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".

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