrative sequences: on the other hand
there was a screenplay that was an anonymous agglomeration of epi–
sodes that, however brilliantly handled, were so different in nature and
atmosphere and implication that they added up to much less than the
sum of their parts.
Spiegel and Lean, in fact, had succumbed to the old lure of pro–
viding something for everybody; succumbed with taste and skill, but
succumbed. Mainly, perhaps, because most of the imperatives of the
audience had been directly contrary to the implications of the subject
in
question; certainly all the movie's additions and alterations, whether
to Boulle's novel or to the actual events along the River Kwai, had
tended in the direction of making things more sentimental and more
affirmative. The grim denials of Boulle's sardonic comedy had been
brushed aside, and so had the grey colors of the prison camps; instead,
the audience was left with the impression that the life of prisoners under
