The bridge on the River Kwai 1957 - One of the greatest war films ever made

IMDB Link
IMDB Rating: 8,3

Director: David Lean
Main Cast: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald

"The Bridge on the River Kwai ranks as one of the greatest films of all time and arguably director David Lean's best film. At the heart of the film is the performance of Alec Guinness as the obsessively principled Colonel Nicholson. In a lesser film, his character might be simplified into a heroic martyr, but The Bridge on the River Kwai revels in its moral ambiguity: no significant character is either purely a hero or purely a villain. Filmed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the film features brutal prisoner-of-war work camps that are nonetheless considerably nicer than their historical counterparts, a good decision since it frees the audience to focus on the battle of wills, at first between Nicholson and Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), later between Shears (William Holden) and Warden (Jack Hawkins). The film's closing line ('Madness... Madness') is among the best-known and most enigmatic closings in screen history.
Bridge on the River Kwai won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for the legendary British filmmaker David Lean, and Best Actor for Guinness. It also won Best Screenplay for Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel on which the film was based, even though the actual writers were blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were given their Oscars under the table." - www.allmovie.com

DVD links:

Stalag 17 1953 - POW classic with William Holden's strong performance

IMDB Link
IMDB Rating: 8,1

Director: Billy Wilder
Main Cast: William Holden, Don Taylor, Otto Preminger, Robert Strauss, Harvey Lembeck, Peter Graves, Neville Brand

"Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 was a new kind of war movie in 1953, a more realistic look at POW camp life than earlier POW movies (often British) had offered, featuring vivid depictions of larceny, betrayal, sadism, gallows humor, and a near-lynching of an innocent (though hardly guiltless) man. Wilder and his actors -- even though several are trapped in stock war-movie characterizations -- create a level of tension that forces the viewer to suspend disbelief, even as the movie seldom moves outside the confines of a single barrack. Stalag 17 helped William Holden establish his cynical, macho persona, a more hard-bitten descendant of the characters that Humphrey Bogart played in such 1940s movies as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon; (ironically, Holden and Bogart would play brothers in Wilder's next movie, Sabrina).
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Stalag 17 is as much comedy as wartime melodrama, with most of the laughs provided by Robert Strauss as the Betty Grable-obsessed "Animal" and Harvey Lembeck as Stosh's best buddy Harry. Other standouts in the all-male cast include Richard Erdman as prisoner spokesman Hoffy, Neville Brand as the scruffy Duke, Peter Graves as blonde-haired, blue-eyed "all American boy" Price, Gil Stratton as Sefton's sidekick Cookie (who also narrates the film) and Robinson Stone as the catatonic, shell-shocked Joey. Writer/producer/director Billy Wilder and coscenarist Edmund Blum remained faithful to the plot and mood the Donald Bevan/Edmund Trzcinski stage play Stalag 17, while changing virtually every line of dialogue.
William Holden won an Academy Award for his hard-bitten portrayal of Sefton." - www.allmovie.com

DVD links: