While not an auteur in the approved sense, David Lean had two great talents as a director, in essential aspects of the art of film – editing, and staging action in space for the camera (whether confined space of a room or endless space of desert or steppe). Overcoming the prohibitions of his strict Quaker parents, passing up college and quitting a job with his father’s accounting firm, Lean developed a passionate awe for cinema and went to work at a movie studio, working his way up from “tea boy” to film cutter, and that background marked his entire career.
In 2008 Anthony Lane wrote a great centenary remembrance of David Lean in The New Yorker, and quoted Lean’s own account of his cinematic annunciation: “I would look at that light as a pious boy might react to a shaft of sunlight in a cathedral. I still find it a slightly mystical experience. Something to do with forbidden and secret things.”
(Here is link to Lane on Lean article, if you have subscriber access. And while I’m at it, here’s link to Netflix listing of the films discussed below. Click through to read my summary of all the director’s films.)
After serving a varied apprenticeship and becoming an expert editor, staging came to the fore(deck) for Lean when he started to work with Noel Coward on In Which We Serve (1942), a quasi-documentary history of one of His Majesty’s naval destroyers. Coming from a theater background, Coward left the actual setting up of shots to Lean, who received a co-director credit (and a lesson in directing actors). Coward, besides writing the script and music as well as producing, starred as the ship’s captain, based on Mountbatten. For a period piece of wartime propaganda and stifling class-consciousness, the film holds up quite well.
Lean’s collaboration with Coward continued through his next three films, as he got sole directing credit for adaptations of the playwright’s stage productions. This Happy Breed (1944) follows a working class English family from the end of the first world war, when they move into their Clapham house, to the brink of the second, as they move out. In surprising early Technicolor, Lean demonstrates an Ozu-like feel for the geometry of domestic interiors. Robert Newton and Celia Johnson excel as the parents, well-supported by children and neighbors, some of whom would become familiar in future films, notably John Mills and Kay Walsh, one of Lean’s many wives. I really enjoyed this film, particularly for its knowing depiction of the period and place in which my mother, a British war bride, grew up.
Brief Encounter (1945) lives up to its classic status as a masterpiece of subdued English passion. The setting of a suburban rail station, where a married man and a married woman meet in passing and fall into a love that hovers on the brink of consummation, heralds Lean’s lifelong obsession with train imagery. Much of the action takes place in the station’s tea shop, waiting for the local and hearing the express rush by, a vehicle of passion and potential self-destruction. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are terrific as the might-have-been lovers. Over weekly meetings, they venture out of the station for a bad romantic movie or an awkward boatride in the park or guilty lunches, until they wind up in a room together, only to return to their spouses and lives. That stiff upper lip covers a lot of quivering emotion. Not much happens, but what does is exquisitely framed.
Of their other collaboration, Coward told Lean after seeing Blithe Spirit (1945), “You just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote” -- which is at least half true. The film was a hit at the time, but doesn’t hold up. Mr. Harrison is Rex-y enough in the lead, but nothing like when he takes the act to the brink of self-parody in My Fair Lady. Here he’s a smug novelist who for research and amusement consults a medium -- Margaret Rutherford in a celebrated role – and is dismayed when she conjures up his deceased first wife. Hijinks ensue with second wife, none remarkable. A sense of humor is not among Lean’s prime virtues.
Though he shared screenwriting credit on most of his films, Lean was really dependent on other writers for source material, and found his greatest co-author in Charles Dickens. His next two films, in the view of many, were his best, as well as the best movie adaptations of Dickens. Great Expectations (1946) has much to recommend it, besides the pathos and humor of the great Victorian novelist. The film is a master class in editing and photography, with atmospheric set design, and a fine repertory of performances ranging from Lean regular John Mills as the adult Pip to Alec Guinness and Jean Simmons in their first screen roles. Finlay Currie and Martita Hunt are definitive as Magwitch and Miss Havisham. Though I may prefer my Dickens in expansive BBC adaptations like Bleak House or even bold appropriations like Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations, Lean’s film is certainly a miracle of compression and craft.
Oliver Twist (1948) may be even more remarkable, about as dark a view of human nature as popular entertainment could allow. It was the supposed anti-Semitism of Alec Guinness’s portrayal of Fagin (actually quite delicious, though just as much gay pedophile as Jewish gonif) that delayed release for several years in this country, but I suspect the film was just too noir for America, even in the heyday of noir. There’s a happy ending tacked on perfunctorily, and some comic caricature, but most of film is exceptionally grim, with a particular horror to Bill Sykes (Robert Newton) murdering his girlfriend Nancy (Kay Walsh, who must have guessed she wouldn’t be Mrs. David Lean for long). John Howard Davies is appealingly angelic as Oliver (and grew up to be a BBC producer with Monty Python), while Anthony Newley is artful as the Dodger. Hard to believe that Carol Reed, Lean’s great rival for the title of best British director, would later make this story into the over-busy but crowd-pleasing and Oscar-winning musical Oliver!. Lean’s film is nothing to sing about, but plenty to admire, despite the bludgeoning.
For his next film Lean reluctantly took an assignment from the studio to salvage a production already in process, and made something out of the adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel. Though The Passionate Friends (1948), with its unfortunate title, was a flop at the box office, film scholar David Thomson declares it Lean’s “film most deserving recovery,” and I’m inclined to agree. It’s a fairly standard triangle, made notable by an odd flashback-within-flashback structure that was probably too intricate for audiences of the time, and by Claude Rains as the wronged but cannily in-control husband. The icy blond Ann Todd, with an angular face that wants to command the screen like Garbo’s but doesn’t, is in love with Trevor Howard, an academic without means, but marries banker Rains for wealth and position in society. Fate tries to correct her choice, but her husband holds the reins and outmaneuvers the illicit lovers. A setting at a Swiss resort takes Lean out of the studio, and the film introduces him to his next wife, her chilly quality rather a draw to an equally frosty man. (The story goes that she came up to Lean at some much later premiere and gave him a hug, and afterwards he turned to his companion and asked, “Who the hell was that woman?” When told, “Your wife,” he inquired, “Which one?”)
As a wedding present, Lean next made Madeleine (1949), giving Ann Todd a showcase for a role she had played on stage, the true story of a young society woman in 1857 Glasgow, who is tried for the poisoning of an inconvenient lover totally unacceptable to her Victorian autocrat of a father. The film stays awfully true to the facts of the celebrated case, right down to the ambiguous verdict. The sense of period and milieu is very strong, and the lingering enigma of the central character, while partly owing to the limitations of the actress, is definitely in tune with more modern sensibilities, giving the film some enduring value.
For his next project, The Sound Barrier (1952), Lean followed his own interests rather than preexisting material, and after extensive research with test pilots and aircraft design, enlisted playwright Terence Rattigan to compose the script. Though the story follows the lives of test pilots and their wives, it revolves around the powerful figure of the self-made airplane magnate played most impressively by Ralph Richardson. Ann Todd plays his daughter, which requires a bit more warmth than she can bring to the role, as her brother and husband are sacrificed to her father’s obsession with breaking the sound barrier. Lean’s excitement with the material is palpable in the semi-documentary presentation of breakthroughs in flying and jet propulsion. This is worthy pre-history to The Right Stuff. Though these three films with Ann Todd are nearly forgotten, each is its own way worth seeing.
Lean turned again toward preexisting material with Hobson’s Choice (1953), an old warhorse of a Victorian stage comedy, about a Lancashire bootmaker who tries to rule Lear-like over the fates of his three daughters. Charles Laughton is at his hammy best as the inebriated domestic tyrant. Brenda de Banzie is the level-headed eldest daughter, who resents being put “on the shelf” and held to her father’s service. She takes the best workman in the shop as husband, and turns the dimwitted John Mills into the canny proprietor of his own shop. Despite its antique pedigree, I found this quite amusing and highly enjoyable, so maybe Lean is capable of humor after all, if not with a very light touch.
See the way he directs Katherine Hepburn in Summertime (1955), allowing her to mug her way through a romantic role that should be a delicate balance of passion and retreat, but for which she just alternates exaggerated masks of comedy and tragedy. In this adaptation of a stage play, she’s a working spinster from Ohio living out her dream of a transformative trip to Venice, in the company of the obligatory Italian gentleman (?) in Rossano Brazzi. Lean turns in the direction of his subsequent international career by shooting in color on location in picturesque places, and the film does succeed as a mini-vacation. Despite implausible and unmotivated swings of emotion, Hepburn is still a great movie star, if not quite the actress for this role, so the proceedings are highly watchable, if not finally satisfying.
Thereafter, Lean’s career takes an epic turn, with mammoth productions in exotic locales. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was shot in the jungles of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Produced by Sam Spiegel with American financing, this is Lean’s first film in the “big bow-wow style” (as Sir Walter Scott characterized his own novels in contrast to Jane Austen’s), though it may have more autobiographical overtones than any of his other films. Adapted from a Pierre Boulle novel, the central character is a British colonel in a Japanese POW camp in Burma, memorably played by Alec Guinness, whose monomaniacal commitment to the task at hand drives him and his men to build a better bridge for his captors than they could ever build on their own. William Holden is his antithesis as the easy-going American reluctantly recruited for a mission to blow up the bridge. Ambiguities mount as the bridge goes up and then comes down, so the film works less as a statement of the futility of war than a character study. And the colonel’s focus on the project at hand to the exclusion of all other considerations is not dissimilar to that of a director on a massive, prolonged, remote location shoot. I’m not entirely sure I ever saw the whole film till I showed it at the Clark on the big screen, so I was more impressed than I might be on a second look. The film was of course a huge hit -- winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor – and from here on, it was nothing but big-budgets and epic scope for Lean.
Anyone reading this must have personal memories and opinions of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) -- the acknowledged pinnacle of David Lean’s career and of imperial filmmaking in general, the essence of epic -- so I won’t waste words on description, except to say that the latest Blu-ray restoration is remarkable and showed up spectacularly on the big screen of the Clark. There remain confusions in the character of Lawrence, as ably embodied by Peter O’Toole, that do not rise to the level of enigma, but all quibble is swept away in the scope and intensity of the visuals. And fifty years on, the whole question of Arab nationalism and the Middle Eastern boundaries imposed by the British Empire looms much larger in our consciousness than it did at the film’s original release. It’s possible, if anachronistic, to take objection to the casting of Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn as Arab leaders, the sly and the belligerent respectively, but Omar Sharif is Egyptian at least, and each serves well within the broad outlines of Robert Bolt’s script. Claude Rains stands out as the amused British diplomat who has seen and understood it all. But the overpowering imagery (by Freddie Young) and music (by Maurice Jarre) carry one along, past all cavil, into the rapture of spectacle. They don’t make movies like this anymore, which is probably a good thing, but what a wonder when they did.
The same may be said of the even bigger blockbuster Dr. Zhivago (1965), where the melodrama shifts largely from militaristic to romantic, but the creative team of director, scriptwriter, cinematographer, and composer remains together. I can’t say this Lean holds up quite as well as Lawrence, but it still has the power to ignite feelings I had when I first saw it as an 18-year-old -- to share Omar Sharif’s misty calf-eyed gaze at the loveliness of Julie Christie, both more cinematic icons than real and rounded characters. Here expanses of snow replace the sands of the desert, and the deserted ice-palace of Varykino recalls Miss Havisham’s abode. Trains thrust through the landscape, red blood splashes on white snow, the candle burns behind the window through a halo of ice -- the images can take your breath away and the music invades your brain, taking your mind where a skeptical viewpoint would shy away. It’s only a movie after all, but still it moves. The winds of revolution blow through domestic interiors, but all that matters is the lovers looking into each other’s eyes, as the balalaika soars. Despite my susceptibility to all this manufactured sentiment, I can’t help noticing details like how clean the family’s clothes are when they arrive at Varykino after weeks in a cattle car with dozens of other refugees, emblematic of how sanitized the proceedings are, right down to the rainbow over the great Soviet dam at the end. Scale supplants both intimacy and plausibility, and the insistent loveliness of the imagery undermines the story. Still, you gotta love it.
Ryan’s Daughter (1970), not so much, despite the spectacular scenery of the Irish coast. Robert Bolt conceived of an adaptation of Madame Bovary for his wife, Sarah Miles, to play, but it wound up being transposed to the far west of Ireland during the First World War, and bloated beyond recognition. I usually like Sarah Miles, but here she is given too much time to emote, just as the landscape is given too much time to be admired. Robert Mitchum is cast too far against type as the meek schoolteacher that the spoiled young woman impulsively marries. Christopher Jones, besides being a dead ringer for James Dean, is an absolute cipher as the shell-shocked British officer with whom Rosie Ryan finds an outlet for her passion. Trevor Howard is okay as the crusty priest who holds the village together, but John Mills is over the top as the village idiot who observes all, so much so that he won an Oscar as supporting actor. But mix in the Troubles and raging seas, to go with tumbles in wildflower-strewn forests and coastal caves, and you’ve got an Irish stew that is just overcooked.
It seemed that the history of film had moved on beyond Lean’s particular gifts, and well over a decade passed till he returned with A Passage to India (1984), similarly overblown but well received, with a welcomed nostalgia for old-fashioned filmmaking. He adapted E. M. Forster’s novel with literary reverence, but less than complete authenticity, sometimes winding up with muddle rather than complexity. The pageantry is pumped up right from the start, when the arrival in India of Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested is heralded by the vice-regal pomp accorded their fellow ship passenger. The elderly but adventurous British matron is well-played by Peggy Ashcroft, and her potential daughter-in-law is given nervy and conflicted intensity by Judy Davis. As in Forster’s Howards End, two well-meaning but heedless women take an interest in a man of a different class, with unhappy result all round, in this case the Muslim Dr. Aziz, played with wide-eyed eagerness by Victor Banerjee, who also tries to ingratiate himself with his imperial overlords by befriending Fielding, the schoolmaster played by James Fox. Alec Guinness again dons brownface, to general dismay, as a semi-comic Hindu wise man (he and Lean never seemed to twig to ethnic sensibilities, though his Prince Faisal in Lawrence seemed a canny characterization). The trip to the pivotal picnic at the Marabar caves is mounted with impressive spectacle, from the inevitable train ride to the novelty of elephant back. But again, there are moments that don’t ring true, done for effect rather than from a profound understanding of character, and an unwillingness to let enough be enough.
Pauline Kael’s review says something that applies not just to this final film but to the career taken as a whole: “If Lean’s technique is to simplify and to spell everything out in block letters, this kind of clarity has its own formal strength. It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it’s like a well-cared-for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this is awfully good.”
Sometimes Lean loses the economy of means that marks his best work, and grandeur descends to gradiosity, but in the movement from the intimate to the epic, he frequently makes the perfect transition, like that famous cut in Lawrence from close-up of an extinguished match to vast panorama of a desert sunrise.
David Lean is not a filmmaker with a clear and compassionate view of life, but in the composition and concatenation of images, he has few peers, and few rivals for craftsmanship and command of massive cinematic campaigns. Not always great at the understanding of human emotion, his vision is more pictorial than profound, but he made some damn fine movies in his time.
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