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)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)