"Bridge" work

If you’re a reg­u­lar vis­it­or to Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere site, you already know how I spent my Saturday—making the trek to Suffern, New York to pay a vis­it to my pals at the majest­ic Lafayette Theater, and check out their inaug­ur­al offer­ing for the new sea­son of its Big Screen Classics rep series, a new digit­al res­tor­a­tion of David Lean’s 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai. I did not bring my cam­era, but I should have, because the reas­on the sea­son star­ted a little late this year is because the theat­er was under­go­ing some sig­ni­fic­ant res­tor­a­tion, par­tic­u­larly on its gor­geous main hall ceil­ing, and it’s really a sight. Jeff put up some video on his site, but I’ll get some more shots when I go back for…well, I’ll get to that in a bit.

Apparently the new digit­al res­tor­a­tion of Kwai is mostly for dis­sem­in­a­tion in the digit­al domain (the Blu-ray comes out on November 2). A vari­ety of cir­cum­stances led to Lafayette pro­jec­tion­ist Pete Apruzesse pro­ject­ing the pic­ture digit­ally, from a hard drive, more or less. Wells was not thrilled with the new ver­sion; I thought it looked very mixed, but really shone in cer­tain scenes, par­tic­u­larly the jungle pur­suit of the Japanese sol­dier by Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne (Jeff had left the screen­ing by this point). But as good as it could look, there was no escap­ing its, well, digit­al­ness; the film grain in the low-angle shots of the sun-blasted blue sky (a lot of these per­spect­ives reminded me of Black Narcissus, by Lean’s old col­lab­or­at­ors and mas­ters Powell and Pressburger) looked like the expert repro­duc­tion of film grain rather than, you know, the real thing. As my friend Kent Jones com­men­ted in a below post apro­pos the vari­ous pro­jec­tions of Olivier Assayas’ shot-on-35mm/projected-in-the‑U.S.-only-in-digital Carlos, everything’s in a state of trans­ition now. Flux is the name of the game. We’re gonna get a lot of good with the bad, and for the most part we’re gonna get a lot of mixed, for a while. On the whole I was­n’t dis­pleased with how this look. 

And I was really thrilled to re-experience the film on such a big screen and such a willing-to-receive-cinematic-bliss atmo­sphere, which is a real intan­gible of theat­er view­ing exper­i­ence and one that the Lafayette deliv­ers every time. Truth to tell, it’s been dec­ades since I’ve seen Kwai in its entirety, and I was really blown away by what a mar­vel of cine­mat­ic engin­eer­ing and con­struc­tion it is. Once William Holden’s Shears makes his escape, the film moves along two par­al­lel nar­rat­ive tracks that even­tu­al­lym, and of course tra­gic­ally, con­verge. Neither of those narratives—the build­ing of the bridge and the mis­sion to infilt­rate its site and des­troy is—is an inor­din­ately com­plex one in and of itself, but Lean and screen­writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, work­ing from Pierre Boulle’s nov­el, build in all these mod­ules in the form of set pieces that enrich the film’s char­ac­ter­iz­a­tions and ten­sions beau­ti­fully, high­lights of course includ­ing the failed din­ner nego­ti­ation scene between sad Japanese mar­tin­et Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) and his seem­ingly mas­ochist­ic but (or is it “and”?) actu­ally crazy-like-a-fox defi­er Nicholson (Alec Guinness), and the afore­men­tioned jungle chase. The actu­al “story” of Kwai could have been cine­mat­ic­ally told in ninety or 110 minutes; the two hours and forty minutes or so that the film actu­ally takes feel abso­lutely neces­sary, because what looks to be added-value mater­i­al actu­ally com­prises the nervous sys­tem and guts of the film.

In any case, an amaz­ing pleas­ure. One glitch was that the cav­ernous house was a trifle chilly, which so dis­com­fited my com­pan­ion Mr. Wells that he had to split early, as he relates in one of his posts. As Pete and myself point out there, this was truly by acci­dent rather than design—a fur­nace mal­func­tion that cropped up sud­denly and could­n’t be fixed in such short order—and future Big Screen Classics events, includ­ing its frankly incred­ible three-day Horror-thon com­ing November 5, 6, and 7, which I’ll be drool­ing about fur­ther in the near future, prom­ise to be fully heated. I’m sorry Jeff was uncom­fort­able, but I’m glad he got the chance to check out the ven­ue, which I know impressed him. I give the guy kind of a hard time about a lot of stuff; much of it is inter­net theat­er, but the fact is that we do have strong opin­ions and strong per­son­al­it­ies and we hold to those things. But Jeff is a true believ­er in the cinema, and a trip to this joint is good for the true believ­er­’s soul. And it was fun hanging with him; he blusters a lot on his site (as I, of course, do here), and at his most eccent­ric he can come off like a char­ac­ter out of The Bonfire of the Vanities as rewrit­ten by P.G. Wodehouse, but he’s the real deal. It was fun to have this excur­sion and I hope he comes out again.