The Bridge on the River Kwai

David Lean's 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai is a real masterpiece, an example of responsible filmmaking done with a true artistic sensibility and realized in a beautiful, beautiful cinematic work. Gush, gush, gush. I left the theater in a state of glee. All this, despite having fallen asleep twice during the first hour (I'd worked all day after about 5 hours of sleep) and failing to recognize the significance of so much of the film until having left the Forum. 

The film's irony works, I think, as a powerful anti-war message. The opening and closing images are of birds before a blue sky - perhaps of symbolic significance, but also allegorical in that the bridge does not fully exist at the beginning or the end of the film, and that nothing has changed - a few men, possibly great men, have died, but the war continues, the prisoners are shunted from labor camp to labor camp, things are built, other things are destroyed. Admit it. It's almost funny; it's "Madness" on a national scale, blindness beyond party or national lines, idiocy and obsession rewarded and punished by armies of men.