Another great movie that could/should be on this list is The Battle of the River Plate, the battle and scuttling of the Graf Spee. Return from the River Kwai is a 1989 British film directed by Andrew McLaglen and starring Edward Fox, Chris Penn and Timothy. Fascinating Facts About 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'In the summer of 1. Tobe Hooper—who passed away on August 2. Central Texas heat to make a horror movie. Braving blistering temperatures, on- set injuries, and a shoestring budget, they produced one of the most terrifying motion pictures ever made. More than four decades after its release, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still shocks and thrills audiences with its realistic imagery, unhinged tone, and “based on a true story” marketing—and its status as one of the ultimate cult classics shows no signs of fading. Not bad for a little film that drove the cast and crew insane during production. From marathon shooting days to flying chainsaws to mafia money problems, here are 2. IT WAS INSPIRED BY A CHRISTMAS SHOPPING CROWD. The inspirations for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are surprisingly diverse, ranging from director and co- writer Tobe Hooper’s attempt to make a modern retelling of Hansel and Gretel to real- life Wisconsin murderer and corpse defiler Ed Gein. According to Hooper, though, the light bulb moment that really ignited the film came at a department store during the Christmas 1. I just kind of zoned in on it,” Hooper told Texas Monthly. The hitchhiker, the older brother at the gas station, the girl escaping twice, the dinner sequence, people out in the country out of gas.”2. LEATHERFACE IS ALLEGEDLY BASED ON A REAL PERSON HOOPER KNEW. Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes, and. Find the latest movie reviews from Empire, the world’s biggest movie destination. Discover Empire's take on the. Film locations for David Lean's The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), in Sri Lanka. The Castro Theatre is San Francisco's Historic Movie Palace. In Bridge on the River Kwai, the British soldiers arrive at the internment. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the memorable, epic World War II adventure/action, anti-war drama, was the first of. Discover Bangkok's beautiful, gleaming temples and the magnificent Grand Palace. Get lost in ancient Siamese history with a. Bangkok's temples, the Chao Praya River and the ancient capital of Ayutthaya are three of Thailand's most iconic symbols and. Leatherface, the chainsaw- wielding maniac who would go down in history as one of horror cinema’s greatest villains, shows obvious Ed Gein influence thanks to his mask crafted from human skin, but Gein was not the character’s only precursor. The idea of a mask made of human skin actually came to Hooper far more directly, and creepily.“Before I came up with the chainsaw,” Hooper said, “the story had trolls under a bridge. We changed that to the character who eventually became Leatherface. The idea actually came from a doctor I knew. I remembered that he’d once told me this story about how, when he was a pre- med student, the class was studying cadavers. And he went into the morgue and skinned a cadaver and made a mask for Halloween. ![]() We decided Leatherface would have a different human- skin mask to fit each of his moods.”3. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL TITLE. After inspiration struck, Hooper and co- writer Kim Henkel hammered out a script over several weeks and gave it the eerie title Head Cheese (named for the scene in which the hitchhiker details the process of how that particular pork product is made). Then it was changed to the menacing working title of Leatherface. It wasn’t until a week before shooting was set to begin that the eventual title arrived, suggested to Hooper and Henkel by Warren Skaaren, then head of the Texas Film Commission, who’d helped the project get financing. IT IS NOT A TRUE STORY. Though the real crimes of Ed Gein did influence Hooper and Henkel in their writing, the idea that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is itself based on a true story is something that grew out of the marketing of the film. The opening narration, which promised that “The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths,” certainly helped that along, as did the original poster and its promise that “what happened is true!” Despite this clever aura, the tale of Leatherface and his deranged family is still a work of fiction, despite continued protestations from fans even decades later.“I’ve had people say . GUNNAR HANSEN WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL LEATHERFACE. It’s hard to imagine anyone but the massive Gunnar Hansen behind the Leatherface mask in the original film now, but he was apparently not the first person cast in the role. When he first heard that the film was being made, Hansen—then a graduate student in Austin—was told he’d be “great” for the role, but that it was already cast. Then the original Leatherface quit.“Two weeks later,” Hansen recalled, “the same guy calls and says, . There’s a lot of bad karma surrounding this movie, and I’m quitting.’ So I called . LEATHERFACE WAS INSPIRED BY REAL MENTAL PATIENTS. With no real dialogue (apart from a gibberish scene that Hooper eventually cut) to drive his character, and his facial expressions hidden by a mask, Hansen had to come up with other ways to express who he thought Leatherface was. When Hooper wanted the character to “squeal like a pig,” Hansen went out into the country and studied a friend’s pigs. Then, to capture the mental instability of the character, he went to an Austin mental hospital and studied the movements of the patients there, which he then incorporated into his performance. TOBE HOOPER REALLY WANTED A PG RATING. Despite its reputation for gruesome mutilation and gore, much of the violence in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is suggested rather than directly depicted. This is because Hooper was hoping for a PG rating so that the film could reach a wider audience (there was no PG- 1. Motion Picture Association of America that he could help his cause if he limited the amount of onscreen blood.“As you watch the film, notice there’s probably about two ounces,” Hooper later joked. Alas, the film’s intensity ultimately meant it earned an R rating. Still, it’s probably not as gory as you remember. THE NARRATOR IS A YOUNG JOHN LARROQUETTE. The film’s menacing opening narration is an instant tone- setter, preparing the audience for a truly horrifying experience. The voice providing that menace? John Larroquette, then an unknown actor who was referred to Hooper by a friend. Hooper asked Larroquette to imitate Orson Welles for his reading, and while he didn’t quite get that, what the actor ultimately provided worked wonders. THE SHOOT WAS HARROWING. The Texas Chainsaw Massacrewas produced on a budget of $6. Bill Parsley, a Texas Tech administrator and former member of the Texas Legislature who fancied himself a film producer. Even in 1. 97. 3 it was a shoestring budget (John Carpenter’s famously low- budget Halloween was made for five times that amount a few years later), which meant little pay and long hours for the cast and crew. To make matters worse, the production endured a Texas summer with temperatures in excess of 1. Virtually no member of the cast went uninjured, and the heat and stench got so punishing at one point that the actors would run to the windows of the house where the dinner scene was shot to throw up and breathe a little fresh air between takes. Years later, Hooper sarcastically referred to the experience as an “interesting summer. THE LEGENDARY DINNER SCENE WAS SHOT IN A SINGLE MARATHON DAY. The dinner scene near the end of the film in which Sally (Marilyn Burns) is terrorized by Leatherface and his family is one of the most intense sequences in all of horror cinema. It feels like you’re actually watching a group of people going insane, and that’s because . THE CAST ACTUALLY DISLIKED FRANKLIN. For the role of Franklin, Sally’s wheelchair- bound brother who draws the ire of the audience when he grows angry with his more able- bodied friends simply because he can’t share in their fun, actor Paul Partain opted to take a very Method approach to his work.“I was a young, inexperienced actor who didn’t realize that it wasn’t like theater. When I first read the part, I could see that nobody wanted this guy to be there. It just hit me that he was whiny.”Partain’s commitment worked just as well behind the camera as it did in front of it. At one point he and Burns stopped speaking to each other between takes, and Hansen later recalled that Franklin was the only character he was actually happy to kill. LEATHERFACE’S VICTIMS TREATED HIM AS AN OUTSIDER BEHIND THE SCENES. As a large man who had to work every day in triple- digit heat while wearing a wool costume that he couldn’t change out of, Gunnar Hansen already had it rough while making The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He got so smelly by the end of production that the rest of the cast and crew avoided eating around him. To make matters a little more difficult, though, he also dealt with an interesting character technique that his victims engaged in. During the shoot, Burns and the other kids who would eventually fall prey to Leatherface avoided Hansen because they didn’t want to hang out with their killer.“During the filming, none of them would talk to me or be anywhere near me until they were dead,” he later recalled. This behind- the- scenes observance actually produced some intense onscreen results. For example, when Jerry (Allen Danzinger) discovers Leatherface’s slaughter room and then meets the man himself, the scream he lets out is genuine. It was apparently the first time he had seen Hansen in full costume. LEATHERFACE ACTUALLY WEARS THREE DIFFERENT MASKS. Though his name would suggest a singular horrifying visage, Leatherface actually wears multiple masks in the film—the rationale being that they were the only way he could truly express himself. There’s the plain killing mask he wears for most of the film, the “grandma” mask he wears while preparing dinner to show his “domestic side,” and the makeup- covered mask he wears to sit down to dinner, complete with a suit in the Southern tradition of dressing up for the evening meal. THE FILM’S MOST BEAUTIFUL SHOT ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN. For all its brutality, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre also made use of the natural beauty of its location to produce some truly stunning images, including one shot that almost didn’t happen. While shooting at Leatherface’s house, Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl conceived a shot that would track under the swing in the yard and follow Pam (Teri Mc. Minn) at a low angle as she walked toward the house, which would grow menacingly in the background until it towered over her. According to both Hooper and Pearl, producers (namely Parsley, who visited the set often and feared the film would be a disaster) didn’t want them to spend time on the shot, as it was not a part of the storyboards they worked from for much of the film. The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1. British- American epicwar film directed by David Lean and starring William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Alec Guinness, and featuring Sessue Hayakawa. Based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivi. The movie was filmed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The bridge in the film was near Kitulgala. Carl Foreman was the initial screenwriter, but Lean replaced him with Michael Wilson. Both writers had to work in secret, as they were on the Hollywood blacklist and had fled to England in order to continue working. As a result, Boulle, who did not speak English, was credited and received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; many years later, Foreman and Wilson posthumously received the Academy Award. In 1. 99. 7, the film was deemed . It has been listed among the best American films ever made by the American Film Institute. The commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), informs them that all prisoners, regardless of rank, are to work on the construction of a railway bridge over the River Kwai that will connect Bangkok and Rangoon. The senior British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), informs Saito that the Geneva Conventions exempt officers from manual labour. At the following morning's assembly, Nicholson orders his officers to remain behind when the enlisted men are sent off to work. Saito slaps him across the face with his copy of the conventions and threatens to have them shot, but Nicholson refuses to back down. When Major Clipton (James Donald), the British medical officer, intervenes, telling Saito there are too many witnesses for him to get away with murdering the officers, Saito leaves the officers standing all day in the intense tropical heat. That evening, the officers are placed in a punishment hut, while Nicholson is locked in an iron box. Meanwhile, three prisoners attempt to escape. Two are shot dead, but United States Navy Commander Shears (William Holden), a survivor of the sinking of the USS Houston, gets away, although badly wounded. He stumbles into a village of natives who nurse him back to health and then help him leave by boat. Nicholson refuses to compromise. Meanwhile, the prisoners are working as little as possible and sabotaging whatever they can. Should Saito fail to meet his deadline, he would be obliged to commit ritual suicide. Desperate, Saito uses the anniversary of Japan's victory in the Russo- Japanese War as an excuse to save face and announces a general amnesty, releasing Nicholson and his officers from manual labour. Nicholson conducts an inspection and is shocked by the poor job being done by his men. Over the protests of some of his officers, he allows Captain Reeves (Peter Williams) and Major Hughes (John Boxer) to design and build a proper bridge, despite its military value to the Japanese, for the sake of maintaining his men's morale. The Japanese engineers had chosen a poor site, so the original construction is abandoned and a new bridge is begun downstream. Shears is enjoying his hospital stay in Ceylon with a beautiful nurse (Ann Sears), when British Major Warden (Jack Hawkins) informs him that the U. S. Navy has transferred him over to the British to join a commando mission to destroy the bridge before it's completed. Shears is appalled at the idea of returning to a place from which he nearly died during escape. He confesses he is not an officer, but merely had appropriated an officer's uniform prior to his capture, expecting that this revelation will invalidate the transfer order. However, Warden responds he already knew the truth and tells Shears that the American Navy's desire to avoid dealing with the embarrassment of his actions is the very reason they agreed to his transfer. Assured that he will be allowed to retain the privileges of being an officer and accepting that he actually has no choice, Shears relents and . The commando team consists of four men. Meanwhile, Nicholson drives his men hard to complete the bridge on time. For him, its completion will exemplify the ingenuity and hard work of the British Army for generations, long after the war's end. When he asks that their Japanese counterparts join in as well, a resigned Saito replies that he has already given the order. The commandos parachute in, with one man killed on landing, leaving three to complete the mission. Later, Warden is wounded in an encounter with a Japanese patrol and has to be carried on a litter. He, Shears, and Canadian Lieutenant Joyce (Geoffrey Horne) reach the river in time with the assistance of Siamese women bearers and their village chief, Khun Yai. Under cover of darkness, Shears and Joyce plant explosives on the bridge towers below the water line. A train carrying soldiers and important dignitaries is scheduled to be the first use of the bridge the following day, so Warden waits to destroy both. However, at daybreak the commandos are horrified to see that the water level has dropped, exposing the wire connecting the explosives to the detonator. Making a final inspection, Nicholson spots the wire and brings it to Saito's attention. As the train is heard approaching, they hurry down to the riverbank to investigate. The commandos are shocked that their own man is about to uncover the plot. Joyce, manning the detonator, breaks cover and stabs Saito to death. Aghast, Nicholson yells for help, while attempting to stop Joyce from reaching the detonator. As he wrestles with Nicholson, Joyce tells Nicholson that he is a British officer under orders to destroy the bridge. When Joyce is shot dead by Japanese fire, Shears swims across the river, but is fatally wounded as he reaches Nicholson. Recognising the dying Shears, Nicholson exclaims, . The dazed colonel stumbles towards the detonator and collapses on the plunger just in time to blow up the bridge and send the train hurtling into the river below. Witnessing the carnage, Clipton shakes his head muttering, ! The curved- shaped truss spans are the originals on the bridge (constructed by the Japanese military during WWII) while the two trapezoidal- shaped bridge spans were provided by Japan as war reparations after the war ended in 1. Allied aircraft. The largely fictional film plot. During its construction, approximately 1. An estimated 8. 0,0. Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, or conscripted in Siam (Thailand) and Burma. Two labour forces, one based in Siam and the other in Burma, worked from opposite ends of the line towards the centre. Some consider the film to be an insulting parody of Toosey. Julie Summers, in her book The Colonel of Tamarkan, writes that Pierre Boulle, who had been a prisoner of war in Thailand, created the fictional Nicholson character as an amalgam of his memories of collaborating French officers. Toosey in fact did as much as possible to delay the building of the bridge. While Nicholson disapproves of acts of sabotage and other deliberate attempts to delay progress, Toosey encouraged this: termites were collected in large numbers to eat the wooden structures, and the concrete was badly mixed. A transcript of the interview and the documentary as a whole can be found in the new edition of John Coast's book Railroad of Death. The documentary itself was described by one newspaper reviewer when it was shown on Boxing Day 1. The Bridge on the River Kwai had been shown on BBC1 on Christmas Day 1. Their roles and characters, however, are fictionalised. For example, a Sergeant- Major Risaburo Saito was in real life second in command at the camp. In the film, a Colonel Saito is camp commandant. In reality, Risaburo Saito was respected by his prisoners for being comparatively merciful and fair towards them. Toosey later defended him in his war crimes trial after the war, and the two became friends. The bridge described in the book didn't actually cross the River Kwai. Pierre Boulle had never been to the bridge. He knew that the 'death railway' ran parallel to the River Kwae for many miles, and he therefore assumed that it was the Kwae which it crossed just north of Kanchanaburi. This was an incorrect assumption; the bridge actually crossed the Mae Klong river. The destruction of the bridge as depicted in the film is also entirely fictional. In fact, two bridges were built: a temporary wooden bridge and a permanent steel/concrete bridge a few months later. Both bridges were used for two years, until they were destroyed by Allied bombing. The steel bridge was repaired and is still in use today. This was an entertaining story. But I am writing a factual account, and in justice to these men—living and dead—who worked on that bridge, I must make it clear that we never did so willingly. We worked at bayonet point and under bamboo lash, taking any risk to sabotage the operation whenever the opportunity arose. In fact, Japanese engineers had been surveying the route of the railway since 1. The two did not collaborate on the script; Wilson took over after Lean was dissatisfied with Foreman's work. The official credit was given to Pierre Boulle (who did not speak English), and the resulting Oscar for Best Screenplay (Adaptation) was awarded to him. Only in 1. 98. 4 did the Academy rectify the situation by retroactively awarding the Oscar to Foreman and Wilson, posthumously in both cases. Subsequent releases of the film finally gave them proper screen credit. David Lean himself also claimed that producer Sam Spiegel cheated him out of his rightful part in the credits since he had had a major hand in the script. Shears, who is a British commando officer like Warden in the novel, became an American sailor who escapes from the POW camp. Also, in the novel, the bridge is not destroyed: the train plummets into the river from a secondary charge placed by Warden, but Nicholson (never realising . Boulle nonetheless enjoyed the film version though he disagreed with its climax. Burma Railway: British POW breaks silence over horrors In the Burmese town of Thanbyuzayat, the railway men can rest at last. The tombstones of 3,1. Commonwealth soldiers are laid out in a semi- circle, beginning with the As: Luke Abbott, Royal Engineer, 2. Leonard Abbott, infantryman, 2. Rai Achal, Ghurka rifleman, 2. In between lies the “Death Railway”, the line devised by Japan's Imperial Army at the height of the Second World War to transport troops and supplies from Bangkok to Burma. The line was completed in just a year, but it cost the lives of around 1. POWs and 1. 00,0. One man died for every sleeper laid. The POWs’ homecomings were quiet affairs and, until the Government introduced a new compensation scheme in 2. The railway, under construction, crosses the River Kwai. Today, however, on the 7. British survivors are at last beginning to tell their stories. Many have been interviewed for a documentary, Moving Half the Mountain, which is due to be televised next year. The story of one POW, Eric Lomax, who died last year, is being dramatised in a new film, The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman. During his three years as a POW, he wrote his entries in pencil on scraps of paper, chronicling daily life in camp. There were 1. 20 of us guarding seven miles of coastline, with one Bren . There were no Army greatcoats so we were given London Passenger Transport Board drivers’ coats.” He hardly felt prepared for Singapore. As an intelligence officer in the 1. Infantry Division, he was due to be sent to Iraq in January 1. Middle East. At the last moment, however, the division was asked to help defend the British colony from Japanese invasion. Of our whole Army, only 8. The Allies were forced to surrender in mid- February, leaving Winston Churchill smarting at “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”. Sir Harold and his division were taken to a prison camp at Changi, in the east of the island, but were forced to forage for their own food. Their captors initially told the men to pack for a “rest camp”. That was the last time we ever believed anything they said to us.” The bridge over the River Kwai where thousands of POW's died (Roy Letkey) Sir Harold’s diary entries chart their gruelling train journey to Ban Pong in Thailand. Little or no sleep at night, very hot by day in all- metal box wagons, too many in each to allow all to lie down at the same time.” From Ban Pong, they were made to march 2. Three Pagodas Pass, where they could begin work. Weakened by work and malnutrition, they quickly succumbed to tropical ulcers, beriberi – a Vitamin B deficiency that causes wasting and paralysis – and dengue, a fever spread by mosquitoes. No sleep for the wretched patients, who moan all night long – their only hope for the morning to look forward to a repetition of all the previous day’s agonies. No man deserves such a death.” Workers laying the railway. One died for each wooden sleeper. The survivors were sent back to Changi, where another 2. It is difficult to believe that in a week or two we might be free.” He sailed back to Britain with the rest of the division, where they were received by the Mayor of Bootle (he wrote they “were worth at least the Mayor of Liverpool”). He quickly got a job, travelling the world for Shell, and did his best to avoid talking about the war: “I’ve never been someone who likes looking back. He attended a preview screening of the new documentary last month and admits to spending “quite a lot of it with tears running down my cheeks”.
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