David Lean in scale and more extensively released internationally. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) was based on a novel by Pierre Boulle recounting the story of British and American prisoners of war trying to survive in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. The film stars William Holden and Alec Guinness and became the highest-grossing film of 1957 in the United States. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness, who had battled with Lean to give more depth to his role as an obsessively correct British commander who is
The Man Who Won the War The Man Who Won the War The Man Who Won the War (1936) is a short story by Robert Buckner. The story tells of an exiled British Naval Officer, Roger Bradman, who "really" won the First World War. Before the start of the story, Buckner writes a short paragraph explaining why none of the story can be "legally" proven. This short introduction suggests the story is fictional. Buckner writes "Neither the official records of the Belgian War Office in Brussels nor the British Admiralty Archives in London contain whole proof of what I am about to tell". "The Man Who