The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

There's a terrific film lurking somewhere in here. The climactic bridge destruction will file your fingernails down to nubs. But Lean cannot resist puffing everything up into An Oscar Film®. At 161 minutes, a good forty minutes could easily be shorn, especially all the scenes of William Holden in paradise. Also, even though Oscar films are supposed to be selling narrative dexterity, the storytelling is sloppy. It's naive, at best, to posit that the film must end with said bridge destruction. It leaves so many questions unanswered, namely, the fate of everyone involved, both prisoners and captors. Set a Don Siegel or a Raoul Walsh on it and this thing would snap. Then again, it would come across as a "mere" genre pic and get ignored by the Academy, as if An Oscar Film® weren't its own genre with limitations and patterns.

Grade (my affection is waning so I better get this in now): B+