So before the month runs out, we probably should get to the Movie of the Month for March. MovieRob championed “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and hosts the show with a description of the plot and four other guests wallow in their admiration for his choice. There won’t be any surprise opinions about the worthiness of the film, but there is a detailed discussion of it’s qualities.

In World War Two, is it a brilliant plan to keep prisoners of war alive, or an act of collaborating with the enemy, when a British Officer helps build a better bridge than his Japanese captors designed or could build for themselves? The stubborn Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness in his Academy Award winning role, earns the respect of his men and control of the situation as he engages in a battle of wills with the commander of the POW camp Colonel Saito.

The film is also a men on a mission story as William Holden, escapes from the camp and is er “persuaded” to return to destroy the bridge that his former fellow prisoners are constructing. Jack Hawkins leads a commando group through the jungles, back to the spot on the river where the bridge is located. Director David Lean shows us some magnificent vistas and claustrophobic foliage both in Commander Shears’s (Holden) escape from and his return to the camp.

For the first third of the film, Sessue Hayakawa as Colonel Saito, tries to break the will of his by-the-book counterpart Nicholson. Torture and other war crimes are ultimately put aside as the fatalistic Japanese officer faces an inevitable future, whether the bridge gets completed or not. Both he and Nicolson spend time discussing duty and honor, so our cast of Nick Rehak, James Wilson and Stephen Palmer do as well. Holden’s American sums it up pretty effectively  “For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules – when the only important thing is how to live like a human being!… “

Introduction

Rob summarizes the film   2:40

Discussion   12:20

Lambscores   1:09:30

Last Lamb Standing   1:20:19

Exit Question   1:31:10

MovieRob Movie Rob Minute

Stephen Asian Cinema Film Club

James Blogging By Cinema Light

Nick Guesting on Exploding Helicopter

Richard KAMAD

The show can be found, of course, via iTunes – just do a search for “LAMBcast.” Also, I always post a link to the show on the LAMBcast’s Facebook page, and there’s a player there if you’d like to listen online. Find the show here:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/lambcast/episodes/2023-03-28T08_04_25-07_00

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