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:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
—Anonymous. Popular saying.
Dating from World War I—when it was used by U.S. soldiers—or before, the saying was associated with nightclub hostess Texas Quinan in the 1920s. It was the title of a song recorded by Sophie Tucker in 1927, and of a Cole Porter musical in 1929.
“Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)