Where to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Trivia & production notes

• Charles Laughton was David Lean's first choice to play Nicholson, but he was either unable to get insurance coverage or unwilling to film in a tropical location.
• Cary Grant turned down the role of Nicholson to appear in The Pride and the Passion with Marlon Brando, who was later replaced by Frank Sinatra on that film.
• Alec Guinness learned he wasn't director David Lean's first choice upon arriving in Ceylon, a revelation that made him consider returning to England immediately.
• William Holden negotiated a deal giving him 10 percent of the film's gross receipts, which was considered one of the best actor contracts of its time.
• Screenwriters Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson were on the Hollywood blacklist and had to work on the script in secret while living in exile in England.
• The Academy initially credited screenwriter Pierre Boulle, who didn't speak English, with the Best Screenplay Oscar, only retroactively awarding it to Foreman and Wilson in 1984 after both had died.
• David Lean and Alec Guinness clashed over the character, with Guinness wanting to play Nicholson with humor and sympathy while Lean insisted he should be portrayed as boring.
• Alec Guinness based his walk during a key scene on his eleven-year-old son Matthew, who was recovering from polio and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
• The studio threatened to halt production after three weeks because there were no white women in the film, forcing Lean to add a scene between William Holden and a nurse on the beach.
• Composer Malcolm Arnold completed around forty-five minutes of music in just ten days and later called it the worst job of his career despite winning an Oscar and Grammy for the score.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Bridge on the River Kwai, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.