If you’ve never seen “The Bridge on the River Kwai” this is a spoiler, but it’s Sir Alec Guinness delivering a line with such pathos that the scene has to end this way.

It’s a wonderful film (it won seven Oscars, including Best Picture), one of many excellent films set in World War II in the 1950s (“Kwai” was released in 1957) and 1960s. Think of “The Caine Mutiny,” “Stalag 17,” “From Here to Eternity,” and “Run Silent Run Deep” in the first decade after the war, and then think of “The Great Escape,” “The Longest Day,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “Von Ryan’s Express” and “Judgment at Nuremberg” in the second.