William Holden movies on TCM: The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch
William Holden is Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” featured actor on Aug. 21. Throughout the day, TCM has been showing several William Holden movies made at Columbia, though his work at Paramount (e.g., I Wanted Wings, Dear Ruth, Streets of Laredo, Dear Wife) remains mostly off-limits.
Right now, TCM is presenting David Lean’s 1957 Best Picture Academy Award winner and all-around blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai, the Anglo-American production that turned Lean into filmdom’s brainier Cecil B. DeMille. Until then a director of mostly small-scale dramas, Lean (quite literally) widened the scope of his movies with the widescreen-formatted Southeast Asian-set World War II drama, which clocks in at 161 minutes.
The plot: At a Japanese-ruled prisoner-of-war camp in Burma, inmates are ordered to build a strategic railway bridge across the River Kwai. A British officer believes that’s an opportunity to showcase the British Army’s superior skills.
Even though William Holden was The Bridge on the River Kwai’s box office draw, the film actually belongs to Alec Guinness’ British commander and to the prisoner-of-war camp’s Japanese leader Sessue Hayakawa – the first and possibly the biggest East Asian Hollywood star to this day. (Audiences couldn’t forget the guy who branded white woman Fannie Ward in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 melodrama The Cheat.)
Guinness won the year’s Best Actor Oscar; Hayakawa was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category, but lost to U.S. performer Red Buttons in the (a bit ironically) Japanese-set Sayonara.
Born Yesterday and William Holden’s Wild movies
Broderick Crawford is a crass, unscrupulous millionaire out to pocket a Washington politician or two in George Cukor’s politically conscious comedy Born Yesterday (1950). Meanwhile, he hires a cultivated journalist to teach his blonde moll a lesson in cultural etiquette.
Once again, although William Holden was the official box office draw, Born Yesterday actually belongs to somebody else: Broadway import Judy Holliday, who went on to win that year’s Best Actress Academy Award and to become a movie star of sorts.
Written by Garson Kanin (originally for Jean Arthur, who left the play before it opened), Born Yesterday’s political message feels a little simplistic today; compounding matters, Holliday, though a capable, personalbe actress, suffers from stage-itis, a not uncommon disease found in 1950s movie adaptations of Broadway plays – e.g., Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed, Deborah Kerr and John Kerr in Tea and Sympathy.
Ultimately, the most naturalistic performance in Born Yesterday is William Holden’s in what amounts to a straight-man role.
In Robert Wise’s Executive Suite, a powerful business magnate suddenly dies without naming a successor. As a result, members of his board of directors fight over who should run the company and how it should be run. William Holden is, obviously, the idealist, but Barbara Stanwyck is the scene-stealer.
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) is remembered for its epoch-making graphic violence, which is absent from the similarly titled The Wild Rovers (1971) – a light, perfectly watchable Western pairing a haggard-looking William Holden with baby-faced Ryan O’Neal.
According to recent reports, Will Smith has threatened to remake The Wild Bunch for the 21st-century moviegoing crowd.
William Holden movies: TCM schedule
3:00 AM MISS GRANT TAKES RICHMOND (1949)
Director: Lloyd Bacon.
Cast: Lucille Ball, William Holden, Janis Carter.
88m4:30 AM BOOTS MALONE (1952)
Director: William Dieterle.
Cast: William Holden, Stanley Clements, Basil Ruysdael.
104m6:30 AM FORCE OF ARMS (1951)
Director: Michael Curtiz.
Cast: William Holden, Nancy Olson, Frank Lovejoy.
98m8:30 AM EXECUTIVE SUITE (1954)
Director: Robert Wise.
Cast: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Shelley Winters, Paul Douglas, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Nina Foch, Tim Considine, William Phipps.
104m10:30 AM THE MOON IS BLUE (1953)
Director: Otto Preminger.
Cast: William Holden, David Niven, Maggie McNamara.
99m12:30 PM PICNIC (1956)
Director: Joshua Logan.
Cast: William Holden, Kim Novak, Rosalind Russell, Cliff Robertson, Betty Field, Arthur O’Connell, Susan Strasberg, Verna Felton, Reta Shaw.
113m2:30 PM THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE (1968)
Director: Andrew V. McLaglen.
Cast: William Holden, Cliff Robertson, Vince Edwards.
132m4:45 PM CARSON ON TCM: WILLIAM HOLDEN (12/1/76)
TCM presents a classic interview from The Tonight Show featuring Johnny Carson and William Holden.
9m5:00 PM THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)
Director: David Lean.
Cast: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald, André Morell, Peter Williams, John Boxer, Percy Herbert, Harold Goodwin, Henry Okawa, Geoffrey Horne.
161m8:00 PM BORN YESTERDAY (1950)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Judy Holliday, William Holden, Broderick Crawford, Howard St. John, Frank Otto, Barbara Brown.
102m10:00 PM THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
Director: Sam Peckinpah.
Cast: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sánchez, Ben Johnson, Emilio Fernández, Elsa Cárdenas.
144m12:30 AM THE WILD ROVERS (1971)
Director: Blake Edwards.
Cast: William Holden, Ryan O’Neal, Karl Malden.
137m
“William Holden Movies on TCM” notes
William Holden movie schedule via the TCM website.