Best Picture, 1957

Awards presented March 26, 1958

The nominees were ... 


... when they should have been ...


And the Oscar went to ... 
Up to this point, David Lean was known as a director of low-key atmospheric black-and-white films: Brief EncounterOliver TwistGreat Expectations. But the success of The Bridge on the River Kwai turned him into a director of epics, and maybe not for the better. It is perhaps the strongest product of David Lean's epic phase, with more coherence and humanity than Lawrence of Arabia, better storytelling than Doctor Zhivago, and greater conciseness than A Passage to India. This is an action epic with psychological depth, a rare enough thing today. Alec Guinness won the best actor Oscar, and the way he plays off his two antagonists, the American played by William Holden and the Japanese played by Sessue Hayawaka, is instructive to watch. The conclusion of the film is not well-handled, owing to some difficulty in filming the destruction of the bridge, but what leads up to it is classic.

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