The Bridge on the River Why

Previous empires have conquered the world, but it remained for America to turn it into a movie set. The bright shadows of all lands where producers are lured by the Zeitgeist or unconvertible currency — Italy, Africa, India, Spain, Japan, Sumatra—illumine our emperor-size postwar screens. Often most splendidly, of course. These exotic “backgrounds” for Hollywood’s formal repertory, with their geologic freshness, their costumes, masses and perspectives, their novel shapes for objects both living and dead, can open up, like an unfamiliar style of painting, new visual dimensions.

After a flying search four times around the world (according to a somewhat dizzying program note), Producer Sam Spiegel, who had already exhausted one continent for The African Queen, hit on the blue- green forested mountains, the paddies and brown streams of Ceylon for the setting of The Bridge on the River Kwai. For the setting, quite strictly speaking. The movie’s dramatic locale is not Ceylon but Thailand. Mr. Spiegel, who by his own admission has “coined a ponderous phrase, ‘the authority of authenticity,’ ” considered Thailand itself for his movie of Thailand, but did not, in the event, find it sufficiently authentic.

JB

About the Author

James Burnham

Featured Tags

Previous empires have conquered the world, but it remained for America to turn it into a movie set. The bright shadows of all lands where producers are lured by the Zeitgeist or unconvertible currency — Italy, Africa, India, Spain, Japan, Sumatra—illumine our emperor-size postwar screens. Often most splendidly, of course. These exotic “backgrounds” for Hollywood’s formal repertory, with their geologic freshness, their costumes, masses and perspectives, their novel shapes for objects both living and dead, can open up, like an unfamiliar style of painting, new visual dimensions.

After a flying search four times around the world (according to a somewhat dizzying program note), Producer Sam Spiegel, who had already exhausted one continent for The African Queen, hit on the blue- green forested mountains, the paddies and brown streams of Ceylon for the setting of The Bridge on the River Kwai. For the setting, quite strictly speaking. The movie’s dramatic locale is not Ceylon but Thailand. Mr. Spiegel, who by his own admission has “coined a ponderous phrase, ‘the authority of authenticity,’ ” considered Thailand itself for his movie of Thailand, but did not, in the event, find it sufficiently authentic.