Film Soundtrack Sunday: Bridge on the River Kwai and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence

Film Soundtrack Sunday:

'Bridge on the River Kwai' (1957)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4HfWay93ubjJ0a5exojJJR?si=pwYP2XJXRmuoYFLrrpmOPQ
Youtube (Soundtrack Suite) : https://youtu.be/QKk6OGje63s

 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' (1983)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5V7xyxNhiGe9KrOfTegME7?si=r3z0Tul-SpehwEykbcIoeQ
Youtube (Main Theme): https://youtu.be/LF9_9MZyQGo

The parallels between these two films is pretty evident on the surface. Both have Japanese WWII prison camps as the setting. Both depict the defiance of prisoners and the harsh disciplinary measures of the camp commandant, and both go beyond that surface to examine Western and Eastern cultural clashes and a strange sort of connection found between such differences. Yet their scores could not be more different - and that perhaps can be ascribed to 'River Kwai' being scored by a British composer, Malcolm Arnold, while 'Mr Lawrence' was scored by electronic musician Ryuichi Sakamoto who also co-stars in the film as the harsh yet in some ways oh so humane Captain Yonoi.

Arnold's score features the striking use of the traditional 'Colonel Bogey March', memorably whistled in the film's iconic opening, and Arnold's own rousing 'River Kwai March' to set the tone for the noble determination and defiance of the captured British soldiers, and as the rest of the score progresses variates itself through increasingly discordant passages to reflect the growing madness within the camp on all sides. You get such marvellous pieces such as 'Nicholson's Victory' which registers both the 'victory' of the British within the camp along with a sympathy for Sessue Hayakawa's Colonel Saito; Colonel Nicholson's (Sessue Hayakawa) breathtaking scene of interacting with Saito not as adversaries but as comrades of sorts is accompanied by the serene 'Sunset'; and of course the 'Finale' is a masterpiece in having all the complex emotions come together in quite the explosive fashion where 'cheery' refrains of previous pieces all converge.

Meanwhile, Sakamoto's work on 'Mr Lawrence' has quite a different method in its use of electronic music, most notably in the now rather famous and frequently sampled titular instrumental. It however also seems to going for a similar thematic idea of how despite the seemingly 'rigid' structures of the camp life there is an emotional messiness to it all. The film's score attains a fine balance of using, like Arnold, deliberately disorientating pieces like 'A Brief Encounter' and 'Assembly' to suggest such emotional balances that come from characters being repressed and unable to express how they feel, most notably Yonoi, a more calming yet perhaps equally unnerving ambience in pieces like 'Last Regrets' where characters are left alone with their thoughts, and a more harmonious through line in pieces such as 'Father Christmas' where characters in showing generosity and kindness get to act 'naturally' in the goodness of their inherent human nature. It's no surprise that both film's scores have been sampled so frequently - though frankly, I think both deserve to be talked about even more nowadays.