YMMV / The Bridge on the River Kwai

• Adaptation Displacement: The film is much better-known today than the novel.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Debate has raged since the film’s release whether Nicholson deliberately fell on the detonator after his My God, What Have I Done? moment.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Although a bestseller, the original novel received a fair amount of hostile response in the UK as an "anti-British" tract written by a Frenchman. This extended to some of the film's cast, namely both Alec Guinness and James Donald (which, according to Kevin Brownlow, influenced their performances). For his part, Pierre Boulle was indignant about these accusations, as he had great respect for the British he'd served with during the war and wrote other novels with a more positive view of the British military. He was at pains to explain that he based Nicholson on French officers he'd known in Indochina who collaborated with the Japanese, rather than Philip Toosey or other British POWs. The movie largely escaped this, since it was made by a British director with a mostly-British cast and crew, though it received some brickbats for its historical inaccuracies.
• Award Snub: Sessue Hayakawa, the first Asian actor to become a movie star in Hollywood, missed out on his only chance to win an Oscar that recognised his achievements - losing out to musical comedy star Red Buttons in a dramatic turn for Sayonara. And since Miyoshi Umeki became the first Asian actor to win an Oscar that night for the same film, it could have been a double victory for them.
• Fair for Its Day:
  • One of the earliest World War II films to depict Japanese characters with any degree of sympathy. Sessue Hayakawa was reportedly very proud of the film for humanizing the Japanese at a time when most Hollywood and British movies still reflected wartime Yellow Peril propaganda. It also has actual Asian actors and actresses playing all the Asian characters in an era when white actors still donned the shoe polish to play minorities.
  • Royce and one of the Thai lady porters are set up as possibly being romantically interested in one another. While it's not a major element of the story, it's remarkable that this is portrayed in a positive and light-hearted manner when interacial relationships were still frowned upon and illegal in the United States.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Oddly enough, the movie was popular in Japan during its original run, perhaps for the reason stated above.
• Homegrown Hero: Shears (who is the only one to escape and return to destroy the titular bridge) happens to be the only American soldier in the otherwise British-dominated POW camp. Needless to say, he used to be British in the original book.
• Jerkass Woobie: Shears. Yes, life in a prison camp ruled by a despot has hardened him and has made him contemptuous of by-the-book soldiers following orders like Nicholson and Warden, but he turned down a soldier who wanted to come with him and he's opportunist enough to try to worm his way out of any terrible situation however he can.
• Parody Displacement: Kenneth Alford's 1914 tune "Colonel Bogey March" is now best known as the theme tune for this movie. During World War II, the song acquired parody lyrics and became known as "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball".

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