Alec Guinness

London, July 10: Ronald Searle, the acclaimed satirist and former Japanese prisoner of war, has attacked the film The Bridge on the River Kwai for providing a distorted picture of the war.

Searle, 85, who was a slave labourer on the infamous Burma railway, said the film’s claim that PoWs regarded completion of the project as a sense of British pride was “romantic nonsense”.

David Lean’s Oscar-winning 1957 adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel is one of the most popular British war films ever made. It starred Alec Guinness as the stoic Colonel Nicholson, a man so obsessed with the completion of one bridge that he is willing to thwart an Allied attack on it.

Searle is strongly critical of the film, and the novel on which it was based, in a special edition of Desert Island Discs broadcast today to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

“It is nonsense and absolute rubbish. It is a romantic novel, a Frenchman’s idea of how the British should behave. A sort of ‘jolly good chaps and let’s build a bridge’.”

Searle says that far from being a source of national pride the railway was actually a symbol of national shame. He said that English officers assigned “troublemakers” ? including himself ? to the project to get them out of the way. For him the bridge remains the place “where I lost all my friends”.

Searle was sent to work on the railway in 1943 after he and two other inmates began producing a magazine to boost the morale of the prisoners. “That is one reason I got sent up to Siam,” he said.