Abstract
In 1957 David Lean's film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, premiered to wide popular acclaim. Yet among the British survivors of the Burma-Thailand ‘Death’ Railway which it immortalized, the film caused much distress. Widely perceived by remaining prisoners of war (POWs) as a travesty of ‘real’ experience, The Bridge on the River Kwai induced considerable survivor anxiety about the film's endurance as a dominant cultural representation of their incarceration. This article thus examines a corpus of POW memoirs which directly responded to Lean's depiction, investigating the memoirists’ perception of a distinctive ‘myth’ spawned by the film which itself became embedded in published survivor testimony after 1957.
Notes on contributor
Frances Houghton is currently completing a PhD in History at Edinburgh University where she is researching remembrance and representation of combat in post-war published military memoirs of Second World War British servicemen.
Correspondence to: The Gatehouse, Malton Road, Keldholme, York, YO62 6NT, UK. Email: [email protected].