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)
“The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“When women finally get liberated, they’ll do the same that men do—dog eat dog— that’s what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.”
—Alice Neel (1900–1984)