A whistled song

When I was little, one relatively cheap entertainment for the family was the Cloud Drive-in Theater, out in the boonies west of St Cloud.  Mom would make a grocery bag full of pop-corn and we'd put our pajamas on.  Part of the fun was leaving the house at dusk, right when we were usually getting ready to go to bed.  We didn't go often, so we never remembered the swarms of mosquitoes at the drive-in--the window had to be open enough for the in-car speaker, and besides, it was SUMMER in Minnesota, and too hot to sit in a closed car.  Ahh, such fun!

It was probably 1958.  I would have been almost 9 when mom & dad decided we'd go see the Bridge on the River Kwai--not exactly a good kids' film, but I'm sure they thought we'd be sleeping by the time anything scary happened.  They were wrong about that.
The movie had a really catchy whistled theme song--is it going thru your head yet?  Every time I've heard it in the last 50 years, I've thought about how incredibly cruel people can be to each other (the metal cages in the movie horrified me).  If there was nobility or understanding in the movie, I missed it.

Yesterday on MPR, there was a discussion of "the best war movies", and of course, 'Bridge' came up.  It made me wonder what dad's reaction to it was back then.  These were Brittish officers in a Japanese POW camp in Burma, and he'd been a US army infantryman in the North African and European theaters, but he would have made connections. But then, I was a kid, and he was a grown-up who'd been there--what could I have asked him?