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Barnaby thompson’s fascinating and entertaining essay about film director david lean is proof of an old principle – luck favors the brave. Lean work is more like a military expedition than ever before; like Napoleon or young Winston Churchill in Sudan or, TE Lawrence in his greatest film, Lawrence of Arabia. It included excellent management of tactics in harsh environments and strong pressure to control the forces that had to be defeated by their will, as well as the skill of the game of leadership, showing his oratory and persuasiveness in giving orders.
Watching this movie, you can appreciate how Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence is a funny, no-nonsense character – dressed in borrowed and traditional Arab robes – but whom no one dares to laugh at. Perhaps Lean, wearing his superior’s robes, could see what his subordinates could not, or could not; he can see his faults, and suffer from delusions and hidden doubts. The film tells us again and again that he can be very angry and tyrannical on set – but there is no film or audio of this, he leans himself in various interviews to be endlessly sweet and restrained. (Though I suspect that the patrician voice may have reverted a bit, at times, to something more serious under pressure.)
Perhaps the film understates the growing importance of music in Lean’s larger screenplays, including Maurice Jarre’s swirling themes in Lawrence of Arabia and his adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. But it gives us an interesting and colorful history, with the help of an impressive group of directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass, Celine Song and the great fan Steven Spielberg at different years in the archive. It shows a highly motivated man, fueled by his commitment to the film industry and the instability of love and sex: compulsively seducing, marrying and remarrying an incredible series of women and lovers who crossed paths. These legal documents are probably just the tip of the iceberg of the most common sex crimes.
Thompson makes a convincing case that Lean’s culture is down to his father, Francis Lean, who left the family and never looked back. Lean did the same for his wife and son, and the stories of love, temptation and betrayal in his films are very visible. He also sought his father’s approval, but he did not get it; surprisingly, his father has never seen one of his films.
Starting out as an editor, a job that may have given him a taste for directing, Lean ended up as Noël Coward’s co-director (the only director in history but a name) on the wartime thriller We Serve. He became a top director on the Coward-scripted romantic melodrama Brief Encounter (Gerwig is a smart critic here, seeing his mixture of innocence and charm) and then the great films of Dickens Great Expectation and Oliver Twist, cleverly using complex and skillfully constructed materials. It was with his 1955 Venice film Summertime that he succeeded in working abroad, where the other motivation was supposed to be a tax exile; it was a nomadic life that, proudly, he brought his Rolls-Royce with him. (I wonder what happened to Lean’s Roller now?)
Inspired by the chaos of the production-finance bromance with the writer Sam Spiegel, Lean began his great period of epics, which were shot outside the real world: The Bridge on the River Kwai, which was shot in Sri Lanka; Lawrence of Arabia, shot in Jordan; and Doctor Zhivago, which were shot in Spain – twice, ironically, in Russia. But as the 1960s drew to a close, and tastes changed in line with new wave culture, Lean found himself out of fashion. Zhivago was scorned by some, although its massive box office success silenced audiences. His Irish play Ryan’s Daughter was ridiculed and the film was, incidentally, the ship of the most embarrassing moment in the history of film criticism: the court of the most important critics in New York, including Pauline Kael, who invited Lean to lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, with the sole purpose of embarrassing and humiliating him.
Lean’s work ended very well: his adaptation of EM Forster’s A Passage to India was received with enthusiasm, although here perhaps Thompson’s writings, at the risk of cultural accuracy, may have discussed the frustration of Alec Guinness in brownface as Prof Godbole. Despite this, the film takes us to the exciting life of Lean and time at the speed of the horse; it’s a really fun run.
