FAQ

British soldiers in a WWII POW camp on the banks of the Kwai River are ordered by the camp commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) to construct a bridge across the river to accommodate the Burma-Siam railway, a vital link for the Japanese forces. After an initial standoff between Saito and Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), the senior British officer, Nicholson agrees to cooperate with the construction of a well-built bridge in order to both boost the morale of the POWs and to demonstrate the superiority of the British. Unknown to him, however, the Allies are sending a commando mission, led by British Special Forces Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) and American Navy Commander Shears (William Holden), the only POW to have escaped the camp, to blow up the bridge.

Le pont de la rivière Kwaï (The Bridge over the River Kwai) is also a 1952 novel by French novelist Pierre Boulle. The novel was adapted for the movie by American screenwriters Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.

No, the film is a work of fiction but borrows the 1942-'43 construction of the Burma Railway across the Khwae Yai River in western Thailand (formerly Siam) for its historical setting. Differences between the movie and the real bridge-building story include: (1) The real prisoner concentration consisted of British, Australian, American, and Dutch prisoners of war, all of whom suffered terrible atrocities at the hands of their Japanese captors, (2) the real bridge was made of steel and iron, (3) the march and discipline had long gone due to low rations, diseases, and torture, (4) the Japanese did not need British engineers as they had plenty of their own, (5) the bridge was destroyed by bombers not by an SAS type of mission, (6) Chinese prisoners were kept separate from the rest and treated 100 times worse than the others, as the Japanese seemed to have a special hatred in their hearts for them, (7) the British Officer played by Sir Alec Guinness didn't care about the bridge being built properly for British prestige; he was just trying to keep the Japanese soldiers from torturing his men, and (8) there were Korean conscript soldiers who were fighting for the Japanese but were treated badly by them.

It's called the "Colonel Bogey March". During World War II, British servicemen gave the tune lyrics which satirized the Nazi regime:

Hitler has only got one ball Goering has two, but very small Himmler has something sim'ler But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.

No. Some viewers interpret the scene where, on the night that the bridge is completed and Saito takes out a knife while seated at his writing desk, as him writing a suicide note with the intent of committing seppuku, the Japanese ritual of suicide by disembowelment, possibly because of his shame that the British POWs did what he couldn't do. Others think that he might have been planning to murder Col. Nicholson now that the job was done. Follow the scene closely, and you will see him cut off a lock of his hair and roll it up in the note. While the POWs were celebrating the completion of the bridge, Saito was doing the same, writing a letter to announce the completion of the bridge and including a lock of his hair in the same way that one might use sealing wax and a personal stamp to signify that the letter came from him.

It was considered to have trivialised and played for comic effect the terrible suffering of the real-life prisoners taken by the Japanese during World War II. A popular campaign was mounted by former-General Authur Percival which succeeded in forcing the filmmakers into adding the caveat in the titles declaring it a fictional film. Percival himself in many ways resembled Alec Guiness' character having suffered the humiliating task of surrendering the British garrison at Singapore but redeeming himself by enduring three years of brutal captivity at the hands of the Japanese alongside his men.