The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 epic war film directed by David Lean and based on the 1952 novel written by Pierre Boulle. Although the film uses the historical setting of the construction of the Burma Railway in 1942–1943, the plot and characters of Boulle's novel and the screenplay are almost entirely fictional. The cast includes Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Sessue Hayakawa.
The "Colonel Bogey March" is a British march that was composed in 1914 by Lieutenant F. J. Ricketts (1881–1945), a British Army bandmaster who later became the director of music for the Royal Marines at Plymouth.
Pierre François Marie Louis Boulle was a French novelist best known for two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and Planet of the Apes (1963), that were both made into award-winning films.
Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold was an English composer. His works feature music in many genres, including a cycle of nine symphonies, numerous concertos, concert works, chamber music, choral music and music for brass band and wind band. His style is tonal and rejoices in lively rhythms, brilliant orchestration, and an unabashed tunefulness. He wrote extensively for the theatre, with five ballets specially commissioned by the Royal Ballet, as well as two operas and a musical. He also produced scores for more than a hundred films, among these The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Oscar.
David Arnold is an English film composer whose credits include scoring five James Bond films, as well as Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998) and the television series Little Britain and Sherlock. For Independence Day he received a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition Written for a Motion Picture or for Television and for Sherlock he, and co-composer Michael Price, won a Creative Arts Emmy for the score of "His Last Vow", the final episode in the third series. Arnold scored the BBC / Amazon Prime series Good Omens (2019) adapted by Neil Gaiman from his book Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett. Arnold is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.
Frederick Joseph Ricketts was an English composer of marches for band. Under the pen name Kenneth J. Alford, he composed marches which are considered to be great examples of the art. He was a Bandmaster in the British Army, and Royal Marines Director of Music. Conductor Sir Vivian Dunn called Ricketts "The British March King". Ricketts' frequent use of the saxophone contributed to its permanent inclusion in military bands.
Dunkirk is a 1958 British war film directed by Leslie Norman that depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II, and starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee. The film is based on the novels The Big Pick-Up by Elleston Trevor and Dunkirk co-authored by Lt Col Ewan Butler and Major J. S. Bradford.
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
Four Scottish Dances (Op.59) is an orchestral set of light music pieces composed by Malcolm Arnold in 1957 for the BBC Light Music Festival.
The Bridge over the River Kwai is a novel by the French novelist Pierre Boulle, published in French in 1952 and English translation by Xan Fielding in 1954. The story is fictional but uses the construction of the Burma Railway, in 1942–1943, as its historical setting, and is partly based on Pierre Boulle's own life experience working in Malaysia rubber plantations and later working for allied forces in Singapore and Indochina during World War II. The novel deals with the plight of World War II British prisoners of war forced by the Imperial Japanese Army to build a bridge for the "Death Railway", so named because of the large number of prisoners and conscripts who died during its construction. The novel won France's Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1952.
The 23rd New York Film Critics Circle Awards, honored the best filmmaking of 1957.
Percy Herbert was an English actor. He worked predominantly from the 1950s into the 1970s and became one of the most recognisable faces in post-war British cinema.
The 11th British Film Awards, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, were held on 6 March 1958, to honor the best national and foreign films of 1957.
Return from the River Kwai is a 1989 British film directed by Andrew McLaglen and starring Edward Fox, Chris Penn and Timothy Bottoms.
John Hollingsworth was a British orchestral conductor prominent in the concert hall, the ballet and opera theatre, and the film studio. He was Sir Malcolm Sargent's assistant conductor at The Proms, where he conducted over 60 times including some world and British premieres. He also conducted at the Royal Opera and Sadlers Wells, and became associated with music for British horror films of the 1950s and early 1960s.
This is a summary of 1957 in music in the United Kingdom, including the official charts from that year.
Christopher Francis Palmer was an English composer, arranger and orchestrator; biographer of composers, champion of lesser-known composers and writer on film music and other musical subjects; record producer; and lecturer. He was involved in a very wide range of projects and his output was prodigious. He came to be regarded as one of the finest symphonic orchestrators of his generation. He was dedicated to the conservation, recording and promotion of classic film scores by composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa, Elmer Bernstein and others. He wrote full biographies as well as sleeve notes, radio scripts, reviews and articles, on composers such as Benjamin Britten, Frederick Delius, Karol Szymanowski, Arthur Bliss, George Dyson, Herbert Howells, Maurice Ravel, Nikolai Tcherepnin and others.
The Hymn of Panathinaikos or Syllogos Megalos is the anthem of Panathinaikos A.O. It was written in 1958. The music is by Giorgos Mouzakis, a well-known musician and trumpeter of the era, and the lyrics are by George Oikonomidis. Leandros Papathanasiou and the Trio Belcanto and later Giannis Vogiatzis were the singers.
At the Cinema! is an album by multi-instrumentalist and composer Buddy Collette's Swinging Shepherds, a jazz group featuring four flautists, recorded in early 1959 and released on the Mercury label.
