The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
69. 1957 - The Bridge On The River Kwai
Honourable Mentions: 12 Angry Men, The Seventh Seal, Sweet Smell of Success
As much a barnstorming WW2-set men-on-a-mission movie as it is a devastating takedown of British stiff-upper-lip traditions, David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai emerges not just as one of the finest films of the 1950s, but of the war genre full-stop - overshadowed though it may be by Lean's succeeding masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia.
Starring William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and an appropriately Shakespearean Alec Guinness as the deluded colonel determined to illustrate the British Army's professionalism while interned - even at the expense of aiding the Japanese enemy - Lean's film is exceptionally photographed and genius in its subversion of post-war convention, utilising Holden's character of Shears, a US Navy officer pressed into the service of the Brits to take down a Japanese railway bridge in Burma, to illustrate the folly of British stoicism.
It's phenomenally self-critical as a piece of cinema, and all the more effective for it. "I don't care about your bridge. I don't care about your rules." Cheers to that, Shears.