Tag Archives: culture clash

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

The 1950s means different things to different people, but it seems to suggest a time of conformity, shared values, and stability, a time when people could speak confidently of the American character. It was during this decade that consensus history was in vogue. Needless to say, those days, if they ever really existed, are long gone.

I say this because The Bridge on the River Kwai seems to be based on ideas of what it means to be an American as opposed to being British, ideas that may have been valid when this movie was made, but might readily be called into question today.  Whether this movie expresses the ideology I suggest is one thing; whether it represented a realistic difference between American and British attitudes is another thing; and whether any of this is still relevant sixty-five years later is still one more thing.

Cynicism

In an opening scene of this movie, we see crosses marking graves alongside some railroad tracks, giving us a sense of the price paid by Allied prisoners of war, forced by the Japanese to work on a railroad in Burma during World War II.  Then we see the men that are working on that railroad.  They appear to be poorly nourished, yet forced to do hard labor, barely able to swing the hammers that drive spikes into the ties that hold the rails together.

The scene shifts to William Holden, who plays US Navy Commander Shears.  Along with an Australian soldier, Corporal Weaver, he is just finishing burying a soldier that recently died of beriberi.  Unlike the frail prisoners of war we just saw, Shears looks to be in good physical shape.  At first, we might suppose that this is just one of those things we are supposed to overlook in a movie.  There have been actors who gained weight for a role, but I don’t think any actor ever starved himself so as to look malnourished.  On the other hand, we soon find out that Shears routinely steals stuff from the soldiers he is assigned to bury so that he can bribe the Japanese captain, with whom he has become friendly.  This allows him and Weaver to get admitted to the hospital, where they do not have to exert themselves.  After the Japanese guard leaves, Shears makes some sarcastic remarks over the grave they just dug, saying the man died for “the greater glory of….  What did he die for?”

Well, this is certainly no John Wayne movie.  I mean, John Wayne would have been too old for this part anyway, but that aside, it would have been unthinkable for him to express that kind of antiwar cynicism.  In fact, it would be unthinkable for him to be a prisoner of war in any event, because that would mean he would have had to surrender.  John Wayne might get killed in a movie, but never surrender.  Holden, on the other hand, is suited to this role.  He was similarly cynical in Stalag 17 (1953), where he was a German prisoner of war, dealing in various schemes to make his life comfortable, often wagering that his fellow prisoners will get killed trying to escape. That proved to be short-sighted, to say the least, since he incurred the wrath of his fellow Americans, getting himself beaten up as a result.  In this movie, his egoism is more enlightened.

The contrast with John Wayne movies raises the question as to whether cynicism was thought to be an American trait in the 1950s, since John Wayne could often be heard mouthing a lot of sentimental stuff in his war movies.  I have read that during World War I, the doughboys sang songs; during World War II, the American GIs made wisecracks.  So, if it was an American trait back then, it might have been a recent one.  In any event, Shears is the only American in this movie, and he is the only one who is cynical as well.

Egalitarianism

We might wonder how a man with the attitude of Shears ever became an officer, but we later find out that he is really an enlisted man.  He was on the USS Houston, which was sunk early in the war, but he and an officer became separated from the rest of the crew.  The officer ended up getting killed, so Shears helped himself to the fellow’s uniform, figuring that as an officer, he would receive better treatment at the hands of the Japanese, and not be expected to do any manual labor.  This brings out another character trait of his, which is his contempt for the distinction between officers and enlisted men.  This is not unexpected coming from an American, steeped in the idea that all men are created equal.  The distinction between officers and enlisted men, as far as Americans are concerned, is artificial, a fiction necessitated by the needs of war.

Individualism

As he and Weaver make their way to the hospital, a battalion of British soldiers is arriving, led by Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness).  They are whistling the “Colonel Bogey March,” which is indicative of a camaraderie among the British soldiers, their esprit de corps.  We cannot imagine Shears participating in such whistling, or singing a song with other soldiers.  The fact that he is the only American in the camp emphasizes his individualism, another trait Americans were known for, as opposed to the British soldiers and their sense of the collective.

Colonel Saito, the commanding officer of the camp, asserts that the British officers will help build a bridge over the River Kwai, right alongside the enlisted men, something Shears found out to his chagrin, his scheme to avoid such work by pretending to be an officer having been in vain. Nicholson, however, takes the distinction between officers and enlisted men as having profound significance, which is not surprising, considering that England is a country where class distinctions are fundamental, where being a duke, baron, lord, etc. is a matter of birth.  When Saito insists that the British officers also do manual labor, Nicholson refuses to allow his officers to comply, willing to endure being beaten and tortured rather than yield on this matter.  He prevails in the end because Saito is behind schedule in getting the title bridge built, and he needs Nicholson’s cooperation.

Pragmatism

Not surprisingly, we find out that Colonel Nicholson was ordered to surrender by his superiors. Otherwise, we can easily imagine that a man of his sort would have preferred to fight to the end. Shears refers to him as having the kind of guts British officers had in 1914, when they went “over the top with nothing but a swagger stick,” the kind of guts, he says, that “can get us all killed.” Shears, we have no doubt, had he been in Nicholson’s position, would have preferred surrendering to being killed. However, the conditions in the camp are so harsh that Shears and Weaver have been planning an escape.  Nicholson, however, figures that his orders to surrender require that neither he nor any of his men make such an attempt.  He believes that one must obey the law, or else there is no civilization.  Shears says there is no civilization in the jungle, so the law is irrelevant.  In short, Shears regards the law as having value only as long as it is useful; Nicholson sees the law as transcending mere practical considerations.

But then, halfway through the movie, everything goes into reverse, and the difference between American and British attitudes begins to collapse when it comes to the distinction between officers and enlisted men. Shears escapes from the camp and winds up in a British hospital, where he pushes his luck by continuing to pretend that he is an officer in order to get better treatment.  Major Warden (Jack Hawkins), a British officer, finds out about this and coerces Shears into agreeing to go back into the jungle with him so they can sabotage the bridge, which will allow Shears to avoid being prosecuted for impersonating an officer.  Since two other officers will be going along, including a Lieutenant Joyce, Warden says he will give Shears a “simulated rank of major” for the purpose of the mission, so that the rigid distinction between officers and enlisted men will not have to be observed.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, Nicholson is anxious to get the bridge built, and to build it as an example of British engineering excellence. The other officers are in favor of surreptitiously delaying the building of the bridge and making sure that it is inferior, so as to minimize their assistance to the enemy; but Nicholson thinks that building a bridge that will redound to British glory for hundreds of years is more important than its effect on the war, dismissing the suggestion that what he is doing could be construed as collaboration with the enemy, even treason.  Furthermore, when he realizes that they are behind schedule, he violates the very code he fought for, and gets the officers to work alongside the enlisted men. He even asks men in the camp hospital to get out of their beds and pitch in, men so sick that not even Colonel Saito would have ordered them to work.

Heterosexuality

Shears is a womanizer.  The main reason he continued to pretend to be an officer when he got to the British hospital was so that he would be able to fool around with the nurses, who are officers themselves and off limits to enlisted men.  We even see one of those nurses doing the walk of shame one morning, after leaving his room. Then, when he joins Warden and the others in the trip back through the jungle to the prisoner-of-war camp, he seems to be making progress with one of the Asian female bearers that have come along.  I don’t know if he got himself some of that on the way, but had he survived, it is certain he would have gotten some on the way back.

Meanwhile, the British soldiers decide to celebrate the completion of the bridge by putting on a show.  The first part of the show consists of men dressed up like women, singing and dancing like the Rockets.  Then, Grogan (Percy Herbert), who is a big man, is dressed like a woman.  He sings a duet with a small man, the only one who in the show who is dressed like a man, at the end of which, Grogan picks him up in his arms and carries him off the stage.  After the show is over, it is time for Colonel Nicholson to make a speech.  Apparently, Grogan was in no hurry to get out of his short skirt and crop top, since we see him in the audience, still dressed up like a girl, while Nicholson is speaking.

Needless to say, there is no way Shears would have participated in a show like that. And if I may be permitted to bring up John Wayne again, we can’t imagine him in drag either.

Isolationism

Another trait thought to be characteristic of Americans back when this movie was made was their reluctance to get involved in foreign conflicts.  It was the basis for American isolationism, which is as old as George Washington’s farewell address, warning of entanglements in European affairs, and John Quincy Adam’s speech saying America does not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Shears represents this attitude at the level of the individual.  He knew he would eventually get caught impersonating an officer, and his plan was to apply for a medical discharge, saying, “I impersonated an officer because I went off my rocker in the jungle.”  We may easily infer from this that Shears would have avoided the whole war by dodging the draft, had he been able to do so. Failing that, he probably joined the Navy to avoid ending up in the Army as cannon fodder.  But his plan didn’t work, and he wound up being blackmailed into a commando mission to destroy the bridge.

Humanism

During an incident where they come across some Japanese soldiers, Warden gets shot in the foot. He tries to press on, but he eventually gives up and tells the rest of them to go on without him. Joyce says they may not be able to come back that way after the mission is over, to which Warden replies, “If you were in my shoes, you know I wouldn’t hesitate to leave you here.”  This leads to the following exchange:

Shears:  He doesn’t know it, but I do.  You’d leave your own mother here if the rules called for it.

Warden:  You’ll go on without me.  That’s an order.  You’re in command, Shears.

Shears:  I won’t obey that order.  You make me sick with your heroics. There’s a stench of death about you.  You carry it in your pack like the plague.  Explosives and [suicide] pills go well together. With you, it’s just one thing or the other:  destroy a bridge or destroy yourself.  This war is just a game.  You and that Colonel Nicholson are two of a kind. Crazy with courage!  For what?  How to die like a gentleman.  How to die by the rules.  The only important thing is how to live like a human being!  I’m not gonna leave you here to die, Warden, because I don’t care about your bridge and your rules.  If we go on, we go on together.

And so, in spite of himself, Shears ends up being the commanding officer in charge of the mission, risking his life trying to destroy a bridge he cares nothing about, in a war he cares nothing about.

Shears and Joyce manage to attach explosives to the bridge, and then set up a plunger at a distance for Joyce to use when an expected train with Japanese dignitaries will be crossing that bridge.  But in the morning, the river has gone down, and Nicholson spots the wire.  Suspecting sabotage, he gets Saito to help him find where the wire leads.  It was one thing for Nicholson to build the bridge, telling himself that it was good for his men to have work to do, but trying to prevent that bridge from being destroyed is undeniably collaboration with the enemy.  Even after Joyce uses his knife to kill Saito, and tells Nicholson he is operating under British orders to destroy the bridge, Nicholson restrains him, calling for help from the Japanese soldiers on the bridge.  A bullet hits Joyce, killing him.

Shears swims the river, intent on killing Nicholson, but he is shot before he can do it, cursing Nicholson with his last, dying breath.  When Nicholson sees who it is, he suddenly realizes the enormity of what he has done.  A mortar fired by Warden stuns him, and he falls on the plunger, causing the bridge to be blown up, just as the train has started to cross, thereby plunging it into the river.  The scene is ambiguous, but I think we can cut the colonel some slack, allowing that he intended to push the plunger anyway, as a way of redeeming himself.

Although we naturally have identified with Shears throughout the movie, there is a doctor who, though British, also allows for audience identification, since he represents common sense.  At the end of the movie, as he beholds the spectacle, he says, “Madness!” a sentiment with which Shears would have been in complete agreement.

Joe (1970)

If there is one thing that best explains why so many people remain firm supporters of Donald Trump in spite of it all, it is white supremacy.  Racism has always been with us, of course, but today it is more desperate than ever, for demographic trends indicate that the white race will no longer constitute a majority in the United States before this century is out.  And Trump supporters believe he is their best hope for keeping America white.  But even when America was overwhelmingly white, with no sense that things would ever be otherwise, there were plenty of people who feared and hated anyone who was different.  And so it is that while we see examples of bigotry every day, it can be interesting to take a look at how it expressed itself in the past.  For that purpose, we have the 1970 movie Joe.

Early in the movie, Bill Compton, a respectable businessman, kills his daughter’s drug-dealer boyfriend in a fit of rage after she overdoses and almost dies. In shock over what he has done, he goes into a bar to have a drink. In the bar is Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), a man who hates blacks, hippies, homosexuals, and communists.  He gives full vent to his spleen. In one sense, Joe’s rant is dated, couched in terms of the cultural changes of the 1960s. But in another sense, it is a timeless expression of bigotry, one that it is just as fresh in the twenty-first century as it was back then.

Schopenhauer said a great dramatist like Shakespeare knows that when the villain speaks, he’s right.  Examples of this may be found in The Razor’s Edge (1946), when Isabel argues that Larry is a fool for thinking he has cured Sophie; in Shane (1953), when Ryker makes his case against the homesteaders, and in Hud (1963), when the title character argues for selling off diseased cattle.  In the end, we reject these villains.  But while they speak, even if just for a moment, we are captivated.  And so it is with Joe.

When Bill first walks into the bar, Joe is mainly complaining about the blacks, the way they burn down cities and get welfare.  The government even gives them free rubbers, he says, but they sell the rubbers to buy booze and then have more babies so they can get more welfare.  Little by little he gets around to the hippies, doing drugs and having orgies.  However, this is not really a change of subject, because for Joe, blacks, hippies, homosexuals, and communists are not unrelated, but rather are all of a piece.  And yet, it is difficult to brings these groups under a unifying concept, or at least to show how they are all interrelated.  But toward that end, he says things like, “Forty-two percent of all liberals are queers.”  Of course, as far as Joe is concerned, liberals are communists, and the hippies are all a bunch of anti-American commies, having orgies on Easter.  The bartender gives Joe a quarter, telling him to give everyone a break and play some music on the juke box.  Joe goes over to the juke box and stares at it.  The bartender says, “What’s a matter, Joe?  You’ve got all those opinions, and you can’t pick a record?” to which Joe replies, “The goddamn nigger loving hippies have even fucked up the music.”

Perhaps a separate comment about communism is in order.  Just as hippies could no longer exist after the end of the Vietnam War, so too does it seem that communists could no longer exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  However much we might still regard Russia, China, or North Korea as enemies, it is their nuclear weapons we worry about, not their communist ideology.  The right still fears socialism, of course, as evidenced by the political rhetoric of the day, but socialism is something we mostly associate with Canada or the Western democracies of Europe, countries whom we regard as our allies.  Those opposing “Medicare for all” are more likely to point to Great Britain, unfairly or not, as an example to bolster their case against socialized medicine than to the healthcare system of Russia.

Now, for Joe, the Russians would have merely been the ultimate example of communists.  He is the kind of guy who would have said to any hippie complaining about the evils of American capitalism, “If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you move to Russia?”  And his mantra back then was “Better dead than red.”  But this is no longer the case among the far right, which has come to have a more favorable view of Russia than one might have ever thought possible, as can be seen in an article at Vox.com, which features a picture of Trump supporters wearing shirts that say, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”  The article explains this shift in attitude toward Russia as “negative partisanship.”  But I say the real reason is that the Russians are white.

In any event, at one point in his vituperative spiel, Joe says he’d like to kill one of those hippies.  Bill tells Joe that he just did, because it makes him feel good to admit his crime to someone who understands, though he quickly says he was just kidding. Later, when Joe realizes that Bill actually did kill a hippie, something he has always wanted to do, but probably never would have on his own, he calls Bill up and says he wants to get together. The two of them form a deadly combination, resulting in a massacre of hippies. Inadvertently, Bill kills his own daughter, Melissa (Susan Sarandon), who happens to be among them.

The first time I saw the movie was in 1970, when it was first released. As the years passed, my memory was that Bill and Joe killed a bunch of harmless, peace-loving hippies. But having seen the movie again recently, I realize that the hippies are not portrayed sympathetically.  Early in the movie, when Melissa enters the room she shares with her boyfriend, he is taking a bath. She gets in the tub with him, and he immediately gets out, criticizing her for being a rich broad who never had to earn a dollar in her life, just sitting in the bathtub on her fat ass. It is not clear whether he is merely indifferent to her romantic gesture, or whether he despises her, but either way, he treats her like dirt.

Speaking of dirt, that reminds me of their feet. Notwithstanding the bath, their feet are filthy. Back in those days, having dirty feet was de rigueur for hippies, because that was a way of displaying contempt for the rules of society. And just to make sure we know they have the required dirt and grime, when they get in bed together, the camera films them from the end of the bed so that we get full view of the bottoms of four filthy feet.

It is a sordid scene:  a squalid room, a syringe, a bowl of pills.  Melissa’s boyfriend is so rude and obnoxious that we don’t feel sorry for him when Bill brutally murders him.  But while Melissa is a frail for whom we have some pity, we are put off by the way she lets herself be mistreated and by her own irritating behavior when she is on drugs.  However much we may feel sorry for people addicted to drugs or caught up in abusive relationships, this movie does nothing to promote such sympathy, encouraging feelings of revulsion instead.

After Melissa recovers from the drug overdose, she runs away from the hospital and returns home, only to overhear her father admitting to killing her boyfriend, and so she runs away from home too.  With Joe’s help, Bill starts looking for her.  They meet some hippies from whom they hope to get some information about Melissa.  In the process, Bill and Joe end up participating in an orgy of sorts, and we get the spectacle of Joe’s naked beer gut coming down on top of some hippie chick as he prepares to have sex with her, but not before remarking that he doesn’t need any foreplay, which he regards as proof of his manhood. While this allows us to see how crude Joe is, it also illustrates some of that hippie promiscuity he was grumbling about earlier.  Furthermore, the hippies are thieves, for they rob Bill and Joe of their wallets.  In other words, the hippies are portrayed as unlikable, scroungy, and immoral.

Bill and Joe track them down.  Earlier, we saw Joe’s gun collection, and he has a couple of those rifles in the trunk, which he says they will use to scare them.  But things get out of hand and the massacre ensues.

I saw the movie at the drive-in, so I was unaware of any audience response.  But a friend of mine said that she saw the movie in a theater, and she was horrified at the way the audience cheered at the end, because, as she characterized it, “They got rid of a bunch of dirty hippies.”  I have since read that this audience reaction was quite common.  I was surprised at the time, but now I realize the movie encouraged that response.  And so, what I once took as being a criticism of bigotry, I now have to wonder whether this movie just went a little too far in giving us the villain’s point of view, or whether there might have been an intentional justification of such, with an exculpatory tragic ending tacked on in the final reel to disguise the movie’s right-wing sympathies.