The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai(2000)
The true story of what happened in World War 2 Thailand
Made famous by the 1957 Hollywood movie, the bridges of the River Kwai emblematize one of the most misunderstood events in history. Contrary to the romanticized film version, the structures represent a period of terror, desperation, and death for over 16,000 POWs and 100,00 local slaves. The Thailand - Burma Railway was the vision of the Japanese Imperial Army: a 250-mile track cut through dense jungle that would connect Bangkok and Rangoon. To accomplish this nearly impossible feat, the fanatical and ruthless Japanese engineers used POWs and local slaves as manpower. Candid interviews with men who lived through the atrocity - including Dutch, Australian, British, and American POWs - illuminate the violence and horror of their three-and-a-half-year internment. From Britain's surrender of Singapore the enduring force of friendship, The True Story Of The Bridge On The River Kwai narrates a moving and unforgettable account of a period in history that must be remembered.
Movie: The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai
Top 1 Billed Cast
Himself - Narrator
HomePage
Overview
Made famous by the 1957 Hollywood movie, the bridges of the River Kwai emblematize one of the most misunderstood events in history. Contrary to the romanticized film version, the structures represent a period of terror, desperation, and death for over 16,000 POWs and 100,00 local slaves. The Thailand - Burma Railway was the vision of the Japanese Imperial Army: a 250-mile track cut through dense jungle that would connect Bangkok and Rangoon. To accomplish this nearly impossible feat, the fanatical and ruthless Japanese engineers used POWs and local slaves as manpower. Candid interviews with men who lived through the atrocity - including Dutch, Australian, British, and American POWs - illuminate the violence and horror of their three-and-a-half-year internment. From Britain's surrender of Singapore the enduring force of friendship, The True Story Of The Bridge On The River Kwai narrates a moving and unforgettable account of a period in history that must be remembered.
Release Date
2000-09-26
Average
8
Rating:
4.0 startsTagline
The true story of what happened in World War 2 Thailand
Genres
Languages:
English日本語Keywords
Recommendations Movies
Red Desert(it)
In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.
Things to Come(fr)
Nathalie teaches philosophy at a high school in Paris. She is passionate about her job and particularly enjoys passing on the pleasure of thinking. Married with two children, she divides her time between her family, former students and her very possessive mother. One day, Nathalie’s husband announces he is leaving her for another woman. With freedom thrust upon her, Nathalie must reinvent her life.
French Connection II(en)
"Popeye" Doyle travels to Marseilles to find Alain Charnier, the drug smuggler that eluded him in New York.
The Wild Pear Tree(tr)
Fresh out of university, a Turkish young man with literary aspirations returns to his home village, and to his father, a debt-ridden man with a gambling problem.
Johnny Guitar(en)
On the outskirts of town, the hard-nosed Vienna owns a saloon frequented by the undesirables of the region, including Dancin' Kid and his gang. Another patron of Vienna's establishment is Johnny Guitar, a former gunslinger and her lover. When a heist is pulled in town that results in a man's death, Emma Small, Vienna's rival, rallies the townsfolk to take revenge on Vienna's saloon – even without proof of her wrongdoing.
Toto and the Kings of Rome(it)
An aging, down-and-out public employee must face the primary school examination.
Good Morning(ja)
A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
Ninotchka(en)
A stern Russian woman sent to Paris on official business finds herself attracted to a man who represents everything she is supposed to detest.
A Man Escaped(fr)
A captured French Resistance fighter during World War II engineers a daunting escape from prison.
Desperate Living(en)
After killing her husband, Peggy Gravel and her murderous maid Grizelda wind up in the crazy town of Mortville, where Queen Carlotta presides over a sleazy collection of misfits.
Sunset Boulevard(en)
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
Gertrud(da)
Hopeless romantic Gertrud inhabits a turn-of-the-century milieu of artists and musicians, where she pursues an idealized notion of love that will always elude her. She abandons her distinguished husband and embraces an affair with a young concert pianist, who falls short of her desire for lasting affection. When an old lover returns to her life, fresh disappointments follow, and Gertrud must try to come to terms with reality.
Woman in the Dunes(ja)
A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.
Close Your Eyes(es)
Years after his mysterious disappearance, Julio Arenas, a famous Spanish actor, is back in the news thanks to a television program.
How Green Was My Valley(en)
A man in his fifties reminisces about his childhood growing up in a Welsh mining village at the turn of the 20th century.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles(fr)
A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores and takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.
The Shop Around the Corner(en)
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
Similar Movies
The Forger(en)
Adolfo Kaminsky started saving lives when chance and necessity made him a master forger. As a teenager, he became a member of the French Resistance and used his talent to save the lives of thousands of Jews. The Forger is a well-crafted origin story of a real-life superhero.
Cross of Iron(en)
It is 1943, and the German army—ravaged and demoralised—is hastily retreating from the Russian front. In the midst of the madness, conflict brews between the aristocratic yet ultimately pusillanimous Captain Stransky and the courageous Corporal Steiner. Stransky is the only man who believes that the Third Reich is still vastly superior to the Russian army. However, within his pompous persona lies a quivering coward who longs for the Iron Cross so that he can return to Berlin a hero. Steiner, on the other hand is cynical, defiantly non-conformist and more concerned with the safety of his own men rather than the horde of military decorations offered to him by his superiors.
Breakthrough(de)
Starting in late May 1944, during the German retreat on the Eastern Front, Captain Stransky (Helmut Griem) orders Sergeant Steiner (Richard Burton) to blow up a railway tunnel to prevent Russian forces from using it. Steiner's platoon fails in its mission by coming up against a Russian tank. Steiner then takes a furlough to Paris just as the Allies launch their invasion of Normandy.
M/S Gustloff(de)
Joseph Vilsmaier Two-part TV movie focuses on the tragic events surrounding the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German passenger ship, at the end of World War II. On 30 January 1945, Captain Hellmuth Kehding was in charge of the ship, evacuating wounded soldiers and civilians trapped by the Red Army. Soon after leaving the harbor of Danzig, it was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine and sank in less than an hour.
Midway(en)
This war drama depicts the U.S. and Japanese forces in the naval Battle of Midway, which became a turning point for Americans during World War II.
Battle of Britain(en)
In 1940, the Royal Air Force fights a desperate battle against the might of the Luftwaffe for control of the skies over Britain, thus preventing the Nazi invasion of Britain.
Pope Vs. Hitler(en)
In the darkest days of World War II, St. Peter's was shrouded in the shadow of the swastika. But even as the Führer surrounded him, the Pope was plotting a secret counter-offensive. Wartime Pontiff Pius XII has been derided for his public silence about the Holocaust. But evidence suggests his silence may have been subterfuge.
D-Day: Normandy 1944(en)
June 6, 1944: The largest Allied operation of World War II began in Normandy, France. Yet, few know in detail exactly why and how, from the end of 1943 through August 1944, this region became the most important location in the world. Blending multiple cinematographic techniques, including animation, CGI and stunning live-action images, “D-Day: Normandy 1944” brings this monumental event to the world’s largest screens for the first time ever. Audiences of all ages, including new generations, will discover from a new perspective how this landing changed the world. Exploring history, military strategy, science, technology and human values, the film will educate and appeal to all. Narrated by Tom Brokaw, “D-Day: Normandy 1944” pays tribute to those who gave their lives for our freedom… A duty of memory, a duty of gratitude.
Kinderland ist abgebrannt(de)
Former classmates at a school in the Southern Germany city of Ulm, Jewish and non-Jewish, recall their childhood in Nazi Germany.
Saints and Soldiers(en)
Five American soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II struggle to return to Allied territory after being separated from U.S. forces during the historic Malmedy Massacre.
Spying on Hitler’s Army: The Secret Recordings(en)
British intelligence undertook an audacious operation to listen in on the private conversations of 10,000 German prisoners of war without their ever knowing they were being overheard. The prisoners' unguarded reminiscences and unintentional confessions have only just come to light, and prove how closely the German army were involved in the atrocities of the Holocaust. British intelligence requisitioned three stately homes for this epic task, and converted each into an elaborate trap. The 100,000 hours of conversation they captured provided crucial intelligence that changed the course of the war, and revealed some of its worst horrors, from rape to mass executions to one of the earliest bulletins from the concentration camps. But when the fighting ended, the recordings were destroyed and the transcripts locked away for half a century. Only now have they been declassified, researched and cross-referenced.
Charlotte Gray(en)
This is a drama set in Nazi-occupied France at the height of World War II. Charlotte Gray tells the compelling story of a young Scottish woman working with the French Resistance in the hope of rescuing her lover, a missing RAF pilot. Based on the best-selling novel by Sebastian Faulks.
Goering's Catalogue: A Collection of Art and Blood(fr)
For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.
A Woman in Berlin(de)
A woman tries to survive the invasion of Berlin by the Soviet troops during the last days of World War II.
Conspiracy(en)
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials meet to determine the manner in which the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" can be best implemented.
Zeitgeist(en)
A documentary examining possible historical and modern conspiracies surrounding Christianity, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the Federal Reserve bank.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence(ja)
Island of Java, 1942, during World War II. British Major Jack Celliers arrives at a Japanese prison camp, run by the strict Captain Yonoi. Colonel John Lawrence, who has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture, and Sergeant Hara, brutal and simpleton, will witness the struggle of wills between two men from very different backgrounds who are tragically destined to clash.
Windtalkers(en)
Joe Enders is a gung-ho Marine assigned to protect a "windtalker" - one of several Navajo Indians who were used to relay messages during World War II because their spoken language was indecipherable to Japanese code breakers.
Attack! The Battle for New Britain(en)
Actual footage by the United States Signal Corps of the landing and attack on Arawe Beach, Cape Glouster, New Britain island in 1943 in the South Pacific theatre of World War Two, and the handicaps of the wild jungle in addition to the Japanese snipers and pill-box emplacements.
Munich, or Peace in Our Time(fr)
September 28, 1938, war is about to break out. Tension was mounting, as Chamberlain and Daladier on one side, and Hitler and Mussolini on the other, met in Munich. This conference marked the culmination of the weakness of European democracies in the face of the rise of fascism. Through period documents and interviews, author Marcel Ophüls recounts this meeting and recreates the European climate of 1938.