When crisis brings out the best in people...

WORLD WAR II is that period of 20th Century history that, at best, should be remembered for what wars (read brutality) can do to humanity and if humans don?t learn a lesson from history, they are bound to repeat mistakes with extremely severe repercussions.

WORLD WAR II is that period of 20th Century history that, at best, should be remembered for what wars (read brutality) can do to humanity and if humans don’t learn a lesson from history, they are bound to repeat mistakes with extremely severe repercussions.

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War is brutal and brutality comprises gory carnage, senseless battles and its psychological dimensions. However, the evergreeen classic of David Lean The Bridge on the River Kwai, while highlighting the psychological dimensions of brutality, also shows the resilience of the human spirit as well as its complexities. One is left wondering if participation in World War II not only psychologically brutalised all those who took part in the Great War but also, if it simultaneously uplifted them.

Focusing on how individuals can play a major role in a war, nothing prepares the group of British officers and soldiers who are held as POWs by the Japanese that even the officers will be asked to pitch in for the construction of a bridge across the River Kwai. The film set in wartime Burma (now Myanmar) is the scene for an almighty tussle between two equally crazy, power-obsessed commanding officers. In the middle of the steaming jungle, Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness) leads his men into Prison Camp 16 and the command of Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Their task is to build a bridge across the River Kwai for the Japanese with the completion date set in the near future. Sardonically observed by long-term inmate Shears (William Holden), an American sailor, Nicholson tries to apply his rules of conduct to Saito.

His major point is that officers aren’t expected to carry out manual work, under the Geneva Convention.

Saito points out they are his prisoners and will do as he tells them. His main reason of worry is that if the bridge isn’t finished on time he will have to commit hari-kari and somehow or the other he has to meet completion deadline. And he is a desperate man.

Subsequently, a tense stand-off occurs between the two officers.

The British troops leave to start work while the officers stay behind, roasting in the boiling sun under the gaze of a machine-gun. Saito won’t lose face and back down while Nicholson refuses to compromise his code of conduct, which is why the British officers end up in the ‘ovens’ - small, corrugated iron boxes which sit in the midday heat.

The face-off between the two officers shows that how men can grimly hang onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. By the end of Kwai..., the viewer is not interested in knowing which side won, the Allies or the Japs, he/she wants to know how individual characters can behave in a crisis.

And this 1957 masterpiece best reflects it.