It doesn't have to be big to be big

In World War Two, in Southeast Asia, Sessue Hayakawa portrays the commandant of a Japanese prison camp. Alec Guinness is the British Colonel of a group of soldiers who were captured and placed in that prison camp. Jack Hawkins is another British prisoner, and William Holden is an American prisoner-of-war escapee. Hayakawa and Guinness collide as Hayakawa tries to "break" the morale of the prisoners and make them build a bridge that is important to the Japanese war effort. Guinness is first obsessed with proving that British troops cannot be broken, and then becomes obsessed with building that bridge, to prove what he and his men are capable of. He needs structure, order, and purpose so much, that he adopts Hayakawa's project as a mission for himself. Meanwhile, Hawkins and Holden are determined to stop or destroy the bridge, to hurt the Japanese.

Everyone is determined, at least, or obsessed, to accomplish purposes that converge, collide, and clash in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The acting is superb, and Alec Guinness deservedly won an Oscar for his portrayal of a man so in need of a purpose that he subverts his own beliefs and adopts the enemy's purpose. One of the scenes at the end, where Guinness's character suddenly realizes what he has done, is an amazing capturing of a man experiencing an epiphany, or emerging suddenly from a cloud of insanity, and Guinness's facial expression portrays an incredible amount of what is going on inside the character.

Most of the time, the term "epic" needs to be connected to something on a very large scale. David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" encompasses much of, well, Arabia. "Dr. Zhivago" spans all of Russia during the Communist Revolution. "Gone With The Wind" covers much of the Confederate South during the Civil War. "Cleopatra" shows us ancient Egypt and Rome. These epics also span years of time in the stories they cover. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" does not cover nearly as much ground, geographically or chronologically. It is, in a sense, a small epic, and it is one that unfolds at its own pace, like "The Green Mile." "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is not big, and it is not fast. It is just quietly magnificent and stunningly powerful.

(this dolphin swam his review over from the Amazon River)