David Lean: Talent of a Master
by Spencer Warren
Issue 116 - September 24, 2008

Many readers likely regard The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which were the biggest Oscar winners in their respective years, as among their favorite movies. Their director, David Lean, attained the height of fame and prestige with these two works, which won the best picture and best director Oscars. This is certainly a reasonable view, but many critics, including this writer, disagree, preferring Lean’s films made before these two spectaculars. We find these two films, like the two that followed, Dr. Zhivago (1965) and Ryan’s Daughter (1970), overblown and studied, and believe Lean’s intense craftsmanship is seen to better advantage in his earlier, more intimate films.

The key to understanding Lean is that he began as an editor. Having rejected a career as an accountant, he entered the British film industry in the late 1920s. By 1939 he had edited major productions, and in 1942 got his first chance to direct, assisting Noel Coward on In Which We Serve. One of the major British wartime films, it tells the story of the crew of a destroyer, H.M.S. Torrent, which is sunk in action off Crete in 1941. (The film is based on the real-life destroyer, H.M.S. Kelly, commanded by Lt. Lord Louis Mountbatten.) The lives of the individual crew members (leading actors John Mills, Bernard Miles and the young Richard Attenborough) are told in flashback: we see them before the war in civilian life in their homes and with their families. The movie today serves as something of a documentary record of the British people’s outlook during the grim days of the war, before victory was in sight.

Brief Encounter (1945) was Lean’s breakthrough into the top rank of directors. From a play by Coward, this film today is seen by many as the greatest romantic drama ever put on screen. A conventional suburban housewife, Laura (Celia Johnson) meets by chance a married doctor, Alec (Trevor Howard) on one of her weekly excursions into town. Against their better judgment, they rendezvous with each other more and more, and they fall in love. Unlike films today based on contemporary morals (or what is left of them), this film builds great tension, if not suspense, as the pair struggle between their romantic attraction and the magnetic force of convention and decency. They take in a film one afternoon, a stroll on another, and then arrange to meet in the apartment of one of Alec’s friends, only to be embarrassingly interrupted by the unexpected intrusion of the friend. Every meeting is haunted by the fear of being seen by someone they know. The tension is heightened further by the constrained, clipped British manner of the dialogue (to which Lean contributed) and direction, which is brilliantly set off against the moody, uber-romantic musical score from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. The tight discipline of Lean’s intimate direction and pacing, which shows off his expert editing, makes this as engrossing a film as one will ever see. In the climactic scene, Laura and Alec, having agreed they must no longer see each other, are having tea in the nondescript waiting room of the railway station where Laura always catches her train home. Tragically, their final moments together are interrupted by an insufferable chatter-box lady acquaintance of Laura’s, and they cannot even make a real farewell. The scene is heartbreaking, for unlike the demands of today’s morality, they cannot have what their emotions demand. More than six decades later, this wonderful film is not dated in the least, a testament to Lean’s under-stated but intense direction and the terrific acting. Lean received a best direction Oscar nomination, as did Celia Johnson for best actress. She also won the New York Film Critics’ Award as best actress.

Taking leave of Noel Coward, Lean next turned to what are today two of his most admired films, adaptations of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The grim, mysterious opening scene of Great Expectations, dramatizing the encounter in a cemetery between the young Pip and the hulking escaped convict Magwitch (Finlay Currie), who in the course of the story will play, from afar, a crucial role in Pip’s life, is a master example of Lean’s editing skill. He was again nominated for the best direction Oscar, and the film was nominated for best picture.

Many of Lean’s films would feature such a set-piece showing off his editing skill. Thus, in Oliver Twist the climactic hunt for the evil tormentor of Oliver, the vicious killer Bill Sikes (Robert Newton), through the dark, dank Victorian streets and over the high rooftops by the enraged torch-carrying mob and then the police is another gem of Lean’s editing and direction – he figuratively glues us to our seats. These two films are widely considered the greatest Dickens adaptations ever put on screen (along with the 1935 MGM David Copperfield, directed by George Cukor).

Lean followed his Dickens period with two romantic dramas starring his then wife, beautiful blond Ann Todd. Based on a novel by H.G. Wells and written by Eric Ambler, The Passionate Friends (U.S. title One Woman’s Story) (1949) features Miss Todd continually torn between the security and riches offered by her older husband (Claude Rains) and the thrill of love she has known and would like to know again from a younger man (Trevor Howard). Better than this is Madeleine (1950); indeed, this little known film is one of Lean’s best. Madeleine Smith (Miss Todd) is the gorgeous but oppressed daughter of a proper wealthy Scottish merchant in 1857 Glasgow. Although forced to become engaged to the stodgy man chosen by her strict father, Madeleine, a determined, independent girl well ahead of her time, carries on an affair in the basement of her home with a poor Frenchman, Emile L’Angelier (Ivan Desny). Their affair hits the rocks when she refuses his demands that she introduce him to her father, and he in turn refuses her pleadings that he take her away and marry her. He threatens to expose their affair by disclosing her love letters to him. Shortly thereafter, Emile dies of arsenic poisoning.

Glasgow is scandalized by the resulting trial of Madeleine for murder. Standing alone at the prisoner’s bar before the stern Scottish court in her elaborate Victorian dress and bonnet, Madeleine is icy and defiant in her denials, despite the ample circumstantial evidence in the form of her prior purchases of arsenic on several occasions. This trial scene is one of the high points of Lean’s career. One can just imagine him pouring over the film at his editing movieola for weeks and weeks, arranging the inter-cutting as he screws up the maximum suspense. To be able to do this in the setting only of one courtroom, without any action, requires the talent of a master. Lean thrived on such climactic scenes.

Lean entered the 1950s with Breaking the Sound Barrier (1952), his superb dramatization of the immense personal sacrifices required of an aircraft manufacturer (Ralph Richardson) as he struggles to develop an aircraft that can break the sound barrier. This was followed by a domestic comedy/drama, Hobson’s Choice (1954), starring Charles Laughton as a shop-owning over-protective father of his daughters. The last film of Lean’s pre-epic career, and also one of his best, is Summertime (1955). Shot on location in Venice in gorgeous, rich Technicolor, Katharine Hepburn plays one of her middle-aged spinster roles as Jane Hudson, a secretary from Akron, who is making her first excursion abroad. The object of many attentions from the local gents, she is befriended in an antique shop by the charming Renato (Rossano Brazzi). Jane begins to flower in the heady atmosphere, with Lean using the Italian settings to maximum effect. Alas, Jane learns that Renato is married with seven children and, just as Laura does in Brief Encounter, she breaks off seeing Renato. This is Lean’s most lyrical film. He won the New York Film Critics award for best direction.

Thereafter, Lean turned to the new wide screen and changed into a self-consciously epic filmmaker, first with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). I have two problems with this movie. First, it presents a sanitized, false account of the role of British, Australian and Dutch prisoners of the Japanese in construction of the famous bridge over the Kwai River, a crucial link in the enemy’s Burma-Siam railway. The Japanese used 61,000 prisoners of war and an estimated 270,000 native laborers from Burma, Malaya, Siam and the Dutch East Indies for construction of the line through 260 miles of mountainous jungle in some of the most unhealthy conditions in the world. The starvation conditions were akin to Auschwitz, with an estimated 12,000 Allied prisoners and 90,000 native laborers dying as the Japanese considered them all expendable. The film does not remotely suggest just how horrible the conditions were. Further, it is untrue that the British commanders cooperated in construction of the bridge. The Alec Guinness character of Col. Nicholson simply did not exist, and the few real-life survivors have bitterly criticized the film and the book on which it is based. Second, we see here how Lean’s intense craftsmanship, which served him so well in his earlier intimate dramas, becomes self-conscious and even contrived as he applies it to a grander subject. Thus, one can imagine him sitting before his movieola, editing the finale for weeks and weeks, trying to build up to a thrilling climax, with the two commandos (William Holden and Jack Hawkins) nervously waiting to blow the newly completed bridge just as an enemy train is crossing it and Col. Nicholson discovers the detonating wire. Having become as devoted to the bridge as his savage captors, Nicholson is intent on saving the bridge from destruction. However, just as the train begins to cross, he realizes his folly, exclaims, “What have I done?” and, shot through, just happens to fall on the detonator, thus blowing the bridge to smithereens and the train with it. This really is terribly contrived and not credible. It is well below the dramatic level of the previous two hours plus. And in reality, the bridge was destroyed by Allied bombers.

Lean now began to take more and more time on his projects, with Lawrence of Arabia not following until 1962. Many readers will disagree strongly, but some critics find this film self-conscious, labored and contrived. Lean’s characteristic painstaking attention to detail, which serves an intimate film, becomes obvious and self-defeating when applied to such a huge canvas. Two examples are the scene of the Arab army’s reaching the sea at Aqaba and Lawrence losing control of himself, shouting “No prisoners, No prisoners” as he leads an attack on the Turks. In the latter scene, Peter O’Toole comes across not as a madman but as a poor actor. There are other examples in this over-long opus, which is made more interminable by the insipid music of Maurice Jarre, for whom Lean unfortunately had a good deal of fondness. Yes, there are stunning shots of the desert vistas, but they call attention to themselves, as if Lean wanted to make the film just for the sake of these vistas. By contrast, Cecil B. DeMille’s direction of The Ten Commandments (1956), Anthony Mann’s direction of El Cid (1961), and even Stanley Kubrick’s direction of Spartacus (1960) have a natural spontaneity and un-self-conscious ease with their epic material.

Lean began to lose critical opinion with his equally overbaked film of Boris Pasternak’s celebrated anti-communist novel, Dr. Zhivago (1965). Yes, the photography is stunning as always, but his producers were starting to lose patience when they learned how Lean would order take after take after take just so he could capture some miniscule lighting effect – for example, the frozen snowflakes on the window panes of the country house where Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) take refuge, which dissolve into spring, or the special look he wanted for the flowers surrounding the house. One example of an over-done scene is the mutiny of the Russian troops and their attack on their elderly Tsarist commander. The scene is so long and slow-paced in its striving for epic effect that it loses its drama. Lean’s elaborate style works with the scene early in the film of the cavalry, sabers drawn, riding down a peaceful demonstration in the Moscow street, but overall the film once again is too long (three hours) and suffers from Jarre’s bathetic Lara’s theme music.

Lean’s career came to a screeching halt with his next epic project, Ryan’s Daughter (1970). This is the kind of story at which Lean excelled in the 1940s – a Madeleine Smith-type (Sarah Miles) in British-occupied Ireland goes after a handsome young British officer (Christopher Jones) at the expense of her modest, older, rather staid schoolteacher husband (a miscast Robert Mitchum). However, Lean makes the story balloon into another three-hour would-be epic, except that he has to employ big ocean waves to stand in for the masses of soldiers that filled his three preceding epics.

By now the recent two-time Oscar winner was no longer “bankable” and Lean’s career dried up. More than ten years later he managed to get financing for his production of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Released in 1984, when Lean was 76 (quite old for a director), his loyalty to traditional film-making in the wake of the sixties-seventies youth revolution was commendable. And in telling this story of the cultural clash between Britain and India in the 1920s, Lean, who also wrote the screenplay, returned to some of the intimacy that made his pre-epic films so memorable. Thus, the quiet scene of the elderly Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft, who won the best supporting actress Oscar) alone in the garden, with Lean suggesting the mystery and alien nature of the colonized country, is the kind of evocative scene without dialogue we rarely see in movies of the past three or four decades. The film garnered many Oscar nominations, including best picture and director, and won the New York Film Critics Circle awards in these categories.

Thus, this highly talented but at times overly ambitious film artist ended his career on a high note. Lean died in 1991, aged 83. He is best known for his epics, but should be remembered for his earlier, more disciplined, more modest, films.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline On Line’s media critic.