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A battalion of British war prisoners, under the command of Colonel Nicholson, is employed by the Japanese on the "death railway". Specifically, their task is to build a bridge on the River Kwai, a vital link in Japanese military communications. When officers are ordered to work alongside the men, Nicholson cites the Geneva Convention. Refusing as a matter of principle, he is subjected by Colonel Saito, the Japanese commandant, to brutal imprisonment. Nicholson stands firm and wins a moral triumph. He then takes charge of the building operations, determined to restore his men's morale and to demonstrate to the Japanese the invincibility of the British soldier. The bridge, as he sees it, will be a symbol of British achievement; and in driving his men ruthlessly he wholly loses sight of the fact that he is now aiding the enemy. Meanwhile, a small British commando force, led by Major Warden and joined by Shears, an American sailor who had previously escaped from the camp, is trekking through the jungle. Their mission is the destruction of the Kwai bridge. Nicholson, realising that a sabotage attempt is being made on his bridge, alerts the Japanese commandant. In the fight that follows, Shears, Saito and Nicholson are killed; but Warden manages to detonate the charges and the bridge is destroyed. The final comment comes from the British medical officer, a horrified onlooker: "Madness, madness".

The Bridge on the River Kwai tells, in effect, two interlocking stories. One is that of Colonel Nicholson, the soldier who lives and dies by the book of rules, brave, utterly confident and supremely wrong-headed. The other is that of the commando trek through the jungle and the manoeuvres leading up to the destruction of the bridge. The Nicholson section of the story is written with a fierce sense of dramatic irony and the script repeatedly develops its situations on two levels. Nicholson's stand against the Japanese is magnificent and idiotic; his obsession with the bridge has grandeur as well as absurdity; his relationship with Saito shows the opposition and points of contact between two men living substantially by the same code. The script makes these points and Alec Guinness's playing fully appreciates them. David Lean's direction, however, tends to work against the ironic effect by emphasising heroism at the expense of absurdity. The film, a highly assured piece of technical craftsmanship, is made rather too literally for the double-edged character of its central drama. On to this drama has been grafted the commando story, and the adventures of Shears during his escape from the camp. Here again there is some carrying over of the ironic overtones (in, for instance, in some scenes at British headquarters in Ceylon) and some passing reflections on the nature of courage. But much of this lengthy episode is straight war adventure, conventionally developed and made with a good deal of attention to production values. The climax, the actual destruction of the bridge, is a director's set-piece. It is worth noting that the novel drives home the irony, and the conclusion that nobody wins, by ending on the failure to destroy the bridge. Altogether, this Anglo-American production has some sophisticated and telling comments to make on the conduct of men in war; but it aspires simultaneously to the status of a big war "epic".

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