The Bridge on the River Kwai The Bridge on the River Kwai The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 British-American epic war film directed by David Lean and based on the novel "Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï" (1952) by Pierre Boulle. The film uses the historical setting of the construction of the Burma Railway in 1942–1943. The cast included William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, and Sessue Hayakawa. It was initially scripted by screenwriter Carl Foreman, who was later replaced by Michael Wilson. Both writers had to work in secret, as they were on the Hollywood blacklist and had fled to England in
The Bridge over the River Kwai the novel, the bridge is not destroyed: the train plummets into the river from a secondary charge placed by Warden, but Nicholson (never realising "what have I done?") does not fall onto the plunger, and the bridge suffers only minor damage. Boulle nonetheless enjoyed the film version though he disagreed with its climax. After the film was released, the Thais faced a problem as thousands of tourists came to see the 'bridge over the River Kwai', but no such bridge existed due to Boulle's aforementioned misassumption. As the film and book meant to 'portray' the bridge over the Mae Klong,