February 9, 2008          7:30pm The Capitol Theatre A Night at the Movies The YSO and Yakima Symphony Chorus will perform signature suites from blockbuster movies. Featured composers and music: Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky, Malcom Arnold, The Bridge over the River Kwai, and John Williams, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Concert sponsors: AB Foods, Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic Guest Artist Sponsor: Janet White

Colonel Bogey March

Anyone who remembers David Lean’s epic 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai cannot forget the opening scene of the captured British company marching with proud defiance into the Japanese POW camp whistling a jaunty march. That march has come to be associated with the film to such a degree that many think of it as the March from Bridge on the River Kwai. In fact the composer, Malcolm Arnold, did supply the film with a River Kwai March, but not the tune that we hear from the captured soldiers.

They were whistling the Colonel Bogey March penned in 1914 by a British military bandmaster named F. J. Ricketts who published all of his compositions under the pseudonym, Kenneth Alford. Each line of the march’s first strain begins with the same interval (a descending minor third; you hear it on airplanes incessantly). According to legend, Alford (Ricketts) was inspired by a golfer he knew who whistled that interval—I hope very loudly—instead of yelling “fore.”

The Colonel Bogey March picked up lyrics of various sorts in its popular history including some doggerel that was quite well-known among Brits and Canadians by the onset of World War II. Anyone who knew the words appreciated the malicious irony of the British soldiers’ whistling as they strode into camp to face their Japanese captors.

            Hitler has only got one ball,
            Göring has two but very small,
            Himmler is somewhat sim’lar,
            But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.