Doctor Zhivago

Sir David Lean was a great filmmaker--a thinking man's Cecil B. DeMille. It was said by writer and critic Richard Schiekel that, in Lean's major films, that there is not a single shot, not a frame that in and of itself was not a small masterpiece of composition and color and story-telling.

The critics were not always kind to what some called his "academic" style of cinema (according to a DVD edition of the film critics panned the movie when it came out) but the general public was more forgiving and less snooty. "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) might not be his greatest film, but it has to rank as his most popular.

With great screenwriters like Michael Wilson, Carl Foreman (for "Bridge on the River Kwai") and Robert Bolt ("Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago") plus the Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Young and the production designer John Box he made sweeping epic films I doubt any directors could bring off today. Martin Scorcese came close to a "David Lean" with his "Gangs of New York", which may be the last film we'll get to see that has actual sets in the old Hollywood/Cinecitta style rather the computer-generated ones favored by George Lucas and a younger breed of producers.

As a viewer, there is something about knowing that the physical surroundings--such as a city--that we see in a blockbuster film are actually there, and the actors are not just in front or behind a "blue screen", that enhances the experience of watching another time period come alive.

Zhivago deals with individuals trying to live and survive in the Russia during the death throes of the Czarist period, the Great War of 1914-18 , the February and October Revolutions, the Russian Civil War, the famines, etc, etc.

It really must be a curse, as the Chinese proverb goes, to live in interesting times. The United States was lucky enough to space out its Revolution and Civil War a good four score and seven years apart--with World War I only coming to us over fifty years after that. Russia squeezed all that terror America absorbed in 150 years into less than a decade, and the Era of Stalin was not far behind.

Boris Pasternak, the revered Russian poet who wrote the book, lived through all of this insanity and turmoil, and, like his title character, his writings were suppressed and many of his friends were sent to labor camps and many no doubt "disappeared" in the Marxist Leviathan of total paranoia. Pasternak escaped that, but he was on the s**t list and had to stop writing his poetry and to took to simply translating Shakespeare and other "safe" (i.e., dead and long gone) Western writers ands poets. He secretly worked on "Zhivago", and, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had to have the body of his work smuggled out of the country to see the light of day.

I read "Zhivago" the book two decades ago. Frankly, the novel hasn't stuck with me the way the film has. (It didn't help that I was three chapters into the book when I noticed I was holding my paperback copy of the novel upside down. *rim shot*)

One of the important themes of the story is how war and political violence robs people of their individuality and their ability to live free....sometimes just to simply live. Ethics flies out the window. Bad men with withered souls get to become "great" men. The search for happiness by those who want to find wisdom seems foolhardy. Families are ripped apart. Good and idealistic men are turned into automatons. This is illustrated in the character of Pasha Antipov (played by Tom Courtney) who goes from being a idealistic believer in a better world into a Bolshevik general with ice water in his veins. "The personal life is dead in Russia!" he tells Zhivago (Omar Sharif) during an interrogation. To a sensitive man, a healer and a poet like Zhivago, such a world is like a death. He must heal the sick and express himself-and he must love. And he does get to love--two woman at once in fact. (OK, I said the guy was sensitive; I didn't say he was a saint.)

The fetching Geraldine Chaplin and the luminous Julie Christie (as Lara, as in "Lara's Theme") play the two women in his life. Rod Steiger is the main bad guy, Viktor, the aristocratic Machiavellian who survives every regime and keeps on making other people miserable or possibly dead, to his satisfaction. Sir Alec Guinness is also in the cast, as the other Zhivago, a Communist big-shot with a sense of humanity still intact (every great movie Lean made has made, Guinness is in there somewhere, going back to"Great Expectations" (1947). Lean considered him his "lucky charm" He wasn't in "Ryan's Daughter" (1970), however, because a rift developed between the two men during the shooting of this film.

It was the bad reviews that "Ryan" earned that is said to contribute to Lean's giving up films for quite a while. Why such a talented person should care so much what critics thought of his work seems strange to me, but he did. Even the bad reviews from "Zhivago" depressed Lean, according to Geraldine Chaplin, even though the film was a hit and was re-released every couple years by MGM to big grosses after its first and second runs at the theaters. Between that and an aborted attempt in the seventies to make a film about the "HMS Bounty" mutiny, the great director didn't make another film for fourteen years.

But he did make "Doctor Zhivago", and if you haven't seen it ever or in a while, I think it's worth a reviewing. All those "Russians" with British accents is a little weird at first, but you get used to it.

The DVD version of the film has a feature on the background of the film, narrated and hosted by Sherif. The documentary itself is worth renting the DVD for.