The Bridge On The River Kwai - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

  • Balu Mahendra, famous Tamil film director saw the shooting of this film at Kitulgala, Sri Lanka during his school trip and got inspired to become a film director.
  • One of the main characters in the movie Dr. Strangelove, Captain Mandrake, portrayed by Peter Sellers makes a brief reference to the events of The Bridge on the River Kwai, as if he were present. When General D. Ripper asks him if he was ever in captivity, he tells that he was captured by the Japanese and forced to build a bridge in Thailand, while he was regularly beaten and tortured for no reason.
  • Actor Tom Selleck has a continuing association with Kwai, first in several episodes of Magnum, P.I. in which the character Higgens was a POW who worked on the bridge in WWII, and then two decades later when Tom (as Jesse Stone) watches the end of the film on TV in Innocents Lost, (which Selleck co-wrote).
  • In the video game Call of Duty: World at War, the multiplayer map Banzai features a bridge that has astonisihing similarities to the bridge that appears in this film. In addition, the console codename for the map is "mp_kwai".

Read more about this topic:  The Bridge On The River Kwai

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger.... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)