Review of The Making of 'the Bridge on the River Kwai'

This "making of" dishes some more dirt about famed epic film director David Lean, about whom I recently took in a lot of negative views from the "making of's" that come on the deluxe RYAN'S DAUGHTER set (Lean's ill-fated follow-up to his trio of successful epics, RIVER KWAI, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and DR. ZHIVAGO). First of all, this RIVER KWAI extra explains how Lean made Sessue Hayakawa (Col. Saito, in the feature film) CRY FOR REAL by insulting the feelings of this silent movie old-timer, who was ancient enough to be Lean's father! Secondly, Lean's assistants from the 1950s gloat in retelling how their mentor "showed up" the New York film critics by locking them out of the advance screening for RIVER KWAI, if they were even a minute late. On a RYAN'S DAUGHTER extra, one of these locked-out critics has the "last laugh" on Lean, expressing NO remorse for the vicious critics gang-up he chaired against Lean in New York a decade later during the first American advanced screening for that snubbed film about the Irish Rebellion of 1916, which drastically curtailed Lean's career. (As a karmic proverb says, "what goes around comes around.") While Col. Saito in the movie seems much "softer" than the real-life Japanese POW camp commander who allowed 12,000 mostly-American slave-labor prisoners to die in order to get his bridge built, Lean appears to have been a much "harder" task-master than all his pipe-smoking archival interview footage would at first suggest.