Prison films – Page 4 – Movie Musings

Misguided principles are brilliantly mixed with an epic scale in this stunning prison camp film

Director: David Lean

Cast: William Holden (Commander Shears), Alec Guinness (Lt Colonel Nicholson), Jack Hawkins (Major Warden), Sessue Hayakawa (Colonel Saito), James Donald (Major Clipton), Geoffrey Horne (Lt Joyce), André Morell (Colonel Green), Peter Williams (Captain Reeves), John Boxer (Major Hughes)

“Madness! Madness!”Are there many better final lines of films – or any delivered with more emphatic, meaningful gusto than James Donald manages at the close of this David Lean classic? The Bridge on the River Kwai is a constantly reliable, wonderfully assembled classic film, and a never-ending joy to watch. It’s not only a gripping epic, it’s also a wonderful psychological study of a series of men and the impact war has on their psyches. It’s all madness after all.

In 1943, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) and his men arrive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma. Camp Commander Colonel Saito (Sesse Hayakawa) has been tasked with building a bridge over the river Kwai, and demands officers and men go to work. When Nicholson adamantly refuses to allow officers to do manual labour (as per the Geneva Convention), he and Saito are set for a clash of wills, in which the iron-willed, rigid certainty of Nicholson eventually triumphs. However, once Nicholson is released from solitary confinement, he is so horrified by the decline in discipline of his men, he decides building the bridge is the perfect opportunity to rebuild morale and demonstrate British character=. So he sets upon building a better, stronger bridge than the Japanese had designed. Meanwhile, fellow prisoner American Commander Shears (William Holden) escapes from the camp back to Allied headquarters – only to be forced to return to the jungle on a commando raid to destroy the bridge, led by Major Warden (Jack Hawkins).

Wow this is one hell of a film. It was garlanded with seven Oscars, and totally deserves each and every one of them. Kwai is a deeply engaging, wonderfully structured epic that balances perfectly the sweep of Hollywood cinema with a keen understanding of the complexities of psychologies under pressure. Because like Clipton says, this is a film about madness. Virtually everyone in this is mad in some way. Lean brilliantly positions these psyches in a series of conflicts and clashes: we have Nicholson vs. Saito, Nicholson vs. Shears, Shears vs. Warden – in every relationship in the film there is conflict and disagreement. It makes for extraordinary drama.

Pile on top of that the fact that David Lean is a consummate film maker. Every moment of Kwai is a display of wondrous visual storytelling, from the arrival of the British in the prison camp – a triumph of defiance, pride and hubris – to the final attack on the bridge. The final sequence around the bridge is exquisitely assembled. The editing is flawless, the tension build-up (nearly 20 minutes!) never flags, but carefully establishes the who, what, why and where. The sequence itself builds up both events and problems with daunting skill. In between, every sequence of the film has some masterful work in it.

The heartbeat is Alec Guinness, simply marvellous as Nicholson. It’s hard to believe watching it that he was not the first choice – in a parallel universe Charles Laughton starred opposite Cary Grant’s Commander Shears! – because he is superb in this Oscar-winning role. Guinness’s Nicholson is mad. Not in the cuckoo way or a cruel or arrogant way. He’s blinded by the rule book, by the middle-class values of duty, order and dignity that govern his life. Mad because he takes a task from his Japanese enemies and does it better than they ever could have: “Must we work so well? Must we build them a better bridge than they could have built themselves?” Clipton asks of him. Too true. Nicholson’s response? That one day people will remember the bridge was built not by “a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers…even in captivity”.

So Nicholson doesn’t see it that way. It doesn’t match his narrow world view of a place for everything and everything in its place. Because he has no vision beyond his own immediate circumstances. The important thing for him is to build the bridge, because it’s his duty to keep his men together, and demonstrate British resolve. So it’s Nicholson who visits Clipton’s sick bay and gently questions the wounded men, encouraging them to go back to work on the bridge so it can be finished on time (they ironically march through the graveyard of the camp on the way). For Nicholson the bridge is everything – and Guinness’ eyes are full of rigid monomania (needless to say, by the end of the film Nicholson himself off-handedly informs Clipton with pride that the officers have volunteered to work on the bridge to make sure it will be finished before the deadline).

His manner contrasts fascinatingly with Sesse Hawakaya’s Colonel Saito. Saito, a bank manager type if ever you saw one, clearly struggles with holding his command together and to deliver the bridge as planned. He has the strength of office, but not the strength of character of Nicholson. Hawakaya plays a weak man – and it’s fascinating how Lean charts the shift in power from Saito to Nicholson. Nicholson stands for principle and simply cannot imagine backing down – and then, with a sense of certainty and natural authority that governs his life, swiftly takes over the entire planning of the bridge from Saito. Poor Saito is a broken, weakened man: and in his own form of madness, is left with Nicholson alone as a confidant (the two of them talk more to each other about their loneliness and uncertainties than they do anyone else – Nicholson in particular gets a marvellous speech about the sad transience of the soldier’s life – “it’s a good life, but still there are times…”).

The madness doesn’t stop there. Jack Hawkins’ Major Warden is as fanatical as Nicholson: the mission is everything. Hawkins is excellent, turning Warden into a sort of over-grown schoolboy, playing at soldiers but with an adolescent aggressive willingness to sacrifice the pieces for the greater good. For Warden, no life in the team is sacred (including his own), and everything must be about the target. Warden’s gung-ho, take-no-prisoners attitude, his lack of empathy for the lives of those around him, makes him as much of an insane danger as Nicholson, perhaps more so.

Holden’s more humane Shears is the counterbalance with these three lunatics. Of course, Shears is sucked even more into the madness than anyone else – who else would escape from a prison camp, only to be forced to head back into the jungle on a fool’s errand? Holden is damned impressive as the naturally anti-authoritarian Shears, a man who never seems to have seen a boss without questioning him, who recognises the insanity of the war around him but when push comes to shove throws himself into the mission he has been given.

He’s the big addition to the original source material – but it’s an idea so good that Pierre Boullé said he wished he had thought of it himself. Boullé won the screenplay Oscar, but the writers of the script were really the black-listed Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. These two put together a superb script, and the structure contrasting Shears with Nicholson works perfectly. These two are mirror images, but never really antagonists. Their final meeting towards the end of the film has a poetic sadness about it. It adds a whole extra dimension to the film – while one storyline sees the bridge being built, a parallel one prepares for its destruction.

All these threads come together beautifully on the morning of the bridge’s opening, after a triumphant celebration by the prisoners on the completion of the bridge – a moment Nicholson describes to them as “turn[ing] defeat into victory”. He is of course both right and wrong – and the triumph of the film is that you can’t help but share Nicholson’s desire to save this bridge that we have seen so much work, effort and love go into constructing.

“Madness”. That’s how Clipton sees it – James Donald is by the way wonderful as the one sane man – and yes of course he’s right. It’s all part of what is a masterful film made by a master storyteller, beautifully filmed and edited. Alec Guinness gives a performance for the ages as stubborn, small-minded man whom we somehow still end up strangely admiring and respecting. Holden, Hawkins and Hayakara offer intelligent, engaging portrayals. The Bridge on the River Kwaiis a film that you can watch again and again. In fact you should, because Lean here marries an epic scale with a story that feels small, personal and deeply felt – that places the psychology of real people at the centre of an epic stage. It’s simply a classic.

Class struggles makes it harder to win the race in this excellent kitchen-sink drama

Director: Tony Richardson

Cast: Tom Courtenay (Colin Smith), Michael Redgrave (Governor), Avis Bunnage (Mrs Smith), Alec McCowen (Brown), James Bolam (Mike), Joe Robinson (Roach), Dervis Ward (Detective), Topsy Jane (Audrey), Julia Foster (Gladys), James Fox (Gunthorpe), John Thaw (Bosworth)

In the 1960s British film made waves when it started to turn away from upper-class, costume-laden dramas, and accents started to be heard that weren’t cut-glass and RP. Few of these films ran (literally) further from this than The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

After the death of his father, Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay), a working-class young man, is drawn into a life of petty crime. Sent to borstal for his re-education, his skill at long-distance running catches the eye of the Governor (Michael Redgrave). The Governor hopes to use Colin to win the five-mile cross-country run in the joint sports challenge day he has arranged with the local private school. But will Colin play ball, or will he stick to his own principles of never playing “their” game?

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is in many ways a sort of British Rebel Without a Cause, but without the glamour. Instead, Colin is a council house lad, angry at the world (but not quite clear why) and brought low by the theft of £70. The film showcases Colin as a sort of anti-authority hero, a man who just simply doesn’t want those bastards telling him what to do. He’s not violent or dangerous, he’s more sullen, fed-up and laced with anger and contempt at a world that short-changed his father.

He finds himself in the confines of borstal, an institution all about rules, regulations and changing people to match what society expects of them: everything Colin hates, and spends the film pushing against. Unlike the anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe’s other seminal kitchen sink drama, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Colin isn’t out for what he can get – while that film’s lead was more frustrated the system didn’t work enough for him, Colin wants no system at all. He wants freedom to make his own choices and define his own life – and his rebelling is all about that.

What’s intriguing about Silitoe’s story is Colin has a genuine gift for running. Richardson shoots the sequences of Colin running through the country (granted special permission to go unattended by the Governor) with a lyrical freedom. It’s as if, while running, Colin can put the world aside for a moment, to focus on his own independence. Silitoe gives Colin the means to move up in the world – but to do so he has to fall in with the desires of his “betters”. Therein lies the film’s conundrum.

It helps a great deal that Michael Redgrave is terrific as the Governor – the very picture of hypocritical and self-serving authoritarianism, interested in the boys only so far as they can serve his ends. The slightest misdemeanour and punishment is absolute – with the boy banished back to the bottom rung of the borstal, and ignored by the Governor.

Richardson shoots the borstal as a confining series of small spaces, a real contrast to the broad, open spaces Colin runs through. The flashback scenes that showcase Colin’s life of petty crime are shot with an intense realism, on-location in Nottingham streets. These scenes are perhaps slightly less engaging and interesting than those at the borstal: their content is pretty similar to other kitchen-sink dramas, and they seem more predictable (for all their engaging direction and acting) than other parts of the film.

The real success of the film is largely due to Tom Courtenay, making his film debut. It would be easy to be annoyed by Colin, an inarticulate and chippy lad who hates the system without actually being engaged enough to understand why. But Courtenay brings the part a tenderness and surly vulnerability, and for all his childish rebellion, his barely expressed feelings of grief and anger at his father’s death strike a real chord. Given a sum of money in compensation, largely frittered away by his mother (Avis Bunnage also excellent) on her fancy man, Colin symbolically burns part of it, then spends the rest taking himself, a friend and two girls to Skegness. Colin’s relationship with Audrey is sweetly, and gently organically grown – and Courtenay brings a real vulnerability to a confession of his own virginity.

Courtenay makes Colin’s principles and issues understandable to us – and relatable – even though it’s tempting to encourage him to play along with the Governor, win the race and seize and opportunity to better himself from that. But what Courtenay makes clear, is that doing that would be a sacrifice Colin’s own sense of self – and that would be a defeat.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a terrific kitchen-sink drama, built around an empathetic lead performance, that gives you plenty to think about. It’s shot with a poetic beauty by Richardson and photographer Walter Lassally. Finally, some credit must go to the casting director – not only Courtenay, but James Bolam and (uncredited) John Thaw and James Fox fill out the cast in prominent roles. Keep an eye on those guys: they might have futures ahead of them y’know.