He watches as a column of British prisoners, led by Nicholson, marches into camp whistling 'The Colonel Bogey March.' Shears is already in the camp we've seen him steal a cigarette lighter from a corpse to bribe his way into the sick bay. The film is set in 1943, in a POW camp in Burma, along the route of a rail line the Japanese were building between Malaysia and Rangoon. By the end of 'Kwai' we are less interested in who wins than in how individual characters will behave. Like Robert Graves' World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, it shows men grimly hanging onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' (1957) is one of the few that focuses not on larger rights and wrongs but on individuals. Most war movies are either for or against their wars.
