Nicholson is prepared to die rather than bend on principle, and eventually, in one of the film's best-known sequences, he's locked inside "the Oven"-a corrugated iron hut that stands in the sun. He even produces a copy of the document, which Saito uses to whip him across the face, drawing blood. Nicholson says the Geneva Convention states officers may not be forced to perform manual labor. Saito wants all of the British to work on the bridge. Nicholson and Saito, the commandant, are quickly involved in a faceoff. He watches as a column of British prisoners, led by Nicholson, marches into camp whistling "The Colonel Bogey March." Shears is already in the camp we've seen him steal a cigarette lighter from a corpse to bribe his way into the sick bay. The film is set in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, along the route of a rail line the Japanese were building between Malaysia and Rangoon. By the end of "Kwai" we are less interested in who wins than in how individual characters will behave. Like Robert Graves' World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, it shows men grimly hanging onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) is one of the few that focuses not on larger rights and wrongs but on individuals. ![]() Most war movies are either for or against their wars.
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