The Epic: The Bridge on the River Kwai (Dir David Lean, 2h41m, 1957)

The epic. Words that conjure up cinema at its maximalist: the colossal biblical epics, typified by Cecil B DeMille's two versions of The Ten Commandments, and Ben Hur, which, alongside the magnificent and ruinous Cleopatra, mark the high mark of the sword-and-sandal genre. The Western, in which America turns its expansion into national cinematic epic, in which How The West Was Won vies for attention with the sweeping and elagic Once Upon a Time in the West and the operatic The Good the Bad and the Ugly, is answered by the war epic, from the pure scale of Gone with the Wind's romance against the backdrop of the American Civil War to Francis Ford Coppola's feverish descent into the jungles of the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now .

It's cinema on the biggest canvas possible. Over the next five weeks we will consider five such canvases, from the deserts of Arabia to the streets of New York, and from the Crusades to Napoleon. What better place to start, though, than David Lean-Britain's master of epic cinema-'s first foray into the genre-what better place to start than The Bridge on the River Kwai. Here, Alec Guinness' Nicholson and Sessue Hayakawa's Saito engage in a battle of wills against the backdrop of British soldiers in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp building a bridge across the titular river in a stark depiction of war as a form of madness.

Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle, later to write Planet of the Apes, and credited for many years for the screenplay (the true authors, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson had been blacklisted from Hollywood in the 1950s, and would only posthumously receive their Oscars in 1985) The Bridge on the River Kwai wastes no time in depicting its scale, and its stark depiction of war. Its opening credits, along the "Death Railway" that the Japanese are intent on building, is a veritable graveyard, the camp no better, with deuteragonist, Sheers (William Holden) introduced burying several bodies, whilst the-at this point unseen-figure of Saito is severe and ruthless in the treatment of the men he oversees. Into this enters Nicholson and his men; whilst Guinness was not Lean's first choice, and the duo repeatedly clashed, it is this tension, both within Nicholson himself, and with Saito, that drives the film.

Kwai is certainly a film about the British character-Nicholson undeniably represents this. His men arrive in an orderly fashion, despite their ragged clothing, cinematographer Jack Hildyard's camera lingers upon bare feet, falling-apart shoes and uniforms, even as Malcolm Arnold's score-despite his Oscar for it, Arnold would describe the film's production as "the worst job I ever had in my life", its scoring taking just ten days and rushed to get the film released by the end of 1957-strikes up the iconic Colonel Bogey March. Nicholson is clearly a military man-later in the film, he recounts his military career, the decades spent in service to Empire, and the admission he's not spent more than twelve months on leave during this period.

At first, Nicholson seems at worst, a gentleman officer, still clinging to the rules in a world that no longer has them. His first argument with Saito-one that sees him and his officers nearly shot, if not for the presence of Clipton ( James Donald), the camp's medical officer, who acts as the film's voice of reason throughout. There is a degree of stubbornesss that, in the early scenes, drives Nicholson. As he refuses to make his officers work, despite Saito's fury and threats of violence, so his men rally behind him, this eventually leading to Nicholson being beaten and confined to the brutal "Oven". Even despite being starved, and with Saito attempting to win him over, he resolutely continues to refuse to kowtow to his captor's attempts to divide his officers. Defeated by Nicholson's determination, so Saito releases him and the officers from their confinement, with Guinness's staggering walk from the "Oven", to be slowly surrounded by his men, perhaps the single best shot moment of the film.

It is with his release that the film's texture begins to change: the film by this point has already shown the complexity of the relationship between Saito, whose very life is riding on the completion of the railway bridge, but is shown to be an artistic Anglophile who enjoys whiskey and corned beef, against the man whose inaction could doom him, but it is with his release that Nicholson's breed of madness begins to emerge. Though this is so often dressed up by Nicholson, against critique of being a collaborator, this madness begins with agreeing to help the Japanese build the bridge, and then steadily increases over the rest of the picture, the drive of wanting to prove the superiority of the British Empire, even if it openly aids the Japanese.

Against this, Lean, Foreman and Wilson place the sole escapee, the figure of Sheers, the American from the prison camp, who represents another kind of madness, returning, albeit reluctantly, to the jungle to destroy the bridge; Sheers may be dismissive of the British soldiery, but he is drawn into the bridge's destruction by the British in Ceylon, together with Jack Hawkins' military man, exclaiming at one point the quote that arguably underpins the film: "This is just a game, this war! You and Colonel Nicholson, you're two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules"

This clinging to codes, to Empires, to duty, is both the connective tissue between Nicholson and Saito, the bridge between the British sense of duty and the Japanese code of bushido, and curiously poignant, especially for a film made in the late 1950s, by which the British Empire had become something, like Nicholson's chivalry, something of the past. Yet, it is also a form of, certainly in Nicholson's sense, madness, the idea of, rather than deliberately sabotaging the Japanese, as the men do before Nicholson, of aiding them for the sake of ambition, for the sake of Empire. It is a film about how war turns men against each other, how ideologies drive soldiers to desperation, and beyond, and yet, manages to bring a struggle between world powers down to a handful of men and a single bridge.

Whilst it is only the start of Lean's great spate of epics-we will speak of the next, and perhaps greatest, next week-The Bridge on the River Kwai depicts madness on a huge scale. The bridge, when complete is not only impressive in its physicality, the scale of the epic film personified, a huge, and very real, bridge crossing a very real river, but with career-best performances from Guinness and Hayakawa, the scale of the two men at its centre's ambition and, undoubtedly, their shared madness.

Rating: Must See

The Bridge on the River Kwai is available on DVD and BluRay from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and available for streaming on Amazon Prime

Next week, we stay with David Lean and head into the desert in the company of Peter O'Toole's  Lawrence of Arabia in perhaps the greatest epic ever made.