The Epic Films of David Lean

The Epic Films of David Lean Constantine Santas

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

2012

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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Constantine Santas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Santas, Constantine. The epic films of David Lean / Constantine Santas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-8210-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8211-9 (ebook) 1. Lean, David, 1908-1991—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.L43S36 2012 791.43'0233092—dc23 2011024014

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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To Mary

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xi xiii

1 2 3 4 5

1 27 55 87 119

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Doctor Zhivago (1966) Ryan’s Daughter (1970) A Passage to India (1984)

Epilogue: Nostromo—The Epic Continues . . . Appendix A: The Early Films of David Lean Appendix B: DVD and Blu-ray Editions Bibliography Index About the Author

155 165 181 187 189 197

v

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Preface

The Epic Films of David Lean did not come to me in a flash of inspiration all at one time. The book took years to develop, first in my viewing experiences of the epics, then in a series of papers on epic film read at various colloquiums and other such forums, where ideas were generated that ended with my publication of my first book on the epic, The Epic in Film (2007). Finally, I decided to try a book-length work that would only deal with the Lean epics. What made this decision come about? First and foremost, the enduring appeal of the Lean epics after repeated viewings, and, second, my increasing conviction that these were not run-of-the-mill epics produced by Hollywood in great numbers during the epic film’s heyday, in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, but works of cinematic art that only grew better with time. I was lucky enough to have seen all the epics on the big screen, chronologically, when they first came out. I still remember these experiences. I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai at a local theater when I was a student at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, after a recommendation by one of my English professors, Dr. Howard Wilson. What impressed me then the most was watching the painful death of William Holden, riddled with bullets, as he swam toward Colonel Nicholson. I had never before seen a war film hero die in action before reaching his goal and dispatching an enemy. I developed a sense that there was something existential or even nihilistic about the themes in the movie, especially in the scene where Nicholson, leaning against the rail, recalls his life, wondering what the “sum-total” of it would be if he did not perform at least one memorable act. This was the height of existentialism, and I recalled Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus rolls the boulder uphill, only to see it roll back down again, in an endless repetition of a futile task. The hawk flying above in the last shot of the movie seemed to survey all human endeavor as a mere speck in the jungle with the indifference of a god. vii

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Lawrence of Arabia came to my attention five or six years later, when I was already teaching, in Chicago. A colleague commented on the beauty and the vastness of the desert, and I duly went to see the movie. The sand rippling in the semidarkness, as Lawrence makes his decision to attack Aqaba, I thought, was the most impressive shot I had seen in any film. Not too unexpectedly, I recommended that movie to my students, describing Lawrence to my literature class as an example of a film that has classic tragic contours. I still think the film is as much tragedy as it is epic. It was the hubris of the self-deification of a Westerner, wearing the robes of “El-Aurens” after saving a man’s life, only to witness helplessly a young Arab boy sinking in a sand hole. I saw Doctor Zhivago after a friend of mine, an actor from the Budapest National Theater who had fled his country after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, challenged me when I tried to get him to see the eight-hour War and Peace (1966), produced in the Soviet Union and described by some as the “greatest movie ever made.” He said, “Go see Doctor Zhivago; that might change your mind.” I remember this was the day Robert Kennedy had been defeated by Eugene McCarthy in the Oregon primary—and I felt a bit down. That might have influenced my first response to the film, for all I thought was tracing the political aspects in it. The beginning shots of an endless line of workers streaming out of a tunnel gave me the impression of a soulless people lining up after a day’s work at an equally soulless factory. Doctor Zhivago slumbered in my conscience for decades, for in those days a movie run after its release was shown on the small TV screen, usually mutilated by the pan-and-scan aspect ratio and the commercials. I saw Ryan’s Daughter on a Cinerama large screen, in a rather small Chicago theater, and I remember the vastness of the beaches, beautiful but empty, and saying to myself, “What is Robert Mitchum doing in this thing?” Lean’s trick of casting against type escaped me then, and it took me a later viewing to realize the complexity of Mitchum’s metamorphosis. I did not really catch up to David Lean and his epics until I saw A Passage to India, in St. Augustine, Florida, a decade and a half later, after I had read Richard Schickel’s article in Time magazine, with Lean’s photograph on the cover, titled, “An Old Master’s New Triumph.” It was this movie that sparked a deeper interest in Lean, and it was then I started reviewing his other epics and the earlier works. It already was the era of the VHS, and soon of the laser disc, when older movies started to appear in their proper aspect ratio—and also the time when larger TV screens (albeit most of them in large square boxes) allowed the viewer a chance to get the feel of watching movies at home in their real format. One of my first laser discs was of A Passage to India, followed by Brief Encounter and the Dickens adaptations. Until then, I had not seen any of the earlier movies, or if I had, it was on TV, with commercials, or on Cinemax or other cable channels that had made their entrance. By that time I had also begun to teach film and

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to read papers in conferences and colloquiums, mostly comparing adaptations of films to their original literary sources. My connection with the epic form and interest in heroic themes made me gravitate toward this genre in film, but it took me a decade after that time to take a serious interest in Lean and nearly two more until I decided to work on the Lean project. This was partly because the DVD era was delayed in coming, after the demise of the brief laser disc mania, and the first Lean film on DVD was The Bridge on the River Kwai. Lean DVD releases lingered on, for some reason. Second came the restored version of Lawrence of Arabia, and then restored DVD and Blu-ray versions of A Passage to India, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, all with special features detailing production materials, with personal interviews of cast or staff members still alive. My interest in the early films also increased, but they were also slow in coming. Several of those became favorites—among these Hobson’s Choice and Summertime, in addition to those mentioned above. But many of the early works—Madeleine, The Passionate Friends, The Sound Barrier—were not available in laser or DVD form until recently. My decision to focus entirely on the epics partly accounts for my late acquaintance with these films, but that was not the entire reason, as I explain in my introduction. Suffice to say here that, when I finally obtained all of them in boxed DVD sets (not to mention the several Criterion Collection editions of five of them), I watched them repeatedly—recently all eleven films in eleven successive nights. I found out that all films of distinction in the narrative thread, the visual effects, the strong personal emotional connections, and even the few delightful comedies (Blithe Spirit, Hobson’s Choice) bore the unmistakable stamp of a Lean picture. The entire body of Lean’s works is a group of distinguished movies, but the epics, in their restored formats, had begun to have their special allure for me in a way that was irreversible. My book is not intended to in any way downgrade the early works; on the contrary, they helped me gain more respect for the Lean opus as a whole. They also made me realize that epics were a progression and development of Lean’s cinematic art. The “perfectionist” Lean (as some of his critics called him jeeringly) had indeed already reached that stage much earlier than supposed, for who would not call A Brief Encounter (my favorite of the early phase) a perfect movie? Attention to detail is a Lean hallmark, but that had already been achieved during his “cutting” period, followed by his long directorial career that took a sudden turn when nobody expected it. The epics were a progression and expansion of Lean’s earlier work, and the result was better moviemaking. This book is based on that premise. The epics were larger and more complicated endeavors, demanding more time and expense and a much larger effort, but the end result was a series of magnificent films that were audience friendly, but also reaching for depths in characterization and meaning that were unparalleled. They did change the fabric of the epic, a denigrated form

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of moviemaking, and brought it to the level of literary art; for Lean had repeatedly been called a novelist of the screen. Think of the fact that all five epics were derived from novels or historical works of literary merit (Seven Pillars), and that the one unmade, Nostromo, would have continued that tradition. My decision was also to approach the epics in an analytical manner, for massive biographies had already appeared—works that helped me grasp essential elements of Lean’s life, approach to movies, work methods, and actual production details. I felt that lack of detailed analysis harmed the epics more so than his previous works, which had received plaudits both at the time they were made and later. The epics were a phase of Lean’s total work that came unexpectedly and remained unchanged to the day of his death. I felt the epics, which brought Lean international fame and adulation, also deserved detailed critical scrutiny, and hopefully this book has achieved some measure of that.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge, first and foremost, the encouragement and contributions that I received from the students in classes to whom the epics were shown, either as independent films or as parts of the literary works that preceded them. I consider myself primarily a teacher of film and literature—or in the reverse order— and the reactions of one’s students are the basic staple on which grown thought can flourish. I used syllabi instead of textbooks (though some came in as assisting material) to offer my students the premises on which each film course was built. Syllabi grew, and the thoughts of students expressed in class on quizzes and in papers helped increase my treasure trove of knowledge and comprehension. The syllabi became larger as a consequence, and at least one of them become the basis of my first book, Responding to Film (2002). In it were my first essays on Lean. Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues, at Flagler College and elsewhere. During a reading of my first paper on the epic in film in 1993, at a Flagler Colloquium sponsored by Dr. Carl Horner, I received enthusiastic compliments from Professor Emeritus Thomas Rahner, chairman of the Drama Department, who asked if my topic, The Bridge on the River Kwai as a classic epic, could be expanded to include other Lean films, like Doctor Zhivago. That remark actually began the ball rolling, for it was at that moment that I thought of a work on all the epics. Professor Andrew Dillon, poet and essayist on Milton and Shakespeare, also made the comment that my paper had “something to take home.” Further discussions about Saito and Nicholson with him enriched my hold on the complexity of those characters. Over the years, many other colleagues encouraged my interest in the heroic/epic character in film, and the result was my second book, The Epic in Film (2007). I owe a debt to Flagler College librarian Michael A. Gallen and his assistant, Peggy Dyess, for their tireless efforts to gather materials, loans from other libraries, actual research by assistants, and the purchase of key books that facilitated my research. xi

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I had outside help and encouragement from many others outside my immediate circle at Flagler College, and I will include some names here. I owe a debt to Professor Gerasimos Santas, of UCI, who offered me hospitality at his house at the Irvine campus, where I could visit the rich-in-film-materials library there during summers and do research that solidified my theoretical grasp on film in general and the epic in particular. I owe debts to the Greek novelist Dr. Spyros Vrettos and his wife, Dr. Paraskevi-Kopsida Vrettou, a scholar and critic, whose enthusiasm on the epic form and the Lean epics in particular gave me a broader perspective on their importance. I owe a debt to Dr. Bjoymi Anne Baker, professor of film and fellow at Melbourne University, whose review of my book and consequent correspondence on the topic of the epic film gave me an additional urge to finish the present work. I wish to thank warmly consultant Brenda Hadenfeldt, whose close reading of almost the entire text made me aware of potential pitfalls and guided me with expert advice on editing, and Harikleia Sirmans, of South Georgia Regional Library, for compiling the index. And finally, thanks to my sons, Xenophon and Aristotle, whose intense interest in Lean—and equally intense discussions—broadened my vision on the Lean epics. And to my daughter, Christiana, for being relentless in deluging me with David Lean books, laser discs, new players, and of course, DVDs. And finally I want to thank my wife, Mary, whose astuteness of remark and patience during lengthy viewings are deeply and gratefully appreciated.

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Introduction

To work with someone who really knows what he is doing—who has enthusiasm for working in film beyond one’s imagination—whose capacity for work has no end—whose determination is to produce the best possible result—to whom nothing matters, discomfort, exhaustion—so long as it contributes to a perfect result. My admiration for David Lean is infinite. —Katharine Hepburn1 This list of achievements marks Lean as the director’s director par excellence. Lavishing years of preparation on carefully chosen and executed projects, he is the man who’ll go to any length to get it right. Yet behind this image of a mainstream filmmaker, adapting classic works of literature, low-key character studies and scrupulous re-creations of historical incidents, something remains unaccounted for. And the only word for it is poetry. —David Ehrenstein, AFI Life Achievement Award, March 1990

The five epics David Lean made between 1957 and 1984 brought him wealth and fame, garnered numerous Oscars and other distinctions, and catapulted him into the international arena as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Though some of his earlier works made in the 1940s hold strong interest with both critics and the general public, it is the epics that won Lean the adulation of broader audiences who were drawn to them by their compelling narratives, range of geographical latitudes, cultural clashes, and visual wizardry. Above all, xiii

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audiences saw in the Lean epics a filmmaker/painter whose bold brushstrokes gave intimate portraits of complex characters placed in wide canvases. Today (2011), Lean’s reputation endures, thanks to the revived interest of younger generations, partly spurred by a plethora of books on his life written since his death in 1991 and the new digital editions of his works, many with supplementary materials that offer today’s viewers an opportunity to revisit and appreciate his works. The epics now offer special challenges to a critical reevaluation of Lean’s opus because, although they have been most successful with audience response and awards received, they have only met with mixed critical attention, especially on the analytical level. As things stand, most significant writings on Lean have focused on biographical and production-related topics, as such very thorough and helpful in an overall reappraisal of the Lean techniques and methods but lacking, or deliberately avoiding, in-depth analysis, especially of the latter phase of his career and in particular where the epics are concerned. In fact, as Alain Silver and James Ursini noted in their pioneering work, “Lean has never been a critical favorite,” and he has not received the accolades “the widely admired” Alfred Hitchcock has.2 To this can be added that his epics, more so than his earlier works, have often been dismissed as big Hollywood-like spectacles devoid of serious content. The aim of this book is to reexamine the five epics with an eye to analysis of structure and relation of form to content and an emphasis on Lean’s efforts to use the epic form not only as entertainment for wide audiences but as means of communication between divergent cultures. The present is neither a biographical account nor a chronicle of the productions of the five epics, for numerous studies that have explored minutely all aspects of Lean’s life and work abound.3 What we will undertake here is a reappraisal of the five epics, an aesthetic overview of the finished products, with added biographical and production details when relevant to the themes at hand. This chapter introduces the several topics that will become the points of departure for the discussion of each epic: the relationship of Lean’s epics to his earlier works; the critical response; the epic structure and the relationship between form and content; and the methods used by Lean and his screenwriters when adapting literary sources from which the epics were taken. The chapters also show Lean’s predilections for tragic themes and “flawed” heroes and review today’s relevance of the epics as historical/political tracts. These topics will not always be discussed sequentially but will be adjusted to the narrative structures and themes of each epic. Specific references will be made, when called for, to any of the eleven films preceding the epics, stressing the fact that some of Lean’s earlier films contain epic elements. A synopsis of each of the previous works will be given in appendix A. Thus the reader can have fuller sense of the continuity and thematic developments running through Lean’s works as a whole.

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Relating the Epics to Lean’s Earlier Works: Significant Departures Starting in the 1940s, Lean produced cinematic works that earned him distinction among his colleagues in England and the general public, before he embarked on his career as epic-maker. In his early years in the British film industry, Lean had rapidly gained a reputation as a “cutter” for about a decade, being credited as “editor” of almost two dozen movies4 before he codirected his first film, In Which We Serve, about the sinking of a British destroyer, HMS Kelly, with Noël Coward in 1942 for Two Cities Films. His directorial debut coincided with two films he edited, The 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, made by the legendary duo (director/writer) Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,5 all adventure stories with epic elements that may have given Lean an early taste for the epic form that he embarked on in his later career. Three more collaborations with Coward came, all adaptations from the latter’s stage plays—This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and the highly touted Brief Encounter (1945), for which Lean earned his first Academy Award nomination. These were produced in joint collaborations with Cineguild, a subsidiary company under the financial sponsorship of J. Arthur Rank, a movie tycoon interested in reviving British cinema during and after the war. Parting with Coward after Encounter, Lean joined forces with Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame, still with Cineguild, which retained its connection to the Rank Organization, and with that group Lean directed his next four movies, two of which were adaptations from Dickens. Those were Great Expectations (1946), a smash hit that earned Lean another Academy Award nomination for director, and Oliver Twist (1948), a critically acclaimed film but marred somewhat at the time by the perception that it was anti-Semitic. The English period with Cineguild included two more films: The Passionate Friends (1949) and Madeleine (1950), both romances starring Lean’s third wife, Ann Todd. Two more came, The Sound Barrier (1952), an adventure of nearly epic proportions, where an aviator loses his life trying to break the sound barrier, and Hobson’s Choice (1954), a comedy with Charles Laughton, both produced by London Films in Association with British Lion. Though two of the last four (The Passionate Friends and Madeleine) were movies of no particular popular or critical appeal,6 they consolidated Lean’s reputation as a first-class filmmaker, ranking with Carol Reed and Alfred Hitchcock (by this time directing in America) as one of the top English directors of that era. In 1955 Lean moved outside of England, partly because of his difficulties resulting from his impending divorce with Ann Todd, and he directed Summertime,7 filmed entirely in Venice in color (his third),8 with Katharine Hepburn, produced by Lopert Films. Lean, already nominated twice for Oscars, had also

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compiled a number of other awards, among which was a “Best Director” plaque from the New York Film Critics for Summertime. Still, his English period had not quite given Lean the international reputation that Hitchcock and Carol Reed enjoyed, and up to this point he was regarded as a talented director but somewhat limited by his lack of international exposure. But his career was to take an abrupt turn in 1957, when he was offered the choice to direct The Bridge on the River Kwai, shot in the jungles of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) by producer Sam Spiegel, whose credits included The African Queen and On the Waterfront, which had won several Oscars.9 The Bridge on the River Kwai garnered seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Lean, and catapulted him to international fame. Collaboration with Spiegel continued a few years later, with Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a popular and critical hit, adding several more Oscars, including another for “Best Director” for Lean. Then came Doctor Zhivago (1965), produced by Carlo Ponti and financed and distributed by MGM, resulting in fewer Oscars but greater box office returns. The two that followed, Ryan’s Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984), came with significant time lapses and diminishing critical appeal. On the whole, his epic cycle netted seven Oscars for Kwai, seven for Lawrence, five for Zhivago, two for Ryan’s Daughter, and two for A Passage to India, a total of twenty-three, including two for Best Director—more than any other director before or since for a specific body of only five works. The epics won numerous other awards for Lean: the New York Critics Award in 1957 and 1984; the National Board Review in 1957, 1962, and 1984; and the Golden Glove Award in 1958, 1963, and 1966. This is not to mention many awards and nominations from international film institutions, including three from BAFTA (1967, 1971, and 1986), the British equivalent of the American Academy; incidentally, BAFTA never awarded him a win. Thus, with The Bridge on the River Kwai Lean was transformed, almost overnight, from a director of average-length melodramas—war adventures, love stories, comedies—to a filmmaker of big-budget productions that were lengthier and costlier and demanded big casts and retinues of crews, location filming, and a new outlook on the art of cinema. While his accumulated experience as an editor, adapter of literary works, and director remained a steadying influence on his new approach, for Lean the epic form became an obsession, a “new art,” one might say, and he stubbornly refused to give it up, though opportunities offered themselves.10 As he explained to Robert Bolt, after their collaboration on Lawrence, he wanted to make “another attempt at something ambitious.”11 For Lean, epicmaking was an act of the imagination. He regarded himself not just as a maker of movies that happened to be epic, but as a filmmaker who wished to embark on a large venture in making a worthwhile and “perfect” film. He thought the film form could uplift the human spirit, and in his opinion, “the film medium is the

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only medium in which [this] could be done properly.”12 Though an opportunity was offered for a “little gem” type of movie,13 Lean never budged from the epic path, following it to the end of his career. Knowingly14 risking his own earlier reputation, he enlarged some small stories to epic grandeur, always believing that the lengthy film, made as perfectly as possible, could become a vehicle of communicating important messages to larger audiences. Of course, it is not suggested here that the epic period diminishes the importance of the earlier works. Lean not only built his reputation, but also consolidated his artistic methods in such a way that the themes explored in the earlier works were often the building blocks for the larger enterprises of epicmaking. The epic period should not be seen as a willing denunciation and abandonment of the earlier works; nor is there a total break and radical division of the two periods. The epic period should rather be seen as a progression to more complex and more challenging enterprises, with its successes and failures, one that lifted him to another sphere of moviemaking and gave him an impetus for greater achievement. A testament of this is chronology: between 1942 and 1956, in fourteen years, he made eleven movies; between 1957 and 1984, in twentyseven years, he made only five. Preparation periods plus inevitable delays were the main causes. The epics cost more, they took longer to scout locations and build sets, and the scripts were the result of long gestations between Lean and his screenwriters. One cannot judge the results independently of all that. But there was more to it. Lean clearly picked his themes to include larger-than-life heroes and expanded the scope of each story, sometimes beyond what the story was offering. But the heroic theme is clear enough, even from the start of his career. In his first work as director, In Which We Serve, and later in This Happy Breed, in the Dickens adaptations and especially in The Sound Barrier, Lean features heroes and heroines who refuse to accept defeat or who strive for goals beyond their reach. In the epics such themes are consistently resurfacing and given wider scope and complexity.

The Lean Epics and Critical Response As things stood for decades before and after Lean’s death, many of his critics viewed his epics as an unfortunate departure from his earlier work, alleging that he had abandoned his career as a director of distinguished small movies in favor of big screen, Hollywood-financed spectacles. If nothing else, such critical assessment of Lean’s opus resulted in a de facto division of his work into two periods: the earlier, between 1942 and 1955, when all his movies, with only two exceptions (The Sound Barrier and Summertime) were studio-bound and made in England,15 and the second, which begins (and ends) with the five epics, although

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at the time of his death, in April 1991, Lean was preparing to shoot another epic, Nostromo, based on the Joseph Conrad novel. Today, the epics that were completed stand in relative isolation, for critical approval is still lavished on the early works, while, with a few exceptions, little effort is made to equate the two phases of his cinematic career16 or to place the epics on a new footing. Lean is always praised for his craftsmanship, but not as much for the complexity of his themes or his contributions in shaping and perfecting the epic form. This critical assessment has often provoked the question as to why the epics were viewed as sellout to Hollywood, a question that has irritated supporters of Lean whose answers have not placated his critics. A new look at the epics as a separate unit can show that the epics are worthy of as much attention—if not more—as the earliest works have received. Critical response is, of course, not the main reason that calls for a second look at the Lean epics. The larger reason should be that, with the epics, Lean’s cinematic art took a quantum leap, expanding its horizons, giving audiences sweeping vistas of unknown lands and landscapes, and surveying the world with the eye of an internationalist, whose unifying concept in the majority of the epics is E. M. Forster’s motto, “Only connect,” a motto used as the broad basis of his last epic. With the Lean epics, the world comes closer together, as cultures cross cultures, heroes from the West interact with other peoples, differences narrow, and conflicts are elucidated. In the end, Lean must be seen as a humanist, whose grand films serve not only as entertainment for large audiences but as interconnections of individuals and races. One can see the epics for what they are: art films planted in the midst of commercial cinema, curiosities but not really paradoxes, for great epics like Gone with the Wind and The Godfather (and one could mention several others)17 have achieved the difficult task of reconciling art and commerce, thus fulfilling the true nature of the epic in film. The Lean epics phase had begun promisingly with The Bridge on the River Kwai, which became an overnight international hit, to the surprise of everyone, including Lean himself.18 The film opened to raving reviews both in London and New York, but not all parties showed the same enthusiasm. Lindsay Anderson, a critic for Sight and Sound magazine, compared Kwai unfavorably to Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (a film Lean admired), calling it “a huge, expensive chocolate box of a war picture.”19 There were other voices that, sporadically at first and then with increasing momentum, downgraded the Lean epics that followed. François Truffaut mocked The Bridge on the River Kwai as a work where two old men spent their time arguing inside a hut, while Andrew Sarris jeered at the “hot air” of Lawrence of Arabia.20 It was Sarris’s dismissal of the epics that may have been the springboard for other critical attacks on Lean. Alain Silver and James Ursini state, “Despite the numerous awards and frequent praise of reviewers for most of his projects, Lean has never been a critical favor-

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ite,”21 though they do not single out the epics as the targets of such disfavor. They add that this disapproval by his critics is most marked among auterists, and they cite the words of Sarris, who, as is well known, promoted French auteur theory in America, and who dismissed Lean’s work with the pun, “too little literary fat and too much visual Lean.”22 On the whole, adverse criticism of the epics outmatched occasional favorable notices. Lawrence of Arabia was described as “The Four Pillars of Boredom” in the New York Times, and Bosley Crowther, in a radio broadcast, spoke of Lawrence “as devoid of humanity as the parched desert sands it portrays.”23 With Doctor Zhivago (1995), negative press notices began to pile up. Newsweek wrote, “It is all too bad to be true: that so much has come to so little.”24 In the HeraldTribune, Judith Crist found Doctor Zhivago “a tedious epic-type of soap opera,” and wrote of “cardboard characters shuffling through a ridiculous plot.”25 But all hell broke loose five years later with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), which was attacked in the English press with devastating comments, such as the “ALL-STAR SIX MILLION DOLLAR BORE,” a headline from the Sun,26 while The Times called it “too bad even to be funny.”27 But the telling blow came from New York critics, especially from venomous remarks allegedly made by Pauline Kael during a meeting of the National Society of Film Critics, at a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, a meeting in which Lean was invited on the occasion of the film’s premiere. (In her New Yorker review of the film, Kael said of Ryan’s Daughter, “It’s Ecstasy blown up to the proportions of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”)28 Richard Schickel, then president of that group, summed up his colleagues’ reaction when he told Lean, after introducing him to his audience, that the critics couldn’t understand how the man who had made Brief Encounter could also make “a piece of crap” like Ryan’s Daughter.29 But the effect of that meeting on Lean was a deep shock that lingered for a long time, and it is generally assumed that the critical animus expressed at that meeting was a key factor accounting for his long absence from filmmaking. This was not entirely true of course, for Lean, aside from his interest in making a Gandhi biography, a longsought ambition, traveled to the South Pacific in 1977 in pursuit of another project, the remaking of The Mutiny on the Bounty, based on the life of Captain Bligh, a figure Lean admired. That project stalled because of lack of financing, resulting mainly from a scuffle with Dino De Laurentiis, who was supposed to back this project, and a break with John Box, art director of two of his previous epics (Lawrence and Zhivago), who refused to associate himself with a project he thought doomed. When Lean made his last film, A Passage to India, critical opinion swerved in his favor, and Schickel himself wrote a laudatory article in Time magazine, “An Old Master’s New Triumph,” with Lean on the cover. Jay Cocks added a veritable encomium on Lean, noting his achievements as a filmmaker in general, but acknowledging the fact that critical opinion on the works of Lean

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had remained distant.30 Lean’s last film received tolerable, even enthusiastic reviews from some of his former adversaries, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker31 and Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and thus old wounds were healed, to some extent. Passage also won the New York Film Critics Award, given by the same group that had condemned Ryan’s Daughter earlier. In 1990, David Lean received a “Life Achievement” award from the American Film Institute and was praised as “a poet of the screen” by David Ehrenstein in his ceremonial encomium.32 But Lean’s work for his epic period has not, as of this date (2011), received full recognition among scholars and major critics33 in the theoretical arena, and his works in the epic format have remained by and large analytically unexamined and perhaps undervalued. Indicative of such an attitude may be the fact that Criterion Collection, a distributor of prestigious films, has issued editions of Pygmalion (of which Lean was the editor), Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Brief Encounter, Summertime, and Hobson’s Choice, but has not included any of his epics. Lean’s success as a maker of epics, which raised him to international fame while sinking him in critical opinion, remains a paradox, for he is still praised by critics for his early films while condemned (or at least disapproved of ) for his five epics. The disapproval is significant, for it comes with all the critical weaponry assembled during his time—and nearly from all quarters: journalistic criticism, mainly in the New York establishment; French New Wave proponents; and the English critics, who were the harshest on Lean. Those who praised him were mostly filmmakers themselves—Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, Akira Kurosawa, Billy Wilder—and his admirers in the modern era include Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack, Martin Scorsese, and John Milius. In his encomium to Lean during the Life Achievement Awards of the American Film Institute, on March 8, 1990, Spielberg proclaimed: “He puts pictures on the screen that not even imagination can anticipate. Gregory Peck quoted someone as having said that David Lean is ‘the poet of the far horizon.’ And for me, Sir David Lean brings that horizon closer to all of us. And then he sails right across it.”34 On the other hand, Lean is either ignored or referred to as a caterer to popular tastes by such critics as David Thomson, who, in his biographical notice on Lean, trashes all the epics, though he finds most of his earlier works “lively, stirring, and an inspiration.” “I challenge anyone to see Oliver Twist and Dr. Zhivago and not admit the loss,” he asserts, concluding his essay.35 Of course Doctor Zhivago made millions and Oliver Twist did not (and in its time it was also received negatively), and that may be one reason it is so awful, in Thomson’s thought. Thomson does, however, issue a fair challenge when he asks the modern viewer to compare the two movies; one can always make up one’s own mind. Lean was knighted in 1984, just before his last movie came out. Some consider him one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but despite consensus

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regarding his meticulous attention to his craft, critical opinion of the five epics remains passive, if not outright hostile or—worse yet—indifferent. It must be stressed that positive criticism that came primarily from film scholars and biographers who offered detailed accounts of his life and the making of his films in general does have a solid foothold. Among such works are the richly illustrated biography of Stephen M. Silverman’s David Lean (1992) and Kevin Brownlow’s David Lean: A Biography (1996), a massive work that provides the reader with rich documentation of Lean’s life and career as filmmaker for further study. In later years came Sandra Lean’s David Lean: An Intimate Portrait and Michael Tanner’s Ryan’s Daughter: A Troubled Epic (2007), works that enrich the viewer’s understanding of some of Lean’s methods and mind-set, while Gene Phillips’s embracing critical biography, Beyond the Epic: David Lean’s Life and Works (2006), revisits the Lean legacy and provides numerous insights given by persons who knew Lean on an intimate basis. Phillips’s book, in fact, revived interest in Lean’s work as a whole and posed the question many have asked, whether Lean should be regarded as an auteur in the fullest sense of the word. This work is especially valuable to those interested in Lean’s early work (hence the title) and pays special attention to works, like In Which We Serve (1942), Great Expectations (1945), and Madeleine (1950), that, like some others, were not available on home video in the United States until recently.36 Though rich in biographical detail and anecdotal information, Beyond the Epic does not provide an extensive basis for a theoretical analysis of the epics, which Phillips treats respectfully but without broader insights as to their structural and artistic merits. Fine analytical approaches based on aesthetic principles are found in the pioneering work of Alain Silver and James Ursini’s David Lean and His Films (1974, 1991) and Catherine Moraitis’s The Art of David Lean (2004), both works pointing in the right direction in evaluating Lean’s cinematic art. A valuable newer work is Steven Organ’s (ed.) David Lean Interviews (2009), which provides a number of interviews of important critics during Lean’s time that give a close look at Lean’s techniques, views on adaptations, and general observations on his filmmaking. Some older works, such as Louis Castelli’s David Lean: A Guide to References and Resources (1980) and Michael A. Anderegg’s, David Lean (1984), are still useful but dated, since neither contains an analysis of A Passage to India. Castelli’s book has a section on the “Critical Survey of the Oeuvre,” with some extensive passages on themes and structure, but his analysis is not free of factual errors.37 Nevertheless, as a guide to references and resources up to the time it was written, this book is invaluable. Anderegg’s work is somewhat handicapped by the Twayne format,38 which demands a schematic analysis, but still contains useful biographical and thematic treatments of Lean’s life and work up to the time it was published. Much of the above materials will be used in our critical study.

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Structure in the Lean Epics Epic structure has been problematic and subject to critical scrutiny ever since the literary epics of antiquity. Throughout the several millennia of its existence, including its original oral character, the epic reigned supreme as formal composition, but it lost much of its glitter once its verse form was abandoned. From the Sumerian, Babylonian, and other oral epics, through Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton—to refer to the best known epics and epic writers of the Western tradition—the epic retained its splendor, but in the past three centuries the epic verse form has withered, as the novel took over some of its characteristics, such as great length, massive plots, and number of characters. Film, however, from its earliest steps (The Birth of a Nation comes to mind) embraced the epic form with unequalled fervor, and in its approximately one hundred years of existence, it has admittedly produced scores of mediocre products in the genre, but also a number of glamorous epics—Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, and, in the digital era, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Avatar, to cite only some of the most memorable titles. For one thing, the sheer scope of this development calls for a reexamination of the relationship between the epic structure of the literary and the film epics. Did the epic film retain the characteristics of the literary epic, and given the differences between the two media, what were the gains, if any, and what were the losses? Such questions must be weighted in, if one is to debate the merits of the epic film form in general, before one applies criteria to specific examples, such as Lean’s works, of the epic film.39 To begin with the earliest and still relevant critical commentary on the epic form, we might refer to Aristotle’s statement in his Poetics that the epic is less artistic than tragedy because the plot of the epic, “spread over a long time,” is diluted.40 What would the effect of Oedipus be, for instance, “if it were cast into a form as long as the Iliad ?” He adds that the “epic imitation” has less unity.41 However, Aristotle, who claimed plot structure was superior to any other element in both tragic and epic compositions, concedes that there are certain similarities between the two forms. In both, the plots must be simple or complex, ethical or pathetic. A simple plot generally lacks reversals and recognitions, where a complex plot depends mostly on both. Speaking of Homer’s epics, Aristotle states that the epic, like tragedy, “has a two-fold character. The Iliad is at once simple and pathetic, and the Odyssey complex (for recognition scenes run through it), and at the same time ethical.”42 Unity (of plot) is perhaps the most troublesome of these characteristics, for, due mainly to their great length, film epics failed to achieve it. That may be partly because doubling the length of an average film, as happened during the heyday (1950–1970) of the epic when the wide screen format was introduced, required an intermission, and audiences often felt, jus-

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tifiably, that they were watching two movies seamed together. Some film epics dealt with this problem admirably, and two examples will suffice to make the point: Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, at 208 minutes, and Lean’s The Bridge of the River Kwai, at 161 minutes (both were made within two years of each other) did not require intermission due largely to their quick pace and tight plots. Unity of plot is a legitimate structural requirement that the epic form tries to achieve. Since its inception, the epic film has, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed from the literary forms preceding it, and some of the observations made by Aristotle still remain in force. For instance, the length of the epic film became a crucial factor, since more time and “space” were required to accommodate battles, long treks, elaborate action sequences with special effects, and spectacle in general. Excessive length, amounting to between three to four hours, soon necessitated an intermission, as we mentioned above. Often, that broke the narrative flow of a lengthy film, in some cases making it difficult to maintain its plot unity. Cleopatra (1963), for instance, is sectioned into two parts, the first dealing with Caesar’s visit to Egypt, the second the affair between Cleopatra and Antony. In fact, this film was initially designed as two films, the first part based on G. B. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and the second on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. As it happens, during the heyday of the epic film, in the 1950s and 1960s, numerous epics were such lengthy affairs, some with loose plotlines. Today, an intermission is a rarity, due mainly to the eclipse of the single palatial theater of yesteryear, which allowed time for crowds to wander off into lobbies during an intermission and then return to the same chamber (as one does in a stage play or opera). Today, the multiplex theater has put an end to this opulence. The length of the average epic film nowadays has shrunk to about two and a half hours, rarely exceeding that limit.43 Also, the digital era has minimized exterior shooting, thus reducing (but not always) the cost of a film. These technological developments have not strangulated the epic structure, for the modern epic, though still longer than the average film, might obtain a tighter plot. Structure, however, is mostly a matter of correct artistic design and may or may not be affected by actual length. When Lean made his first epic in 1957, he adopted the already established modus operandi of that era, and easily adjusted to such things as the wide screen, larger casts, and, of course, greater length. Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai was tightly constructed, with no intermission, but three of his next epics— Lawrence, Zhivago, and Ryan’s Daughter—all had one. The structural patterns of his epics, however, were determined partly by the literary sources from which they were taken, but mainly by the decisions that Lean and his screenwriters made during their composition. By the time he started making epics, Lean had already established his own methods of adapting literary material and did not hesitate to shape his plots according to their narrative potential. Adapting Noël

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Coward’s plays and the Dickens novels gave Lean a sense of what is cinematic in a literary work and could be retained, and what should be curtailed. When it came to filming The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lean saw that the plot of Pierre Boulle’s novel had classic contours—as will be shown in more detail later—with a double plot, reversals and recognitions, and unity, despite its double strands of action, that neatly led to an explosive end. Lawrence of Arabia, also classic in general outline, is structured in two parts, the first part following a single line of action, while the second is episodic. Dr. Zhivago’s somewhat incongruent plot is bound together by a voice-over narrative that attempts to explore, in somewhat of an investigative manner, the mystery of Lara’s disappearance. Ryan’s Daughter offers a classic symmetry developed from two interwoven plots, and A Passage to India derives its plotline from E. M. Forster’s novel, which is followed in its general outline, as we shall see. Much more will be said on these points in the corresponding chapters. Despite the fact that the Lean epics differ thematically from most epics of their eras—especially those of the late fifties and early sixties, during the prevalence of the Roman/Biblical topics—they share characteristics with the epic form in general. The epic was known since antiquity as a long narrative poem with greater length than stage plays, multiple plots, a greater number of characters, and large conflicts usually borrowed from history or myth—or both. The film epic retained most of these traits, adding elaborate visual effects that changed with time, as technology advanced. When epic film arrived on the scene and became a Hollywood staple early in the twentieth century, in addition to its formal qualities, it made use of the star system that enabled it to feature Hollywood actors—Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Navarro, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, among others—who projected “larger than life” personas designed to attract large audiences. Stars gave the film epic the glamour of archetypal heroes, but often they affected both the structure and the quality of the final product. An example is Cleopatra (1963): in the first part, Rex Harrison, a superior screen performer, did well besides Elizabeth Taylor, then at the peak of her career, while in the second part Richard Burton’s uneven performance weighed down the massive plot irreparably. But on the whole, the epic film benefited from its format and length and, combined with the glitter of stars, increased its commercial potential, and in fact became a key factor in rescuing the movie industry from emergent and highly competitive television. Though the Lean epics differed in two areas—none of them had a religious/Roman theme and all of them were set in the twentieth century—they largely followed the epic lines already established—length, special effects, and use of stars—and at least in these areas, they retained some of the characteristics of the Hollywood epic. These trends lasted until the middle or late 1960s, when the religious/Roman epic, by and large dominant until then, finally ran its course. Four of the

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five Lean epics were made during that period (1957–1970), while A Passage to India was made almost two decades later, in 1984. When Lean began his epic endeavors in the late 1950s, relatively late in his career, he faced two new challenges that affected filmmaking structure that he had not encountered before. One was the wide screen, with its scale of the mise-en-scène established by the 2.35:1 aspect ratio (cinemascope and other wide screen formats), which required not only different technical equipment but a different approach to the photographed object. The other was length. Lean adjusted to these changes readily: the wide aspect ratio offered him an opportunity for his favorite long shots, which he alternated with close-ups stressing both the largeness of the canvas and the intimacy of his story. Lean was very conscious of structure, stressing the idea that a perfect plot demands an “arc,” the complication (or desis in Aristotelian terms) that makes the plot gather momentum at a crucial turning point. In Kwai, the turning point (after a brief lull in the action) is the moment Shears learns from Warden that he has to go back and help the commandos blow up the bridge, a plot complication that comes as an utter surprise to the viewer (as much as to Shears), but also a development that creates new conflicts, taking the two strands of plot in a new direction that will lead to a unified end. Lawrence, being even longer, requires several complications, but the arc is achieved with the taking of Aqaba, which catapults Lawrence to a new height in the Arab Revolt, giving him the rank and the status to continue his mission (with all the ironies created by that complication). In Zhivago, it is the “casual” second meeting between Zhivago and Lara, where she becomes his nurse and love interest, one hour into the movie. In Ryan’s Daughter, the arc occurs when Doryan stumbles into the Ryan pub, where Rosy is “minding” the store, and becomes her lover. And, of course, in A Passage to India, it is the adventure at the caves that brings on the arrest and trial of Aziz. All the five epics contain numerous other “minor” complications, but those mentioned are the crucial events that are needed to carry serpentine plots forward. The looser structure placed the epic in a different category of movie viewing, for the viewer, as the potential ticket buyer, had to expect something quite extraordinary, worth the price of admission. That, in turn, affected producers directly and directors indirectly, as both had to consider the stress that shooting on location placed on production costs and duration of filming. Lean became known for delays caused by his “perfectionism,” as his pursuit of artistic integrity was called. As the length of a film and its structure are factors that come hand in hand, it is important to show, among other things, how these factors became both a challenge and a risk that the filmmaker faced. Epic structure must also be seen in relation to Lean’s popularity and the adverse response of some critics. Perhaps the factor that worked against him more than any other was the accessibility of his films to the general public, for

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Lean always insisted that his films, no matter how serious the issues they dealt with, should be understood by the man in the street. It may be that he had taken the advice of Noël Coward, his early mentor in the business, who had allegedly urged him “to quit the business if what pleases you doesn’t please the public.”44 Coward, who valued the great popularity his plays enjoyed on the stage, cautioned Lean that popularity is crucial to a filmmaker who stays in the mainstream, and added, “Always come out of another hole,”45 meaning that audiences want variety of subject and easily tire of the same fare, a principle that, as we will see, Lean followed in choosing his subjects for his epics. That principle, however, did nothing but contribute to added critical animus and a mounting number of his adversaries, who found increasing popular success—and winning Oscars—a sign of artistic decline. Whether films of great popularity can also be considered art works (or art films) is a question that has yet to provoke a satisfactory answer, and some consider it an impiety even to think of such likelihood, despite the fact that reputable art filmmakers—Kurosawa in Japan, Jean-Pierre Melville in France, Fellini in Italy, and Bergman in Sweden— had achieved both critical approval and a measure (and often more than a measure) of popular and commercial success. One cannot overlook the example of Alfred Hitchcock, who, while hailed as one of the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century, always had an eye on box office returns. But no other director could match the phenomenon of Lean, whose first three epics erupted on the screen, winning Oscars, amassing fortunes for Lean and his producers, while combining lengthy spectacle, intriguing storylines, and attention to craft that remains unrivaled. Though he had already made a reputation as an editor of quality and director of small movies of merit, he seemed to come out of nowhere with his first epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, for Lean was not expected to possess the skills needed to handle the large movie, a task more complex than any other in filmmaking. Spiegel himself did ask Lean if he could handle cinemascope, and Lean’s reply was that, if one had an eye for composition, there would be no problem. Coming from a man inexperienced in the epic formula, Kwai became a stunning international hit, garnering seven Oscars and many other awards. The two grander epics that followed, Lawrence and Zhivago, showed a smooth progression in the mastery of the form, as if he found it natural to go from A to B to C, with cinematic ventures that brought him success, reputation, and riches. Those rather easily attained (albeit with much hard labor) successes may be the reason why the sudden flop of Ryan’s Daughter came as such a great shock to Lean, for that movie was made with as much attention to craft as—and probably more than—the others. Regardless of that failure, when Lean made his last movie (and he had attempted others in the intervening years), A Passage to India, that too was in the epic form. No other director has made five epics on the grand scale in succession, before and since. DeMille made more

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epics, but not in succession and with intervening smaller movies. (And DeMille knew how to circumvent the wrath of the critics by simply being oblivious to it.) Kubrick, Lean’s contemporary, though a younger man, made Spartacus in 1960, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, A Clockwork Orange in 1970, and Barry Lyndon in 1974, but his productions also included Lolita in 1962 and Dr. Strangelove in 1964, both black comedies. And Kubrick had a different mentality—an aggressive antiestablishment bias—and the epic did not interest him as a form for its own sake; it just suited his temperament at that particular time. The same lack of exclusive concentration on the epic can be said of several other directors— William Wyler, who directed Ben-Hur (1959); George Stevens, director of Giant (1957) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964); and Howard Hawks, whose two important westerns, Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1949), both with John Wayne, can be considered epics. Anthony Mann’s El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) were distinguished historical epics in the same general category as Kubrick’s Spartacus. These were fairly ambitious works with breadth of scope and action that carries them to the sphere of grand epics with some serious intent as history based. But for most of these directors, the epic format was not always their primary goal and they also showed other interests. When Lean chose the epic form he stayed with it, though in his later years he toyed with the idea of making a “small movie” again.46 That he was hooked on the epic form may have to do with his constant wanderings, as he had been a virtual exile from England since his separation and divorce from Ann Todd in 1957. The freedom of exotic locales, the large canvas where a director can operate on a more complex level, telling the story from multiple points of view, captivated him. Also, the reinvigoration of the form must have had its attractions. Lean took the epic out of its religious and pseudohistorical periphery, where it had operated for decades, and gave it a clearly secular, if not worldly, modernity. Other questions arose with the advent of the epic form, and Lean’s use of it in particular. One has already been mentioned: Is Lean progressing or retrogressing with the epic form? Antagonism to the epic form hammered away, especially from the camp of auterists, as Silver and Ursini pointed out. The epic, being the most lengthy, complex, and expensive movie venture, provoked the hostility of proponents of the New Wave auteurs, both critics and filmmakers (Truffaut and Goddard in France and Sarris in America were such examples, as mentioned), because it was by its nature the most collaborative. Could one man—the director—control the chaos often faced in actual productions? The question of course has its obvious answer. Some directors could. Examples abound, and some American filmmakers—Howard Hawks, John Ford, Anthony Mann—did that, and were accordingly praised by the auterists. Kubrick is another example. After Spartacus (Lean, declining the offer to direct it, had said he had refused “to jump on a running train”), Kubrick took on a string of legitimate, if unorthodox, epics, mentioned

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above. Like Lean, he resembled a general commanding an army, as Omar Sharif in his 2001 DVD commentary said of Lean when filming Doctor Zhivago. In some of the epics, especially A Passage to India, Lean wrote the script, edited and directed the film, and had a hand in location choosing, showing that he had a firm hand in most aspects of filmmaking.

The Literary Sources of the Lean Epics All five of the Lean epics are adaptations from literary works, some done more literally than others. The relationships of the epics to their original sources will be examined in detail during the analysis of each epic, but here some general principles followed by Lean and his scriptwriters will be outlined. As we have seen, Lean, at the time his epic period started, had already been schooled in adapting literary works in his earlier career—notably Noël Coward’s plays (for This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, and Brief Encounter) and two novels by Dickens (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist)—and thus he had drawn materials from both the stage and novels and had gained experience of important literary works he had edited.47 The Dickens adaptations are by far the most celebrated, and perhaps the most loyal to the originals—the reasons being that Dickens’s stories offer subject matter that can be easily translated into the visual medium,48 and with well-known and easy-to-follow storylines. Lean, therefore, had not only gained experience in adapting great works to the screen, but seemed to pick up stories that offered the greatest challenges to the filmmaker, and thus he had, in a very conscious and deliberate fashion, set the standard for serious work in the field of film adapting. Lean had also been formulating a principle that favored film over the original literary work. He was primarily a filmmaker convinced that what mattered most was the finished product one had to put on the screen; hence, he felt the film was not there to serve the purposes of literature but, first and foremost, to be a film worthy of the attention of the viewer. If he had to make changes in the original, no matter how worthy a literary work, he had to be certain that the product he delivered to an audience had the most important cinematic values—visual substance, a musical score attuned to the action, and expanded time limits during production as required to achieve the exact result he had aimed for. He also believed that the script derived from a literary source—or any script for that matter—should be as detailed and inclusive as possible, providing the most minute instructions as to how a shot should be framed, what the locale should be, how loyally actors rendered each word, what type of lighting— interior or exterior—should be used, and so forth. These values do not always coincide with an author’s written account of the events narrated, for an author

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can use exposition, for instance, by describing mental states in lengthy paragraphs, while a cinematographer can cut through these with various cinematic techniques—camera movement, deft editing, close-ups/long shots, voice-over, and others. Adaptations of works, therefore, have to comply with those means the art of cinema requires, and those aims do not always coincide with all literary aims, with their philosophical asides, shifts of point of view, and greater reliance on the slower pace of exposition. The question of accuracy and loyalty to the original source also comes in, and that includes consideration of all the above points. Adaptations can be made from fictional works, in which case the fidelity to the original is a primary consideration, and from historical material, in which case accuracy is perhaps a more complex factor. An example is the primary sources used for Lawrence of Arabia, which was mostly derived from a celebrated book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, known both for its historical content and literary values. Cinema did not always, and it did not have to, borrow material from fiction. Historical events, in the past or modern eras, have been fodder for film since its inception, be they ancient history (Spartacus and Cleopatra come to mind) or more recent history (biographies of Napoleon, Lincoln, Gandhi, Hitler, Patton, to mention a few) or great historical events (the Civil War, the First and Second World Wars). While remote historical events have seen distortions in film, modern technology has provided minute accounts of recent events, and to falsify history is regarded in some quarters as unacceptable. One example is that of Steven Spielberg, director of Schindler’s List, based on true accounts, who in his commentary on Lawrence of Arabia, a film he greatly admires, admits that today Lean would not have gotten away with what is perceived as an inaccurate account of the events of the Arab Revolt, as told by Lean in his great film. Lean and his collaborator of three of his epics, Robert Bolt, while not entirely disregarding historical accuracy, did not feel that a film of epic proportions (or any other film for that matter) had to be a historical document. This is a much disputed point, one on which historians, critics, and filmmakers do not always agree. On the whole, modern filmmakers—roughly after the 1970s—produced film works paying close attention to historical fact. Examples are Patton, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Gandhi, Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York, and Flags of Our Fathers—to mention some of the most prominent. And, finally, it is worth noting that any film following a literary source acquires some of its literary values, despite changes necessitated by adapting a work from one medium to another. Schooled by Noël Coward and the Cineguild environment of the 1940s decade and given his background with adaptations, Lean felt quite at home with the idea of creating screenplays from literary works. He was also keen about coauthoring the scripts for his movies and one of his epics—the last—was entirely authored by him. Lean had his reasons for having

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a hand in adapting the literary works used in his epics: he believed that film was art as worthy as literature and that film had as much a right to be respected as the literary work did. But he also believed that the movie medium—epic or not—demands a different approach than that of the literary fictional narrative. For one, film, like music, is set in time, and thus it has both a listening and a viewing audience. Time restrictions, in turn, require condensing the contents of a lengthy novel, cutting characters, simplifying plots and authorial reflections, and maintaining a quick rhythm and pace, things that a novel can ignore to a certain degree. Lean was also keenly aware of the fickleness of large audiences—and even more so for the epics, lengthy affairs that could bore instead of constantly arousing and entertaining an audience 49 The Bridge on the River Kwai was based on Pierre Boulle’s novel, The Bridge over the River Kwai, a popular prisoner-of-war adventure that drew attention for its subtle psychological insight into its main character. Lawrence of Arabia was adapted by Robert Bolt, author of the distinguished play A Man for All Seasons (later an Oscar-winning movie), from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written in poetic prose by a scholar-archaeologist who turned warrior during the Arab freedom movement in the early part of the twentieth century. Doctor Zhivago, also adapted by Bolt, was based on Boris Pasternak’s Nobel-winning novel detailing the love story of its poet-doctor during the fall of the czarist regime in Russia. Ryan’s Daughter began as an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary by Bolt and subsequently evolved as an original story set on the Irish-British conflicts of the early twentieth century but retained the main love triangle of the Flaubert novel. A Passage to India was an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel during the English Raj in the early part of the century. The fact that all the epics bear significant affinities to their literary sources partly accounts for their literary qualities and the complexity of their characterizations and themes. Like some of the previous works, the epics are all tied to preexisting literary works, and that makes them, even in a nominal sense, literary epics. Lean courted literary topics from the beginning of his career, a fact attested by his association with Noël Coward, not to mention his editing two of Shaw’s plays, Pygmalion and Major Barbara. Lean had been a voracious reader of novels during his youth and was thus accustomed to novelistic plot structure and design, a principle he followed in authoring or coauthoring scripts for his movies. For that reason he has been called a “cinematic novelist,”50 who always looked for books in bookstores, in search of subject matter for his next movie. His first epic, based on Boulle’s novel, The Bridge over the River Kwai, coming to his attention through his association with Sam Spiegel, gave him an opportunity to work on a war adventure that had noteworthy novelistic characteristics—character complexity, a large canvas carefully laid out to make the action compelling, and an ambiguous ending, quite unusual in films and war novels

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written during that period. Boulle’s novel had made an impact as a respectable war novel, seen by some as a sign of the decline of the European powers in the Orient. Though not a literary work of the highest order, in the hands of Lean it became a first-rate war epic, favorably compared to an earlier prisoner-of-war movie, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on the popular but also nonliterary novel by Erich Maria Remarque. At that point in history (the 1950s), a literary war epic was out of tune with the commercially prevailing spectacular religious epics, with only a few exceptions—one of which may be George Stevens’s Giant (1958), based on Edna Ferber’s novel, showing the rise and fall of a flawed oil tycoon (played by James Dean in his last role), which also retained some of its literary characteristics. Admirable as such sporadic epic masterpieces might be, the religious epic had cornered the market, won over large audiences, and stifled any ambition to make epics with more complex themes and characterization. But Lean’s success in making The Bridge on the River Kwai led to a more ambitious literary project, Lawrence of Arabia, based, albeit not too literally, on T. E. Lawrence’s masterwork, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with the script written by Robert Bolt. In view of the above, one can surmise that Lean nurtured at least a degree of literary ambitions in making his epic films, and that he knew that translating literature into film had its pitfalls and that failures of such attempts had outnumbered successes. The question, however, of whether the translations of literary works into film, in general, are viable is quite a different topic—though a related one—from that which asks whether epic films can carry out the task of bringing literary masterpieces to the screen without diluting or corrupting their contents. At least in the opinion of some critics, if not a segment of the audience in general, such a task does not suit the epic film, which was invented by Hollywood (mainly) as a moneymaker. Still, this does not quite answer the question as to whether Lean’s epics are films of artistic merit that equal those of his pre-epic period. One can argue either way, for Lean courted large audiences but he also pursued complex themes—and perhaps proved that it is possible to be both “artistic” and popular. Even though he disavowed the term “artist” for himself, he did stress that a cinematic work should be art.51

Tragic Themes Tragic elements, both in the classic and contemporary sense, include self-knowledge (anagnorisis); reversal of fortune (peripeteia); and fatal flaw (hamartia)52 in basically good men (or women). These three are the most common attributes of tragedy and can be applied equally to stage plays (where they originated), novels, and film, whether drama or epic. It is important to underscore that all of the Lean epics are ei-

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ther full-blown tragedies or contain tragic elements, and that was a deliberate choice on the part of Lean, who preferred flawed characters as his main heroes throughout his opus. In her biography of her husband, Sandra Lean, Lean’s last wife, writes: “Many of the films he chose to direct and the stories he told so well were about flawed characters, like him. Something within him rebelled against boring convention, so he inadvertently started that unconventional streak that fuelled him; at the same time he got rid of his inadequacies by throwing them at the characters in his films.”53 Lean himself said: “I am drawn to the person who refuses to face defeat, even when they realize that their most cherished expectation may go unfulfilled.”54 The choice of tragic heroes in the epics may also have been influenced to some degree by the handling of the subject matter by the screenwriters involved, especially by Robert Bolt, who had a decided preference for tragic plots, as his own A Man for All Seasons—play and film—demonstrates. Nicholson, Lawrence, Zhivago, Doryan—all were flawed heroes, men who possessed certain character traits, such as being men of some stature, as per Bolt’s own formula when the character of Zhivago was being sketched: “The way to make a man having stature dramatically is to make him do things that have great stature.”55 This formula goes back to Greek—and to Elizabethan—drama, and it certainly has been exhibited in film. Charles Kane, Spartacus, General Patton, Schindler, among many others, were men of great stature, and also men flawed to some degree or other. Welles’s Citizen Kane, a film Lean admired and watched numerous times,56 contains all elements of tragedy: stature, pride, self-delusion, life being a futile pursuit for something lost in youth. Lean’s films, from the outset, featured tragic heroes, male or female, more or less on a regular basis. The sinking of the destroyer Torrin (HMS Kelly) in In Which We Serve is seen as a tragic event in the war years, while dramas like Brief Encounter and The Passionate Friends show female characters on the brink of suicide after failed romantic affairs. But it was in the epics that the tragic situations took dimension, perhaps because the greater complexity of plots allowed room for tragic characters to fully develop. It takes over two and a half hours of film before Colonel Nicholson is transformed from a delusional traitor to a truly tragic figure, when he mutters, “What have I done?” before falling on the detonator, regardless of whether this action is regarded as intentional or not. One can even say that this phrase changes the tone of the story from a well-staged war melodrama to a full-blown tragic event. Lawrence is a tragic character whose own megalomania and ambition set him up for a fall. Zhivago ends tragically, dying on the street attempting to grasp a phantom female figure that looks like Lara. In Ryan’s Daughter Major Doryan commits suicide, but before him even Charles comes close to tragedy when he runs out in his nightshirt, after glimpsing through his window his wife running to meet her

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lover. Many have complained that Lean has altered the tragic ending of Forster’s novel, but the arrest and trial of Aziz, and his subsequent outburst after the trial, “I am an Indian at last!” shows his tragic split with his best friend and only supporter among the British. In the epics Lean was influenced by Robert Bolt, his screenwriter of three of them, that a tragic end brings a story to a higher level of human understanding. Bolt believed that tragedy “is not pessimism,” and that “even at its worst, life is worth living.”57 Despite all that, Bolt complained that Lean did not wish to end his stories in bleak tragic terms—which, according to him, would have elevated their potential for tragic falls; but as they are, the tragic depth in plot and character in the Lean epics is undeniable. Of course, Lean was running against the grain. The public was used to most epics of the religious/Roman era, which in most cases pitted good men against villains, and such heroes as Ben-Hur, Moses, and countless others of that ilk had more or less monopolized epic characterization. The flawed hero occurred only sporadically in the epic film, and in general was featured in adventure films, which were perceived as vehicles for swashbuckling heroes like Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Errol Flynn, Stewart Granger, and western heroes like John Wayne. While often not taken too seriously, these adventures, and the James Bond franchise that jump-started the modern action movie, bore the stamp of the Hollywood studio and dominated the screen for decades, always with a loyal following. These films had all the attractions of popular entertainment: adventure, romance, action, suspense, exotic locales (though most were filmed in studio lots), splendid photography, rousing music, spectacular male stars, and beautiful women. Lean’s epics brought a string of flawed heroes to the screen, while retaining and enhancing grand spectacle as an organic part of the epic structure. The large public did not seem to mind the ambiguities or the flawed heroes in the Lean epics, as long as the movies had the other essential ingredients of the epic: action, adventure, suspense, spectacle, and, perhaps above all, exotic locales. Something fresh and unexpected had come with them: his epics where not shot in studio back lots (or in Cinecittà, Rome, as in the case of Ben-Hur and Cleopatra), but in real locations—the jungles of Sri Lanka, the Jordanian desert, the open spaces of the Russian landscape (Zhivago of necessity having been filmed in Spain), a peninsula of western Ireland, or in India. Lean used few well-known stars in his epics, and apart from William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Robert Mitchum in Ryan’s Daughter, most of his ensemble casts included well-known character actors: Jack Hawkins, Claude Rains, and Rod Steiger. The first three epics made relative unknowns—Alec Guinness (known only for his comic roles up to then), Peter O’Toole, and Omar Sharif— international stars of the first magnitude. The innovations were in the concept of the heroes these actors embodied. They were shown as epic protagonists driven by an inner force to achieve extraordinarily ambitious goals, but their actions

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also showed their vulnerable human side. Was Lawrence, after all, a hero or a despicable and self-loathing megalomaniac? Was not Colonel Nicholson a traitor, constructing a bridge for the enemy and having an epiphany, recognition of his error, before he dies? And wasn’t Zhivago a well-intentioned but weak man, a disloyal husband unable to protect his family from disaster and a lover who failed to save the woman he loved from the claws of a predator? Still, audiences seemed to ignore such subtleties (which some mocked) and flooded the theaters to see big epics lured by spectacle, adventure, and romance, ignoring or bypassing (or perhaps disliking) the ambiguity of the main characters. In retrospect, Lean’s epics show that tragic heroes, or tragic elements, though not a staple in the epic film, do belong to it. Lean proved that tragedy can be part of the epic, as subsequent filmmakers of epic movies—Coppola (The Godfather), Spielberg (Schindler’s List), and Scorsese (GoodFellas)—demonstrated.

Politics in the Lean Epics: Their Relevance Today Lean stated many times that he had no political predilections, and he appears to have scrupulously avoided political topics in all his movies from the start. Indeed, the movies of his pre-Hollywood period can hardly be called political in any sense. But in the epic cycle, political ideas are almost ever-present, even if they slip in through the back door sometimes. The Bridge on the River Kwai, for instance, has been viewed by many as an antiwar movie in the guise of an epic adventure. Certainly one can see in it the collision of East-West values, honor in battle versus honorable surrender (a contradiction in the eyes of Saito), British know-how versus Japanese ineptness, civilization, as conceived by Nicholson, versus the jungle ethics. Added to those is the element of brutal treatment of Allied POWs—emphasized more in the Boulle novel than in the film—by the Japanese during the construction of the infamous 250-mile railway to connect Bangkok with Rangoon. The Japanese government has apologized to the West in recent years, but at the time the movie was made this fact was still alive in memory. In all the other epics, politics is a thematic ingredient in one form or another. Lawrence of Arabia shows the cynical manipulation of Lawrence by French and English agents as an instrument to dislodge the Ottoman Turks from Arabia in order to slice up and maintain hold of Arab lands. The other three epics also contain strong political elements, as we shall see during the analyses of each. Political statements, whether implicit or explicit, are reinforced by Lean’s voluntary exile into foreign lands that brought him in touch with different cul-

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tures: Arab, Japanese, Spanish/Russian, Indian, Irish—even that of the South Pacific islanders, though his project there never materialized. Shooting on location lent his work an aura of cosmopolitanism, a transcontinental and transatlantic authenticity, something that gave his epics a universal appeal, for almost all his epics showed the insularity of Western culture, since the epics exposed the West’s basic ignorance of exotic lands and divergent mind-sets. In at least three of his epics (Kwai, Lawrence, A Passage), Lean seems to be critical of Westerners, the British Empire in particular, while presenting non-Westerners (Sherif Ali, Prince Feisal, Saito, Aziz) as persons worthy of notice. His epics are not mere excursions of Westerners into the East; they are explorations of the Western mind-set when exposed to the ethos and land they visit—as A Passage to India clearly shows. “India forces one to come face-to-face with oneself,” says Mrs. Moore after the shock of recognizing how terribly her own son, a sensitive young man back in England, had turned into a bigot in the new land. Her premonitions come true after her experience at the cave, where she realizes that India is a mystery—or “muddle” as she candidly admits during Fielding’s tea party. Colonel Nicholson fails completely to comprehend Saito’s rage, when the latter accuses him of lacking Bushido, a sense of honor, which the Japanese value highly when they sacrifice their lives for their land; Nicholson, stubborn but not truly courageous, does not comprehend or admit cowardice when one surrenders, as Saito sees him. Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), though eventually an admirer of Lawrence, warns him of blasphemy when the British officer, full of his own importance, pronounces that “nothing is written,” showing a conceit that eventually haunts Lawrence, who had to execute the very man he had saved from the desert. The West, with its “go-getter” approach, fails to understand that these ancient cultures had pride and a long tradition of past glories, and what they wanted from the West was respect, “kindness and even more kindness,” as E. M. Forster, who inspired Lean, put it in his novel. Lean took his clue from those words, realizing that Indians and Eastern peoples in general sought to establish their dignity and an admission from the technologically advanced West that they were not inferiors but equals, in humanity and cultural values, though treated as inferior and unworthy of notice because of their poverty or perceived technological backwardness. Easterners abhorred colonialism and the West’s arrogant and long-lasting subjugation of their lands. When Lawrence, who, despite his flaws, had penetrated into the mind-set of the Arabs, was asked by an American journalist, Bentley, “What is it that these people want?” he tersely replied, “They want their freedom.” The Lean epics are not merely photographic marvels, splendid renditions of landscape beauty and majestic vistas (which they are) but also, and principally, subtly constructed tirades against the West’s callousness, ignorance, arrogance, and inability to understand their own actions when campaigning against peoples about whom they had not the least notion.58 Nicholson builds the bridge to show the superiority

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of his technicians over the inept (as he perceives them) Japanese engineers—an ironic fact in view of the technological ingenuity the Japanese were to display in the next half century. Saito perceives Nicholson as an arrogant coward who prefers slavery to an honorable death in battle—and there is where the deadlock is: in the perception, in both cases, of the value system of the other side. Lean brings these conflicts to a sharp focus, and though these can be treated as “subthemes,” they are actually illuminating major points in his epic stories. Broadly speaking, Lean can also be considered an architect in structuring his epics, an artist of juxtaposition and contrast. One of the problems critics in general seemed to have was the complaint that he abandoned the “small” story in favor of the grand spectacle that requires a large canvas. They perceived him having gone Hollywood, though Lean never really worked there except on one occasion,59 a perception that they considered a betrayal. Such a perception entailed the notion that the small story—or the story the epic has to narrate—was subjugated to the canvas. The canvas is what might be called the “spectacle” in the story, and spectacle had been condemned since the days of Aristotle as the “least artistic” part of a narrative composition, on the stage and later in film. Hollywood was of course to blame for such a misconception, for it used spectacle, in the epics of DeMille and others, as a means of grandiose entertainment. No spectacle-for-its-own-sake belongs in a Lean epic. Every bit of spectacular set or action is organically connected to the meaning and, one can say, despite endless vistas of desert in Lawrence or of snow-covered steppes (filmed in Finland) in Zhivago, is directly related to the content and part of the imagery and tone established by the rest of the film. The storm sequences in Ryan’s Daughter, filmed on location in the actual Dingle peninsula in western Ireland, are meant to be connected to the turmoil caused by the rebellion and also parallel Rosy’s emotional turmoil and the havoc it is wreaking on her and the two men involved in her life. For Lean, the large canvas is there to serve the purpose of the story, and not vice versa. The run-of-the-mill Hollywood epic would blow everything out of proportion in order to entice the audiences to enjoy the spectacle but would rarely give its audiences the satisfaction of an emotionally involving story worthy of the length of time it took to watch it. Lean’s epics, on the other hand, balance the linear story of the epic with the requisite spectacle. The sheer dimension of his canvas, and the meticulous care to present it as accurately as possible, made his works appear real, not mythical, as the majority of the epics tend to do. Ben-Hur, Superman, Luke Skywalker, to mention a few, are projections of mythical heroes, creatures of fantasy and fiction. Aziz looks and is played by a real Indian. Omar Sharif is an Egyptian, and many of Lean’s other heroes are not stock Hollywood types but seem to embody the culture from where they were sprung admirably.

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The epics of Lean can thus be viewed in two ways. One is to regard them as a part of the Hollywood tradition that saw in the epic an opportunity for exploitation of the medium in order to attract large audiences, and thence reap great profits; the other is to regard the epic as an inheritance of the literary tradition that has produced great epics since antiquity. Despite the fact that Aristotle, the first to broach the subject in the literary sense, had given the epic lower marks as an art than he gave to tragedy, he also acknowledged that the epics of Homer were superior works of art, for they adhered to artistic principles, having unity of plot, multiplicity of action (something tragedy did not achieve), and the “heroic meter” (the hexameter), which gives the subject matter dignity. Throughout the centuries and even before Aristotle and the Greeks, epics were produced by numerous cultures, including the Sumerians, Babylonians, Romans, medieval poets (including the authors of Beowulf ), and of course by great poets of the West like Dante, Milton, and Goethe. When the novel acquired some of the epic characteristics—length, richness of plot, and spectacular action—no one complained that it was becoming inartistic. While Hollywood, the main producer of epics (though epics were also common in French and Italian and German production), embraced the epic form with considerable enthusiasm, it also degraded it by placing it in the hands of producers, the early Hollywood moguls, who understood it only as a means of larger profits, by and large ignoring the reputation of its literary form. Some of course did not. For instance, D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, from two different cultures and different points of view, honored the epic literary tradition, while others, Cecil B. DeMille and his followers (some great directors in their own right), took a commercial course. Hollywood went for what some older critics admired the least60 in the literary epic: spectacle, often without substance, as a mere means of entertainment. Think of what Ben-Hur would have been today without the chariot race or The Ten Commandments without the massively spectacular scenes of the exodus and the parting of the Red Sea. Lean, on the other hand, whether consciously or not, followed the literary tradition of the epic, and in the process set his rules in adapting a literary work: it had to be cinematically viable, for the film epic was a visual medium. The large canvas was there, but it was conceived as the context of the dramatic demands of the story, which remained the primary consideration. Once those parameters were set, he remained loyal to the spirit of the original. One had to tell the same story that a novel did but had to do so by being eclectic as to the specific means and materials. Again, once this principle was established, then the dramatic interests of the story to be told predominated. It was story, not character, that mattered with Lean, and he did solidify his storylines by utilizing the most important of visual techniques—editing. It was in the cutting room that the story acquired its rhythm, and even its style. His stories, even the most complex ones,

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acquired the fluidity of narrative for which his films were renowned. Lean strove to present his epics in lucid and engaging plotlines, although, having established a transparent surface, he challenged the viewer to search what lies underneath, if one looks closer. A prisoner of war in a Japanese camp escapes and returns to blow up the bridge his allies were building for the enemy, an Englishman is fighting for an Arab cause, a Russian doctor who is also a poet pursues the love of his life amid the turmoil of a revolution, an adulterous affair in a remote Irish peninsula, a young woman visiting an exotic land and suffering a sexual awakening—these are the sum and substance of his stories. These are small stories if measured by ordinary epic standards, but becoming larger as they are cast against large canvases, merging and being influenced by larger events that shape the destiny of their protagonists. It is always the story that drives a Lean epic, a fact attested to by his meticulous search for an appropriate script. Once the script material was determined, either because it came his way by chance or because he had always something in mind, he set out then, and only then, to find the appropriate location to film it. The location was then perfectly integrated into the content of the story. There were no superfluous shots for their own sake, for such a thing as the desert in Arabia was part of Lawrence’s psyche—of his struggles to conquer it and unlock its mysteries. The caves at Marabar became Mrs. Moore’s and Adela’s terror and their mysterious echo an unearthly fear—or a kindling of the libido—that gripped their souls. Lean’s epics managed a feat rarely achieved before and since then: they managed to adopt and use “a magnificent form” (as Henry James called the novel—a term that fits here) for the purposes of filmmaking and for the ends of art, putting the form to the service of the viewer who looks for the ever-elusive integration of form and substance. Today, as Lean’s films are revisited, for reasons that no one could predict when they were made, in the decades between the 1950s and 1980s (the time span alone of four epics in four decades must say something), one gains a wider perspective on them, and one can easily see patterns of theme and meaning in them that point to wider aspect of interpretation than mere physical and technical perfection. For one thing, there are repetitions, or motifs, to put it differently, that keep appearing and developing as time went by and as each epic came out, and these can be summed up and linked and be seen in a broader perspective that makes them relevant not just to their time but to ours.

Notes 1. Quoted in Stephen Silverman’s David Lean (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 14. 2. Alain Silver and James Ursini, David Lean and His Films (Los Angeles: SilmanJames Press, 1991), 8.

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3. Key works in the last two decades are Kevin Brownlow’s David Lean: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), and Gene D. Phillips’s Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006). See also Silverman’s David Lean and Sandra Lean’s David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001). 4. Among these are Java Head (1934), Escape Me Never (1935), As You Like It (1936), Pygmalion (1938), Friend without Tears (1940), Spy for a Day (1940), Spies in the Air (1940), Major Barbara (1941). Lean also coedited (with Thelma Myers) In Which We Serve (1942). He had also worked as a “cutter” for numerous other movies since 1930, for most of which he did not receive full credit. 5. Known as “The Archers,” whose 1940s films included The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and Black Narcissus (1947). 6. In 2008, Hobson’s Choice was reissued by Criterion Collection, with a running commentary by Alain Silver and James Ursini. 7. Summer Madness was (and is) the original English title. 8. His first two were This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit, both in Technicolor. 9. Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), for The African Queen, and Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Director (Elia Kazan), for On the Waterfront, which also won for editing, screenplay, and art direction. 10. As we shall see later, film projects came his way that had smaller compass, but the one example that stands out is Ryan’s Daughter, which at first was intended as “a little gem” variety. 11. Brownlow, David Lean, 490. 12. Brownlow, David Lean, 491. 13. Lean himself used the term when Ryan’s Daughter was at its initial stages, when Robert Bolt suggested the idea of a love story based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. 14. During the filming of Ryan’s Daughter, Lean complained that “those beastly little British films” kept being revived and talked about by critics, getting in his way when he wanted to prove that he still had the skills that “once produced Brief Encounter.” Brownlow, David Lean, 554. 15. The Sound Barrier required shooting outside of England. 16. An honorable exception is Phillips’s Beyond the Epic, which, among other things, attempts to define Lean as an auteur and to envision his work as a whole. 17. One could also mention Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (The Boat, 1985), Schindler’s List (1993), which achieved a fair measure of popularity (if not a great deal), not to mention their numerous awards. 18. Even Alec Guinness, contentious during filming, wrote a letter to Lean after the film’s premiere, saying that the film was “terrific” and that he was “proud to be associated with it.” See Brownlow, David Lean, 384. 19. Brownlow, David Lean, 385–86. 20. Gerard Prattley’s “Interview with Sarris,” Madrid, March 1965. See also David Sterritt, “David Lean: Master of the Great Film Epic,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 30, 1991. 21. Silver and Ursini, David Lean, 8.

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22. Silver and Ursini, David Lean, 9. 23. Silverman, David Lean, 147. 24. Susan Sackett, Box Office Hits (New York: Billboard Books. 1990), 180. 25. Brownlow, David Lean, 538. 26. Silverman, David Lean, 177. 27. Silverman, David Lean, 177. 28. “Bolt and Lean,” in “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker, November 21, 1970, 116–18. 29. The actual expression Schickel used was “a piece of bullshit,” as some sources have it (see Brownlow, David Lean, 587). “Piece of crap” is the expression Schickel used in his segment of the commentary on the 2006 W/B DVD edition of Ryan’s Daughter. 30. “Adventures in the Dream Department,” Time, December 31, 1984, 59. 31. “A Passage to India,” reprinted in For Keeps (New York: Plume, 1996), 141–45. 32. American Film, March 15, 1990, “Arts Module,” 20. 33. A noteworthy exception is Phillips’s Beyond the Epic, mentioned above. 34. Brownlow, David Lean, 726–27. 35. A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 36. Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 167. This is no longer true, for boxed DVD sets have appeared lately, containing ten of the eleven Lean films, excepting Summertime, which is a Criterion Collection edition. 37. On a passage on Lawrence, it is mentioned that Tafas (Lawrence’s guide) was killed by a detonator, when in fact it was Farraj, one of the two boys who had befriended Lawrence (42). 38. Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall and Company, published a series of important international authors, artists, and filmmakers in the 1970s and ’80s, a series that proved useful as basic scholarly treatments of such authors. 39. Constantine Santas’s The Epic in Film: From Myth to Blockbuster (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007) examines these questions in more detail. 40. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson (eds.), Criticism: Major Statements, 3rd edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 53. 41. Kaplan and Anderson, Criticism: Major Statements, 53. 42. Kaplan and Anderson, Criticism: Major Statements, 47. 43. Troy (2004) was 163 minutes, Alexander the Great (2005) 175 minutes, while Avatar (2009), in its initial release (it was reissued in the fall of 2010 with additional footage), comes in at 162 minutes—just to cite a few modern examples. 44. Jay Cocks, Time magazine, December 31, 1984. 45. Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 76. 46. During the genesis of Ryan’s Daughter plot, when Lean toyed with the idea of making a “small gem.” 47. As an editor, he had worked on G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion and Major Barbara. 48. See Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 102. 49. Quote from his letter to Santha Rama Rau. Brownlow, David Lean, 646–47. 50. Hugh Hudson, filmmaker, DVD edition, in “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” 2006. 51. Sandra Lean, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait, 39.

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52. Such terms were used in Aristotle’s Poetics, and have become standard fare in literary criticism. 53. Sandra Lean, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait, 47 54. Quoted in Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 96. 55. Quoted in Brownlow, David Lean, 506. 56. Sandra Lean, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait, 50. 57. Brownlow, David Lean, 604. 58. It is worth noting that T. E. Lawrence, author of both Seven Pillars and Revolt in the Desert, is far from ignorant of Eastern values, but the same cannot exactly be said of Lean’s character (O’Toole playing Lawrence), who, at least at first, shows ignorance of the Arab tribes he is going to lead. 59. Lean directed (unaccredited) a scene or two in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told. 60. Aristotle thought that of all the elements of a staged play, the least artistic (“the art of the machinist”) was spectacle.

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The Bridge on the River Kwai Crew Director: Screenplay: Producer: Cinematography: Editor: Music: Art Direction: Sound Editor: Assistant Directors: Technical Advisor: Cast Colonel Nicholson: Shears: Major Warden: Colonel Saito: Major Clipton: Lieutenant Joyce: Colonel Green: Captain Reeves: Major Hughes: Grogan: Baker: Nurse: Captain Kanematsu: Lieutenant Miura: Yai: Siamese Girls:

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David Lean Carl Foreman, Michael Wilson Sam Spiegel (Columbia Pictures) Jack Hildyard Peter Taylor Malcolm Arnold Donald M. Ashton Winston Ryder Gus Agosti, Ted Sturgis Major General L. E. M. Perowne Alec Guinness William Holden Jack Hawkins Sessue Hayakawa James Donald Geoffrey Horne Andre Morell Peter Williams John Boxer Percy Herbert Harold Goodwin Ann Sears Henry Okawa Keiichiro Katsumoto M. R. B. Chakrabandhu Vilaiwan Seeboonreaung Ngamta Suphaphongs Javanart Punynchoti Kannikar Dowklee

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CHAPTER 1

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

An Epic Transition The Bridge on the River Kwai is the first epic of the five made by Lean, and in one particular way it is different from any of the others that followed. It was not entirely the result of choice, or even of inclination, but of mere chance. In 1955, despite the success of Summertime,1 Lean was low in funds, embroiled in his divorce with Ann Todd, and practically unknown outside of England. It was on the strength of Katharine Hepburn’s recommendation to Sam Spiegel that he was offered the job of directing an epic, a form he had never tried before. The project had already been rejected by several directors, including Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, and Carol Reed. Spiegel offered it to Lean as a last resort. Hepburn, who had worked with both Spiegel and Lean, brought the two together, and Lean accepted the assignment, entering a challenging but unknown territory, an undertaking that would involve unforeseen difficulties but that would eventually catapult him to international fame and an Oscar for Best Director. Austrian-born Spiegel had fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933, as so many other distinguished filmmakers had done, and taken refuge first in London and then in Hollywood, where he produced numerous films including such blockbusters as The African Queen2 and On the Waterfront. When Hepburn introduced Lean to him, Spiegel had already obtained the rights of Pierre Boulle’s novel, The Bridge over the River Kwai (Ponte de la riviere Kwai), and had assigned the writing of the script to Carl Foreman, then blacklisted and living in England, writing under a pseudonym. Subsequently, Spiegel submitted Foreman’s draft to Lean, already in Ceylon, and when the latter found it objectionable, Spiegel sent another screenwriter, Calder Willingham, whose work Lean thought even less acceptable than Foreman’s.3 Finally, Michael Wilson arrived in Ceylon, and 1

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he and Lean worked smoothly together to fashion the final script. Though much of Foreman’s original work survives, it was Wilson’s work that gave shape to the character of the American Shears, with Lean contributing ideas and dialogue to the final shooting script. Lean made no secret of the fact that he didn’t like Foreman’s script (Foreman had scripted High Noon), and while already filming in the jungles of Ceylon, he stated to him that he was doing the project “only for money,” and that he would rather quit than film what Foreman had written.4 The project took nearly a year to finish, as Lean ran into difficulties with both Sam Spiegel and his English crew, and the project came to the brink of collapse several times, but in the end the result was a spectacular hit with critics and audiences. Though accepting to do this film out of sheer necessity, and having tried the wide screen format for the first time, Lean never again wavered from making epics. In his hands, the epic form acquired characteristics and achieved new standards never before seen in the Hollywood productions that preceded it for many decades. Lean may have run into the genre by mere accident, but once in it he never left the format. The Bridge on the River Kwai is an epic whose themes and structure marked a turning point in the evolution of the epic form as defined by Hollywood standards. Hollywood productions, especially those of the 1950s, were sprawling spectacles, aiming to gain back the earlier glitter of Hollywood usurped by the advent of television in the late 1940s. Of those only a few are memorable: Samson and Delilah (1948), Quo Vadis (1950), The Robe (1951, only because it was the first CinemaScope epic), The Ten Commandments (1955), and Ben-Hur (1959). The last two were big box office hits, won Oscars by the handful, and defined popular taste, which showed a patent interest in Biblical and Roman/ Christian-related storylines. The Bridge on the River Kwai marks a transition from those epics to the war/adventure stories that prevailed in the decade after World War II, though few of those excelled as character studies or escaped the confines of action flicks aimed at exploiting the justifiably prevalent bias against two specific enemies the Allies and U.S. fought during the war—Japan and Nazi Germany. Though placing more emphasis on nuanced performances than on spectacle and action, Kwai contains enough of war adventure elements to appeal to popular audiences. As a war movie, it remains within the war parameters— British-American units fighting Japan in the Pacific, for instance—but gains in richness of characterization and heightened suspense to match Hitchcock’s, though a much different film from his. Filmed entirely on location in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), in a lush tropical jungle, Kwai takes full advantage of its locale, thus avoiding the artificiality of the usual Hollywood epic sets and appearing more real. But what marks this departure from the usual epic spectacle more than anything else is the plot design with its discernible classic lines. Character becomes complex and ambiguous, while ironic utterances throughout the action become the film’s most potent thematic tool.

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The Bridge on the River Kwai also marks Lean’s transition from a literary adaptor of Dickens and director of small, distinguished movies, to an international celebrity with wealth, Oscars, and many other awards. But when the glow of the first two epics faded, critical discontent also came along. Among other things, many critics found it a paradox that a career started on one path, one well defined by art movie adherents, and ended on another, that of an epic filmmaker of popular blockbusters. To some, that made Lean two directors blended in one, for those who condemned him later never ceased to admire his earlier, and more limited, achievements.5 Whether this can be seen as a betrayal of cinematic art remains a question not yet resolved either by theoretical or “middlebrow” critics. His work, especially on the epic, is still to be fully assessed. The paradox continues with the question: are the two types of moviemaking so different from each other? Can a small movie have any serious relationship to an epic? Some directors—Hitchcock comes to mind—never attempted the epic form.6 Others mixed them up—Howard Hawks, for instance—rather effortlessly. But none has made five grand epics in a row without ever returning to the formula of the “small” film. Today, of course, many dramas have epic elements in them, but these are confined to movies that are tight in structure and rather of average length—the thriller/action movie, for instance, which does not usually exceed the usual multiplex limit of two to two and a half hours. Today the epic has, of course, changed character: it can be made with relatively limited budgets, made possible by digital technology, whereas at the times of Lean, DeMille, and William Wyler—among others—epics were colossi with almost prohibitive budgets—some threatening to bankrupt studios, more than once.7

Kwai and Pierre Boulle’s Novel: Literary/Historical Perspectives As pointed out above, the Kwai script went through several transformations, with contributions from diverse sources, before it became the story we see in the film. Therefore, a look at Boulle’s novel may offer the viewer a chance to gain clearer perspectives on the literary and historical matters that came into play as the story evolved. All the Lean epics had their origins, in some fashion or other,8 in literary works, which, inevitably, left their mark on plot design, theme, and character development. Lean’s method was to design a detailed, finished script before shooting, and though this was not always possible, this practice of his prevailed, by and large. Therefore, the tensions created between original work and final script are worth exploring, for film, though a visual medium, is built on a literary structure preceding it—whether an original screenplay or one borrowed from a literary source. Boulle’s novel is not a literary work of high order, but a

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wartime thriller, an adventure story written with unusual skill, drawing realistic characters seen in action and depicting tangled situations so designed as to show that human conflicts, such as war, are, despite bravery or honorable intentions, often blind efforts thwarted by chance with tragic outcomes also resulting from pride and self-delusion. Such is the case here. Kwai follows the same storyline of Boulle’s novel, with mostly the same characters, who act out of motives similar to those of the characters in the novel. A group of British prisoners undertake to build a bridge that would connect a railway line from Bangkok to Rangoon, a link that would enable the Japanese to invade India. The Boulle novel is loosely based on history, for the Japanese did build bridges along 250 miles of this section of that railway, using hundreds of thousands of captured Allied troops—American, Australian, Dutch, and British—forced to surrender after the capitulation of Singapore and of the Dutch East Indies, in 1942. The scene in the novel is set at one particular camp near the Burmese border, where a group of British prisoners, under Colonel Nicholson, are assigned the building of a major bridge over a stream, the Kwai River, to connect the two sections of the railway, one going south from Rangoon, the other north from Bangkok. The novel makes frequent references to the larger historical picture—the camps at Singapore from where a large number of prisoners were transported north to build the railway, and the physical torments suffered at the hands of their Japanese captors, who ignored any appeals to international law about the treatment of prisoners of war. But the main action centers on what happens in a small section in the line, the site of the building of the bridge, with flashbacks to British headquarters in Calcutta, from where a British group of commandos is dispatched to destroy it. The novel comes in four parts (twenty-five chapters), and in its first two parts—through chapter 11—it focuses on Nicholson’s clash with the Japanese commander, Saito, over the infraction of the Geneva Convention9 about the illegal use of prisoner officers for manual labor. Then the action shifts to a second plotline describing the plans of the team of British commandos, Force 316,10 in Calcutta, home of the school of “Plastic and Destructions Company, Ltd.,” whose aim is to search and destroy enemy structures along the Bangkok-Rangoon railway. These two strands of the plot gradually merge, as the commando group arrives at the site of the bridge built under Nicholson and prepares to blow it up. The main British characters in the Japanese camp consist of Colonel Nicholson and his officers, Clipton, Reeves, and Hughes; and the team of the commandos includes Major Shears, Captain Warden, and Lieutenant Joyce. The names of the main characters (but not all their actual ranks) are retained in the film, with one significant difference, as we shall see. But the psychological makeup of the main characters is given more depth in the novel, since exposition

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allows an author lengthy descriptions and recollections of the characters’ previous lives, impossible to retain in their entirety in a film. The novel narration starts with the reflections of Major Clipton, the M.O. (medical officer) of that unit, whose point of view is established for several chapters before it shifts to that of other major characters. Clipton, as in the film, remains a central secondary character providing perspectives on the actions of Nicholson and his officers while the task of building the bridge is under way. At the very outset, Clipton reflects on the two main characters at the camp—Nicholson and Saito—stating that “the mentality of the Japanese colonel, Saito, was essentially the same as that of his prisoner, Colonel Nicholson.”11 Both men were preoccupied with “saving face,” an attitude that shapes their actions and defines their characters. Clipton repeats this point as the action progresses through the first part of the novel, offering an insight that may explain Saito’s sudden capitulation to Nicholson’s demands, as well as Nicholson’s decision to build the bridge for the Japanese. Saito, mindful of his superiors, wants the bridge built on time, so his reversal comes from the need to “save face,” even if that means his own personal humiliation—but it would have been worse for him had he failed to carry out his orders. And Nicholson, having to swallow Saito’s insult that the British, though defeated, “have no shame,”12 compensates by “proving” to the Japanese “barbarians”13 that the British, though defeated, have the superior know-how and intelligence (and technology) to build a fine bridge. “We’ve got to show we are superior to these savages,”14 says Nicholson to Captain Reeves, his engineer who designs the bridge, and who is also affected by his leader’s eagerness. And he too wants “to prove the superiority of the West—this bridge, which was to be used by the Japanese trains in their triumphant advance to the Bay of Bengal.”15 Again, Clipton captures the tension between the real motives of Nicholson and his proclaimed rationale for building the bridge. To Clipton’s protest that his men are too undernourished and “in a poor state of health” to take on such an enormous task as building a bridge, Nicholson absurdly replies that nothing is more important for their physical health than work, which builds morale. “Troops who are bored, Clipton, are troops doomed in advance to defeat,”16 he says. And he adds, “But fill every minute of their day with hard work, and cheerfulness and health are guaranteed.”17 “Be happy in your work!” responds Clipton sardonically, citing General Yamashita’s motto.18 Nicholson, in retort, finds this quite a sensible motto, under the circumstances. Ironically, the troops adhere to Nicholson’s logic and undertake a debilitating task with overwhelming enthusiasm. Later in the novel, when Joyce arrives at the scene, he is horrified by the sight of emaciated, sick men working slavishly to the task at hand, attributing all that to the cruelty of the Japanese oppressors. The novel text is fraught with passages of such devastating ironies, which are by and large retained in the film, adding new dimensions to its intensifying tragedy.

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Colonel Nicholson stands on a pontoon with fellow officers. Columbia Pictures/ Photofest © Columbia Pictures

One of the most important differences between the film and the novel is found in the change of identity of one of the major characters, Shears. While in the novel Shears is a cavalry officer transferred to Force 316, and the leader of the commando group, known as Number One, the film Shears is an American, a mere sailor (“swab jockey, second class”) posing as “Commander Shears,” whose true identity is later revealed by Major Warden. This arrangement caused a restructuring of the novel plot, for the American Shears is already in the Japanese camp when the British battalion arrives and is, in fact, preparing to escape. After an initial brush with Nicholson, who subscribes to Saito’s slogan, “We are an island in the jungle; escape is impossible,” and forbids the formation of an “escape committee,” Shears soon escapes on his own, accompanied by a British officer, Jennings, and Weaver, an Australian who had been a pal of Shears in the camp and had apparently known of his fake rank.19 The last two are killed in the attempt, but Shears manages to reach a native village through the jungle, and from there he sails down a river and into the ocean, where he is picked up by a British rescue plane. We next see him at Mount-Ravinia Hospital in Ceylon, cavorting with a nurse on the beach, unaware that his true identity is known by the British authorities there and that he is soon to be assigned a role in Force 316, whose mission is to destroy the same bridge, now under way, being built by Nicholson and his troops. Thus the film plot has an additional twist to deal with, as Shears’s escape is documented in brief nondialogue crosscutting, while the NicholsonSaito feud is going on. The addition of Shears as an American also adds ironic twists, as Shears has a different take on the war effort as a whole. Though he

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does not know that Nicholson is willingly building the bridge as monument to British efficiency, Shears does discern similarities between Nicholson and Major Warden (Captain Warden in the book),20 under whom he serves in his new expedition. The film Shears sees that both men are unbending disciplinarians, both expecting absolute obedience, and both are ready to sacrifice their lives for the cause they believe in. In the Boulle novel, the commandos group—Warden, Shears, and Joyce— are trained men, ready to undergo countless physical and mental torments through a hostile jungle environment to accomplish their mission. But, because the novel can afford to give its characters greater psychological depth through lengthy exposition, a reader gains insights about their adventure impossible to include in a film. All three characters in the Force 316 describe the action (or the action is described through them) with elaborate shifts of points of view. Left to his devices after he and Shears reach the post in a river inlet near the bridge, Joyce is seen as a lonely man, his self-confidence shaken, wondering whether he will be able to endure mental and physical torment and to handle the weight of responsibility assigned to him. Shears has given him this post having reservations about Joyce’s ability to carry out his mission when it comes to using his knife, as the film Colonel Green had done when he interviewed Joyce for the mission. Both opine that Joyce has “too much imagination, as opposed to cold calculation,” and is thus unable to kill an enemy in cold blood. For his part, Shears, an alarmist by nature, follows closely what is happening across the river as the train approaches, to his utter amazement seeing Colonel Nicholson taking Saito to the spot where Joyce is waiting with the plunger by his side. Seeing Joyce’s inaction, Shears (as in the film) jumps into the river to kill Nicholson and is killed by Warden’s mortar fire, as are Nicholson and Joyce. While the train is partially derailed after an explosion of the detonators on the tracks, planted there the previous night, the bridge remains intact. Warden, the only survivor after the failed attempt, returns to Calcutta and relates to Colonel Green, in lengthy monologues, what has happened. Though Colonel Green hears what he considers incoherent ravings of a disturbed man, the reader grasps the author’s paradoxes that underlie the failure of the mission and, more importantly, what the great irony of the ending is. Warden’s “delirium” amounts to nothing more than the startling revelations he has gained while witnessing the disaster. Warden has seen the whole action, using his field glasses, so nothing has escaped him. He has seen Nicholson leading Saito to the site where Joyce was hiding and understands what the “old man’s” obsession with the bridge he has built means to him, and he deplores “this idiotic worship of action”21 that also afflicted him as much as it did the participants in the 316 mission. In a flash of self-knowledge, Warden makes admissions that Green interprets as those of a battle-scarred veteran, but the reader sees what Warden has seen. All of them—Nicholson, Shears,

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Warden, and even Joyce—are products of the same regimentation produced by the Western view of what an “Oriental” is. This rather lofty generalization is in truth the essence of the novel. Building a bridge or destroying it doesn’t matter, as long as the principals remain loyal to their mission. That Warden is still deluded, though, is seen in the way he ends his tale. He chooses to kill his own men by using the mortars rather than let them be captured by the Japanese. (His “I had to do it” remains something of a puzzling statement in the film.) What Warden later reveals, though, is what the author wishes to be revealed, indirectly, through one of his characters: as Warden confesses to Colonel Green, “perhaps that silly old fool was really quite a decent fellow at heart?”22 A passage from his “delirium,” describing the militarily induced worship of action, is worth quoting in some length: This dreamworld, as far as I can see, is simply a hell afflicted with devilish standards which warp our judgment, lead the way to any form of dishonesty, and culminate in a result which is bound to be deplorable. I tell you, sir, I’ve been thinking about this for the last month. Here we are, for instance, blundering into this part of the world in order to teach Orientals how to handle plastic so as to destroy trains and blow up bridges.23

As he and his collaborators adapted the Boulle novel, Lean perhaps saw that the author was making a note in history that imperialistic conquerors of all colors were playing the losing game. But, if such a statement is meant to be a historic truth rather than a casual remark in fiction, he owed this idea to the work he adapted. A few other differences between the novel and film might be worth mentioning. While in Boulle’s novel all characters are male, Lean adds several native women who are used as “bearers,” replacing native males that the Japanese had conscripted in the village where Warden and his group landed. In the film, a guide called Yai is going to take them to the bridge after an arduous and lengthy trek through the jungle. Yai is the fourth man, as the Warden group lost one of its men, Chapman (not in the novel), who parachuted into a tree. In the novel, Shears, Warden, and Joyce arrive at their destination well in advance of the final mission and hide in a hamlet sheltered by the villagers, using the spot as their headquarters from which to launch their attack on the biggest target they can find. They finally settle on the River Kwai Bridge, only three days’ march from the hiding place. Just as Captain Reeves in the Nicholson camp is shown to be a meticulous planner, leaving no detail to chance, so is Shears cut from the same cloth, an example of British efficiency and discipline. The point of all this is that all principals in both camps—Nicholson, Reeves (and his colleague Major Hughes), Shears, Warden seem to have the same mentality: these men are

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fiercely dedicated to their mission, whether issued from headquarters or of their own initiative, and believe themselves superior to their opponents, holding the lofty contempt of a Westerner against the Japanese, whom they call “savages”—a term hard to imagine in currency today. The film presents the same characters as having the same mind-set, two in particular, Nicholson and Warden, whom the American Shears compares, when the latter, wounded, asks to remain behind, as he explodes with “You are like that Colonel Nicholson, crazy with courage, how to die like gentlemen, for what?” It is worth remembering that these classic film lines originated in the Boulle novel. The film provoked denunciation by many ex-POWs who survived the ordeal of building the Bangkok-Rangoon railway under the Japanese during World War II. A large number of Allied prisoners captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942 were compelled to march through the jungles of Thailand under the most excruciating circumstances in order to build the infamous railway and the many bridges needed to cross hundreds of streams. Thousands died or suffered the most inhuman ordeals during the six months needed to complete those huge tasks. The movie was described by veterans as “Hollywood fiction” that had nothing to do with what actually happened. The film “distorts reality” and is “factually untrue,” expressions used by surviving POWs,24 who stressed that the conditions in the building of the railway were horrors second only to those of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Many of those veterans complained that the film did them a great disservice by “romanticizing” the action and that they are still waiting for someone to finally tell the truth about their ordeals. These charges brought against the film by those who actually suffered the horrors of building the Thailand-Burma railway cannot be ignored. There is of course no real answer that would alleviate their indignation, except to offer a few responses on a purely theoretical basis. The first thing to say is to admit that a film is fiction, as are most films that have claimed historicity—though Lean and his collaborators never claimed that the film represents history; it was based on a fictional work, Boulle’s novel, a fact never mentioned in the History Channel narrative. However, and despite its fictional character, it was based on the author’s experiences. Boulle had been in that part of the world during the war, had served in the French army in the same capacity as some of his heroes, planning to demolish bridges, and had been captured and served as prisoner, and escaped captivity.25 In the novel, some facts bearing on that point are mentioned, as we are told that “the Burma-Siam railway is now under construction,” and that sixty thousand Allied prisoners “are being employed on it and under ghastly conditions.”26 Among the complaints launched by the veterans—and by the documentary narrator—is that the inaccuracies of the film are compounded by saying that the British built the Kwai bridge because of their superior know-how, in

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contrast to a Japanese engineer, Lieutenant Miura, portrayed in the film as inept and helpless. The History Channel documentary states that the Japanese were very good at building railways and employed some of their best engineers in the Thailand-Burma line. In the novel, Boulle opines that “qualified engineers did exist in the Japanese Empire, but they had been kept behind in the capital,” adding that, in the occupied Siam many of those engineers had been under the army officers, who could overrule any decision made by civilians.27 Here, it could also be pointed out that the Siam-Burma railway was an enormous undertaking and an engineering marvel, worthy of Japanese expertise, but that the construction of most bridges along the railway could have been assigned to second-rate military engineers—as is the case both in film and novel. The History Channel tells that the Japanese constructed a major bridge along the railway called the Tamarkan Bridge, near the Burmese border, a bridge made of steel transported by the Japanese from Java, designed as a sturdy structure, on which a several thousands of prisoners worked, but only nine died.28 But next to this bridge, a wooden structure was erected for trains carrying construction material and personnel and this second bridge had some similarities with the bridge in the film. There was also a river called Kwei, not Kwai, and it is assumed that is the name the filmmakers (and of course the novelist) imitated. Here one may add that, although fiction, film or narrative rarely makes claims of exact historical truth; it establishes certain premises for a narrative to exist, and that in this case those premises rest on materials that are no doubt historical: bridges were constructed by the Japanese, along an important railway, and the Allied prisoners employed there were terribly abused and many died. Boulle’s novel narrates these horrors along the same lines as the historians do, though focusing mostly on those who built the bridge. We are told that prisoners were “wretches,” sick and starving, suffering countless hardships, “beating-up, butt-end blows, and even worse forms of brutality,”29 and were forced to build the bridge under conditions hard to imagine. Joyce, the character who brings back a report to his superiors of what he saw on his reconnaissance trip, narrates the conditions of the British workers, horrified by what he saw: Most of them are covered with ulcers and jungle sores. Some of them can hardly walk. No civilized person could even think of making men work in such a crippled state. You ought to see them, sir. It could make you weep. The team pulling the rope to drive in the last few piles—absolute skeletons, sir. I’ve never seen such a ghastly sight. It’s utterly criminal.30

That shows that Boulle was fully aware of the horrible abuses the Allied prisoners suffered under the Japanese, but his passage is intended to intensify

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the irony of his narrative—in this case that the condition of the POWs was caused by their own C.O., Colonel Nicholson, under whose orders the bridge was built. The History Channel shows emaciated, sick prisoners, practically skeletons, doing hard work under inhuman conditions, but, as said earlier, the novel, with its identical descriptions (whether in the camp or along the railway), is never mentioned in the documentary. The film, admittedly, makes no effort to show what the prisoners actually looked like, but there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that. While a novelist—or a historian—can describe such details as realistically as need be, a film is hampered by the fact that real actors have to be employed, and, in spite of makeup, it is not possible to starve actors to the point that they look as emaciated or sick as the prisoners of war were. The contrast between the prisoners shown on the History Channel and those in the film is significant. The filmmakers were obviously aware of the dilemma. That is one reason, at least, why Lean rejected Charles Laughton as the lead character, because he deemed the portly Laughton could hardly look like a starving prisoner of war. Even Guinness, though looking shaky and raggedy stepping out of the oven and barely able to stagger toward Saito’s hut, does not appear like a man who is dehydrated and near starved (as the novel describes him). A muscular Holden when first meeting Nicholson at Clipton’s infirmary looks more like a professional wrestler ready to jump into the ring rather than a starving prisoner of war. The same is true for most actors playing roles, major or minor, in the entire film. Makeup artists did their best to make actors look like prisoners, including whitened faces of locals playing English prisoners, but even so most of the actors in the film, in the camp or in the commando group 316, look physically fit by comparison. This in spite of the fact that Spiegel and Lean toured Ceylon to recruit the hundreds of extras needed for the scenes featuring British soldiers at the camp, and many residents and even some who had been actual prisoners volunteered to join the film crew. The filmmakers did attempt to render prison camp conditions as accurately as possible, being as loyal as they could to both the original source— the novel—and what history told. Some final thoughts on the subject: the film—as the novel—should be judged as fiction, as such forced to condense the plethora of materials of actual events and, as required by fictional structure, to focus on one episode of the war—not the entire war incidence, in this case the building of the railway. The film represents the novel quite closely, with some of the changes pointed out and some others of lesser importance, and the novel does not stray a great deal from the historical events of that period. As things stand, Boulle’s novel is an indispensable part of the study of the film, throwing much light on the character complexities of the movie but also spurring interest in the relationship between narrative fiction, film, and history.

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Kwai: Formal Elements The change of Shears from a member of the commandos group in the novel to an American sailor changes both the tone and the plotline in the film. The American Shears in the film is a completely different character from Major Shears in the Boulle novel, but this change adds richness in characterization that also affects the film structure. In the film, Shears is both cynical and pragmatic, having lost faith in the war effort, as his chores as a graveyard man show him proof of its futility; and he sees escape as the only alternative to certain death in the prisoners’ camp. His sarcastic remarks about a dead man he is burying (“What did he die for?”) and his echoing of Saito’s “Be happy in your work”31 show him to be utterly lacking in loyalty to principle or even patriotism—at least at first. As a consequence of Shears’s changed identity, the film gains in several aspects, mostly in plot design, which becomes a tightly knit story of classic structure—with unity of action, time, and place, and causal links between episodes. Ironies develop in the several reversals of the story, which is also rife with conflicts, all neatly serialized as the inner logic of events leads to final recognitions and, possibly, the arousal of “pity and fear,” a well-known phrase

Shears, Warden, and Joyce shoot at Japanese soldiers. Columbia Pictures/ Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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since the days of Aristotle, as vague now as this phrase was when he compared tragedy art to that of the epic.32 Kwai, nevertheless, does achieve unity of action and time, mainly because of its tight plot and adeptly quick pace. Lean, a master editor, never allows scenes to drag, using a variety of camera angles, long shots alternating with intimate close-ups, and using crosscutting to shift from one part of action to the other, so the two plots constantly interrelate. Kwai achieves unity of action and place by singling out a portion of the Second World War, the Japanese-American/English conflict in the Pacific, and focusing on an even smaller portion of that conflict, the Japanese prison camp where British prisoners of war are assigned the building of a bridge. The movie action takes place in the early months of 1943, between February and early May,33 and focuses on a relatively minor incident, not a battle or massive war operation—usual in the war epics—but on the clash of two individuals, a British and a Japanese officer, over a rule of the Geneva Convention that exempts officers from manual labor. Gradually, this seemingly insignificant incident grows into a ferocious battle of wills and takes a most serious turn when the U. S. and British naval forces in the Pacific become aware of the importance of this location and that the bridge being built has serious repercussions on the Japanese operations in this corner of the world and decide to take action. The major command centers are all kept in the background, out of sight, and all we see is what happens in the field, centering on two locales: the site of the bridge itself and the commandos training camp at Ceylon, where orders are received to organize a group of commandos to demolish it. These two main strands of the plot follow parallel lines for a while and eventually come to a head, when the two different groups—the one building the bridge, the other intent on demolishing it—collide. Incidentally, and not without the creation of a major irony, both groups are operating under the command of British officers. Most of the above is of course in the Boulle novel action, already summarized. But the addition of the early opening scenes with Shears allows the action in the film to get into the heart of the matter quickly and move rapidly toward a resolution. Colonel Saito, the commander of the Japanese camp (Camp #16), seems to have encountered some difficulties in completing his assignment, due mainly to lack of men and equipment. Therefore he is in a hurry to get his project under way, and he counts heavily on a new group of British prisoners who arrive marching through the jungle34 led by their indomitable commander, Colonel Nicholson. The main conflict arises by the clash of the personalities of these two men. Saito, hard driving and anxious to finish his job, orders all the men/prisoners to work at the project, including their officers. Nicholson, a stickler for military etiquette even in the middle of a jungle, resists having his officers doing manual labor and refuses to obey, citing the regulations of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war. As a consequence, he and his officers are

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shut in the camp’s punishment huts. Nicholson obdurately refuses to succumb to Saito’s threats and rejects the latter’s attempts to cajole him by offering him a dinner, and the building of the bridge comes to a halt. After about a month of delays, Saito desperately gives in and frees Nicholson and exempts his officers from manual duty. Under Nicholson, the British build the bridge, proud to have won the “battle” with the Japanese. As Nicholson clashes with Saito, a second line simultaneously develops with the escape of Shears, whose story is briefly documented without dialogue, as the Saito-Nicholson feud goes on. Eventually, Shears is rescued by a British search party, his true identity is revealed in a lengthy scene between him and Major Warden (Jack Hawkins), the leader of the commando group, and he is assigned a role in the expedition to blow up the bridge. This group includes one Canadian (Joyce), another British officer (Chapman), Shears, and Warden himself. Warden, an ex-professor of linguistics turned demolitions expert, knows well that Shears comes under compulsion after his fake identity has been exposed, but he and Colonel Green, his ranking officer, consider his presence essential since Shears had escaped from that very same camp they are trying to reach. (“You don’t realize what a plum you are for us,” Colonel Green says to Shears.) The

Shears kills a Japanese guard while escaping. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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plot is now focused on the activities of this group, with crosscuttings into the Nicholson group back at the camp busy building the bridge. The commando group are flown to Indochina and parachuted to a clearing where they are joined by a Siamese guide and several women, who undertake to carry supplies and equipment to the campsite through a thick jungle. After much adversity, which includes a skirmish with a Japanese group, which they eliminate but not before Warden is wounded, they arrive at the camp on time and prepare to blow up the bridge the next morning when a Japanese train carrying a VIP will be crossing it. Tension is built as the two strands of the plot merge, and the two separate activities begin to integrate. The (first-time) viewer wonders which group is going to win out but also vacillates as to which side to root for: a loyal group of commandos that has made a valiant effort on a key war operation, or for Nicholson, who inspired his troops to work for a “cause,” telling them building the bridge “in the middle of the jungle” is a victory against tremendous odds. Both sides have a point. The ironies built into this plot can shed some light into this moral and logical dilemma, but any conclusion that can be drawn from all this action stands on perilous and slippery grounds. We shall come back to this point.

Kwai: A Full-Fledged Tragedy As the plot spins its twin yarns, the characters in question undergo an intense scrutiny by Jack Hildyard’s deft camera work, which reveals as much about their inner struggles as the rather sparse dialogue (more or less, for some, like Saito, deliver laborious orations) that punctuates their adventure. The four major characters—Nicholson, Saito, Warden, and Shears—as is usual in many Lean epics,35 are paired, acting either in unison for a common course or in antagonism or simply because of cultural isolation. Here, the SaitoNicholson feud has its dimensions, while the duo of Shears-Warden drive for a common cause, though this relationship is marred by antithetical personalities. The conflict between Saito and Nicholson is a clash of personalities as well as two cultures: the proud Saito sees honor (Bushido) in victory and feels his enemy should be humiliated and dishonored in defeat; the stubborn Nicholson is intent on showing his Western superiority over the inefficient and blundering (if not barbaric)36 Easterner. Yet many have found their personalities complementary, as both are unbending, brutal (in their specific ways) in driving the men under them to extremes, and loyal to what they believe is their cause. A most potent irony of the movie is built on this relationship, as both switch sides, Nicholson building the bridge with Saito aiding him. Their personalities actually become the main forces that propel the plot to its tragic conclusion. Ironies are also built into the Shears-Warden relationship,

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as when Shears kicks the broken radio in disgust, but producing the opposite effect: the radio comes to life, starts transmitting, and the group learns that a train will be passing the same day the bridge is finished. That causes them to accelerate their pace, something that has unforeseen consequences, and unexpected results. Such utterances as “There’s always the unexpected,” by Warden, become motifs—one of many—giving added depth to both character and theme. What Warden says happens, but it is the reluctant Shears who becomes the unwitting agent for such change, and for another plot twist. Such ironic reversals become the means for character growth, especially when a character achieves recognition (the Aristotelian anagnorisis) at the same time. In classic tragedy, anagnorisis is this confrontation with the self—and so it is in the ancient epic. In Kwai, such a confrontation occurs when Nicholson, who, after Joyce is killed, recognizes his mistake (“What have I done?”) and falls on the detonator to blow up the train. Nicholson’s ignorance of his own true motives has been foreshadowed and fulfilled by choruslike reverberations throughout the film. English efficiency, which is part and parcel of both Nicholson’s and Warden’s mentality, has been highlighted by such phrases running repeatedly through the action, as in the already cited “There’s always the unexpected,” or Colonel Green’s “In our job, there’s always one more thing to do.”37 These choruslike utterances underscore not only the film’s theme of Oriental fatalism, but the role of chance in human endeavor. Nicholson, who thinks he can defeat adversity by singlemindedness and hard work, becomes vain and self-deceiving, but he cannot foresee that his endeavors will be forestalled by the same British war machine of which he is a part. Throughout the course of the action, he displays an enormous capacity for self-elevation and self-deception, at the expense of sanity and common sense. Soon after he is freed by Saito, he embarks on the ambitious project of building a “proper bridge” (though a less perfect one, he was told by his medical officer, would do), despite severe limitations of his resources and personnel. Standing on a pontoon in the water, he confers with his senior officers who shared the hot oven with him for many weeks. His slyly made point is that building the bridge means “rebuilding the battalion” and boosting the morale of his troops. He easily brainwashes his officers, who are receptive to his orders after his defeat of Saito in the battle of wills and ready to take any steps to finish the bridge, which they also see as a challenge, all except two, Evans, puzzled unlike the others by his commander’s decision, and of course Clipton, his medical officer, who discerns Nicholson’s perilous truck with the enemy. But most of the others go along, out of the enormous respect they have for their leader for defeating Saito. He can do no wrong, so they enthusiastically back his efforts, also gloating in the prospect of building a bridge that will “last six hundred years.”38 Flushed from his victory and vainglorious, Nicholson rises to heights of conceit and self-deception by seeing this as an opportunity to build on his victory—he surmises—by demonstrating how

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inefficient the Japanese were.39 The stiff-necked colonel, symbol of the conquering British Empire, though waning in prestige at this point in time,40 conceals his true motives to his officers and to his troops, letting them believe that his reason for this huge undertaking, bound to exhaust them physically, is done for their welfare. All but one or two fully share his self-deception. The film director’s concept of detachment here is similar to the objectivity of Homer, the calm viewer of the massacres perpetrated in the battles of Greeks and Trojans. The camera may be detached, but the viewer knows, and develops empathy for the characters as the action develops. A slightly changed atonal music note or two is heard every time Nicholson goes into one of his trancelike fits of self-deception. If the qualifying characteristic of the epic hero is self-awareness, or anagnorisis, then, judged by this criterion, four other persons, in addition to Nicholson, may share tragic traits in Kwai: Saito, Shears, Warden, and Clipton. Of these, Warden does not achieve full self-knowledge, though he comes close when he is forced to kill a young Japanese soldier in the jungle, in order to maintain the secrecy of his mission. Warden is a Cambridge scholar learned in Oriental languages, now an expert in demolition and explosives, and the leader of the commando group sent to blow up the Kwai bridge that Nicholson is building. Culturally and socially, he is the typical “officer and gentleman” (something the amoral Shears is not), a specimen that the English empire proudly produced and exhibited to the world, as a model to be adopted and copied. He comes through as a loyal, modest, courteous officer—even when he is deceptive to Shears—selfsacrificing, a model for the military code of obedience and a stickler for the rules. He is totally dedicated to his mission and despises Shears for making such a fuss about going back to blow up the Kwai bridge. Casually, Shears (and the viewer) hears from Warden’s superior officer, Colonel Green, that Warden had been the hero in many sabotage missions, that he had already been captured by the Japanese (and presumably escaped), and that he is ready for another mission. Warden never has scruples about the murderous nature of his mission, but tosses his mortar away in disgust, saying, “I had to do it” to the uncomprehending Siamese women, after its shells had killed two of his own men. Clipton is Delphic, possessing common sense that his leader lacks, but not displaying any dimension of real depth; he is merely an announcer, and a very distressed one, who does his duty, as his conscience dictates, warning his superior officer of the dangers of his deception. His knowledge is not selfknowledge, but knowledge of what duty means, but on medical or humanistic, not military levels. (Ironically, Nicholson tells him he is a good doctor, “but you have a lot to learn about the army.”) His own duty is to save men from disease, something that he does efficiently, but he can easily discern the lapses of judgment of his commander. At the end, viewing the catastrophe, the collapsed bridge built with such extraordinary effort and the death of men, he

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utters, “Madness . . . madness.” In a long shot at the end, he descends the hill, while the hawk flies above him, both symbols of objectivity, summing up a viewer’s impressions of the absurdity of human endeavor. Shears, probably the most interesting of all the characters in Kwai, has knowledge of himself, but that knowledge only lowers his self-esteem, since he knows quite well that he has evaded his duty by deceiving not only the Japanese but also the American navy in order to get a medical discharge. He has dimension and depth, however, because of his assumed role as the second Delphic commentator and observer of the British and their absurd attachment to military order and discipline. Shears has a half-hidden fondness for Nicholson, whose death-defying heroics amuse him at first and make him report these admiringly to the barracks commander at Ceylon. Later, however, as Nicholson is leading Saito to the spot where the detonator has been placed, Shears is appalled by this mad action of an English commander who is about to betray his own countrymen and attempts to kill Nicholson. The change in Shears in that part of the action is interesting, but it is not a result of self-knowledge. Shears changes nature—from a cynical army dropout to a hero—when he refuses to obey Warden’s order to leave him behind and leads the group to the “objective,” but he does not undergo a profound change. He is merely caught up in the mad rush of the others, intensifying the concept of “madness” in the story, without being redeemed with the light of knowledge of himself. This reversal is one of the most powerful ironies of the story, however, for it underscores the theme of “blindness,” of the erratic behavior of the human heart. Shears, the ultimate survivor at the expense of principle, throws every caution to the wind when he leaps into the river, riddled by bullets, trying to reach and kill Nicholson and save the mission. The other irony is that the audience now perceives him as the archetypal war hero, one of those typically concocted by Hollywood war epics that have conditioned us to accept men sacrificing their lives for the sake of their country. Holden’s Hollywood image as a “superstar” (and his own energy) reinforces this view and brings about shock, if not catharsis of pity and fear. The one other character closer to tragic/epic hero, aside from Nicholson, is Saito. Arguably, Saito is a noble character. A brutal disciplinarian,41 subject to fits of murderous rage, not hesitating to kill, imprison, or torture, he is yet ready to give his life to carry out his orders to build the bridge. He is a proud officer, totally dedicated to his duty, unable to understand anything else but how to perform it. Nicholson’s stubbornness, however, is his stumbling block, and in his frustration he is unable to deal with it. Ultimately, Saito is defeated by this stubbornness, and the change in his role from the point when he admits defeat and becomes a mere helper to the indomitable British, who are occupied with building a bridge he can’t build himself, is one of the great reversals in this film. Saito, however, is not afflicted with Nicholson’s delusion and megalomania. He

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Nicholson leads Saito to the spot where the detonator is. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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is a realist who never loses sight of what is to be done, and what it means. He truly believes that officers should share in their soldiers’ labors, and he despises Nicholson for refusing to work. The latter’s resistance baffles him, as does his subsequent enthusiasm to build the bridge. Saito is proud and honorable, and realizes that by giving in to Nicholson he suffers a crushing defeat. He is fully aware of his defeat and humiliation and cries inconsolably when he gives in. This knowledge of his utter defeat does not come to him as a surprise. If he is tragic, he is so because of his agony, his shock, his dismay; he, the victor of the war conflict, the captor of his enemy, becomes the victim and the captive of his relentless enemy. The horror of this knowledge undoes the proud Saito, who, however, has exchanged his personal defeat for his country’s sake: for the bridge has been built. It has cost him his honor and manhood, but the sacrifice was worth it—as his ritual of cutting the lock of his hair and attaching it to the document with his signature at the completion of the project tells us.

Thematic Notes The ending of Kwai has provoked questions as to whether it is merely an antiwar movie or one with thematic overtones about the futility of human effort. A group of prisoners of war expend all their energies to build a bridge under false pretenses, as their leader tells them their work was an honorable goal achieved “in the face of great adversity.” On the other hand, the movie also describes the efforts of another group of men dedicated to a patriotic mission—to destroy a work that might enable the enemy to win a war against their own country. After the bridge is blown up—ironically by the man who built it—viewers have been left with a puzzle in their hands: Who are they to root for? The man who built it, a dreamer of sorts who wants to prove the superiority of his race? Or his compatriots, equally heroic, if not more so, who came there to do their duty, which is to defeat all works built by the enemy? The ironies that are found in the conduct of all involved do not eliminate the puzzle, further complicated by the last shots of the movie—Clipton’s final utterance, “Madness . . . madness,” and the sight of a hawk (as in the beginning of the movie) that flies surveying the ruins of human effort, an image that might also suggest that there is no rhyme or reason in human endeavor, no matter how heroic—all is for nothing. The ambiguities of the ending beg the question: what does this all mean? Answers concerning interpretation will vary, but in this case they might also show the thematic richness of this movie. As the tale is spun, one might trace the development of each character, as well as the relationships that develop in the conflicts between them. The conflicts that arise are between antithetical characters within the same group or certain characters in different groups with

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irreconcilable goals between them. The first would be Saito versus Nicholson and Shears versus Warden; the second would be Shears versus Nicholson. And the third is Joyce, who is in conflict with himself, unable to answer any warrior’s moral quandary: is not the killing of an enemy just another name for murder? Since a great deal has already been said about all the above characters, a few points about these relationships between these men will suffice. We may momentarily return to Nicholson, who is the focal point of this epic film, and whose initial harsh encounter with Saito develops into a cold tolerance of each of these men toward the other, but it ends with an unexpected note of reconciliation. After a contentious first half, when Nicholson wins the battle of wills, Saito falls out of the action, occasionally seen in brief shots either standing on a height surveying the progress of the bridge or looking at the prisoners at work through his binoculars. He seems like a nonentity who has accepted defeat but not entirely fallen out of sight. But Saito is seen sauntering to the same spot where Nicholson stands on the bridge admiring his work. The two men have been at odds during this whole torturous exercise, both having contributed to its construction for entirely different reasons. They are quite conscious that they are still mortal enemies. Both, however, are proud of the work that was accomplished under their leadership—even if Saito had been reduced to a passive figure, he still gave his full support to the endeavor. At this point, Nicholson, leaning against the bridge railing, over the water, looking away from Saito, and still holding his swagger stick (albeit a substitute tree twig), opens his mind to his enemy. He has been in the service for twenty-six years, but what has his life amounted to? Has it been worthwhile? Is he going to leave anything behind, or has his life “not made any difference at all”? As he concludes such existential reflections, he turns and drops his swagger stick, which splashes to the water underneath. Was that a reminder that his work is finished, the emblem of his power gone, and that once more he is a prisoner to the Japanese? Or has the memory of his achievement continued to bolster him? To Nicholson, the bridge has become an emblem of his presence on earth and his chance to escape the all-human thought that his presence on earth has been for nothing. (That reminds us somewhat of Mrs. Moore’s “We are merely passing figures in a godless universe.”) Deluded, he envisions a work that will survive for hundreds of years, and his delusion has transcended military obligations, even the war itself. What does it matter that the Japanese are fighting the British or the Americans? His bridge is a poem, “Beautiful!” as Saito ecstatically exclaims (but looking at the sunset), meaningful in itself, containing its own reason for being. There is no other reason. The bridge unites the two men for a moment in a special bond, otherwise impossible in the context of the cruel war. Shears has been called a cynical manipulator interested only in his own survival, indifferent to the war effort (“I don’t care about your war,” he says to

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Warden), considering the campaign to blow up the bridge Britain’s war.42 It is true that Shears appears in a negative light in the first part of the movie, delivering a mock eulogy on a just buried British soldier and bribing a Japanese officer to get in the “sick list.” Shears must be seen in his triangular relation: first to Nicholson, and secondly to Warden (it is clear that he despises and mocks Saito, but that is justified). As to his feelings for the British prisoners who are meant to build the bridge, he shakes his head appreciatingly—if not fondly—when he sees the bedraggled troops marching in proudly singing the Colonel Bogey tune. He is not without feelings or a sense of patriotism, but he is a weary prisoner who uses any means to cheat the enemy and survive—and no one can blame him for that. But he is also a pragmatist, who easily sees Nicholson’s naïve expectations that Saito will respect the Geneva Convention rules. Later that evening, he is asked his opinion about the futility of escape and hears Nicholson saying that “that fellow Saito is right,” that escape is impossible. Correctly, he points out that to not try to escape amounts to “a death sentence.” Still, he grudgingly appreciates Nicholson’s courage and sounds irritated when Weaver, his Australian companion, points out that “the old man has guts.” Later, after his rescue, he asks Warden if he knows what happened to “that Colonel Nicholson,” adding that the man “had the guts of a maniac.” While this is one of the major ironies of the story, another one is added at the end, when Shears, now fully committed to the mission of destroying the bridge, sees Nicholson guiding Saito to the spot where the plunger is and shouts to Joyce, “Kill him! Kill him!” and then jumps into the water, dying by enemy bullets just before he reaches him. It might be argued that seeing Shears as the cynical pragmatist that he is does not preclude seeing him also as the main hero of the story. Another relationship is the antagonism of Shears/Warden. Shears has been dragged along, screaming and kicking, to a mission he scorns, being rude, sarcastic, and disrespectful to Warden, a linguistics professor turned commando admirably enduring every hardship and ready to die for the sake of his mission. When Warden is injured and Shears assumes command of the team, he disobeys Warden’s orders to leave him behind and saves his life by carrying him along on a stretcher, showing that his “survival” motto is for real, and that he is ready to apply it to others and not only to himself. His outburst, accusing Warden of playing a “war game,” has a cleansing effect on him. When the team arrives at its destination, Shears, now a team player, gallantly relinquishes his command to Warden, who, for the first time since they started, calls out to him, “Thank you, Major,” bestowing on him the honor of the rank. Shears did not deserve but had finally earned his respect. For the first time Shears has achieved not only his superior’s but his own self-respect and has become a hero, earnestly carrying out his duties to the end, dashing to his death for the sake of the mission. Even Joyce, the young lieutenant who had volunteered for the mission for the chance

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“to think,” but who also considers killing in the line of action as “murder,” recovers from his paralysis at the end of the story when he finds it necessary to kill Saito. (Earlier, he had failed to kill a young Japanese soldier, forcing Warden to do that and get injured, thus causing the complication in the story.) Joyce had considered the war an adventure, seeing it as a chance for excitement in his dull life as an accountant, but he now knows what the demands of military mission are cruel, inhuman, but unavoidable. Nicholson, having had utter contempt for his adversary, Saito, whose name he cannot even remember (he stumbles over the word often trying to address him), now considers his opponent “reasonable” (a word Shears had mocked earlier), able to come around to his point, and during his final speech to the troops, he declares that he appreciates Saito’s courtesy allowing him and the wounded to go to their next destination “by train.” And Saito, at the bridge, recognizes Nicholson’s dedication to a project he had committed himself to carrying out as a prisoner of war and respects him for that. Clipton, the wise one who sees Nicholson’s folly in building the bridge, is ironically blind to all this, and only sees the terrible destruction, the nihilism of it all, for the bridge, built with such stupendous effort, is now a shambles, a ruined sight for the flying hawk. By contrast, the viewer obtains a requisite objectivity, undergoing a catharsis of pity and shock. Lack of moral resolution does not mean lack of unity, and the effect of unity is aesthetic completion.

Notes 1. Summer Madness was the title used in England. 2. Howard Maxford, David Lean (London: Batsford, 2000), 94. 3. Maxford, David Lean, 231. 4. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 356. 5. David Thomson, in “Sir David Lean (1908–1991),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), writes: “I am more than ever of the opinion that Lean became lost in his own pictorial grandeur” (428). 6. One can argue that both North by Northwest and Torn Curtain contain epic elements. 7. Cleopatra can be cited as an example of a movie that failed following the triumph of Lawrence of Arabia. 8. Exceptions are Madeleine (1950), based on a true story in Victorian Glasgow; The Sound Barrier (1950), based on a flier killed while trying to break the sound barrier; and Ryan’s Daughter (1970), which was originally planned as a Madame Bovary adaptation, retaining some of the characteristics of Flaubert’s novel. 9. The Hague Convention, as referred to in the novel. The Geneva Convention was signed in 1864, and it was revised at the Hague Peace Conference in 1907, and adopted by the British at that time. Japan refused to ratify the Geneva Convention in 1929,

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and, hence, all prisoners of war had no rights whatsoever during the ensuing conflicts. Whether Nicholson was aware of Japan’s refusal to ratify it is not clear either in the novel or film. 10. Boulle himself did belong to a similar team, Force 136, assigned tasks similar to those in the novel. Gene D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 227. 11. Boulle, The Bridge over the River Kwai (New York: Presidio Press, 2007), 3. 12. A phrase used in the film, in the hut scene, but broadly implied in the Boulle text. 13. A word that occurs in the book (as is the word “savages,” never in the film) is used only once in the film, when the recently freed Nicholson talks to his officers while on a floating raft. This word, existing in the theatrical releases of the film and originally heard in the VHS versions of the film, has been deleted from the DVD editions. 14. Boulle, The Bridge, 78. 15. Boulle, The Bridge, 79. 16. Boulle, The Bridge, 92–93. 17. Boulle, The Bridge, 93. 18. Boulle, The Bridge, 93. Saito in the film had cited this motto several times, but in the novel it was General Yamashita himself who had delivered this to the captive troops, prior to their arrival at the camp. General Yamashita was in charge of war operations in Indonesia when General Percival had surrendered in Singapore in 1942. Yamashita was tried after the war for “war crimes” and was executed along with thirty-two other Japanese military for their inhuman treatment of war prisoners. 19. “Are you going to tell him the truth, Commander?” he asks Shears sarcastically as soon as Nicholson has arrived, and to the negative response he responds, “You are neither an officer nor a gentleman,” a statement that drops a casual hint of what is going to be revealed to the viewer later. 20. Erroneously referred to as “Major Warden” by Phillips. See Beyond the Epic, 228. 21. Boulle, The Bridge, 203. 22. Boulle, The Bridge, 202. 23. Boulle, The Bridge, 202. 24. The History Channel’s The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai was broadcast in 1999 and was issued in DVD form in 2005. After a brief introduction by Roger Mudd, many ex-POWs appeared to give damning evidence of the “falsities” that appear in the movie. 25. Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 226–27. See also Boulle’s The Bridge over the River Kwai, synopsis of the author’s life, in the inside of the back cover. 26. Boulle, The Bridge, 53. 27. Boulle, The Bridge, 75. 28. The History Channel, The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai. 29. Boulle, The Bridge, 4. 30. Boulle, The Bridge, 120. 31. In the Boulle novel, these words are first spoken to the troops by General Yamashita (14) and then repeated by Saito in the camp. In the film, Saito uses the phrase twice, and Shears repeats it sardonically as he sees Joyce flirting with one of the Siamese girls during the jungle march.

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32. See Poetics, Bk. 24. There Aristotle bemoaned the “dilution” of unity of action in the epic due to its length, in comparison to tragedy’s compactness of form. 33. Both in the Boulle novel and in history, the building of the bridge starts late in 1942—the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack to be specific—and ends six months later. The writers of the script of Kwai condensed it to four months—one of these wasted during the Nicholson-Saito feud. 34. They marched in whistling an uplifting martial tune, “Colonel Bogey,” which became popular with audiences throughout the world. 35. Lawrence-Ali in Lawrence, Father Collins-Michael in Ryan’s Daughter, and Mrs. Moore-Adela and Aziz-Fielding in A Passage to India are other examples. 36. As pointed out, this word is deliberately obscured by other sounds in the DVD editions of the film. 37. Though the phrasing is changed, these sayings have their origin in the Boulle novel. 38. The phrase, also existing in the novel, is spoken by Captain Reeves. Boulle, The Bridge, 81. 39. This at a time that England was losing its world power status with a defeat at the Suez Canal (1956), while the Japanese were to rise as one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. 40. The British were forced to withdraw from the Suez Canal when Nasser nationalized it in the 1956 war. 41. In the Boulle novel he is also a drunk, reduced to “chain-gang” leader in a prison camp due to his drunkenness and subject to fits of rage when under the influence. 42. The point is stressed by Michael A. Anderegg, in David Lean (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 95.

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Lawrence of Arabia Crew Director: Screenplay: Producer: Cinematography: Editor: Music Score: Production Designer: Art Director: Set Decorator: Costumes: Sound Editor: Special Effects: Assistant Director: Second Unit Directors: Second Unit Photography: General Factotum:

David Lean Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson Sam Spiegel Freddie Young Anne V. Coates Maurice Jarre John Box John Stoll Dario Simoni Phyllis Dalton Winston Ryder Cliff Richardson Roy Stevens Andre Smagghe and Noël Howard Skeets Kelly, Nicholas Roeg, Peter Newbrook Eddie Fowlie

Cast Lawrence: Sherif Ali: Prince Feisal: Auda Abu Tayi: General Allenby: Colonel Brighton: Turkish Bey: Mr. Dryden: Jackson Bentley: General Murray: Gasim: Majid: Farraj: Daud: Tafas: Medical Officer: Club Secretary: RAMC Colonel:

Peter O’Toole Omar Sharif Alec Guinness Anthony Quinn Jack Hawkins Anthony Quayle José Ferrer Claude Rains Arthur Kennedy Donald Wolfit I. S. Johar Gamil Ratib Michel Ray John Dimech Zia Mohyeddin Howard M. Crawford Jack Gwillim Hugh Miller

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CHAPTER 2

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Background: Biographical Notes on T. E. Lawrence We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in these whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world we knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. —T. E. Lawrence1

The above words by T. E. Lawrence sum up the essence of the story that Robert Bolt and David Lean strove to give expression to, as the film reveals under critical scrutiny. Lawrence of Arabia is an epic about the idealism of youth that can achieve wonders, but when its achievements come to an end, old politicos and cagey generals take over and shape the feats of bravery to fit their interests. It is important to stress that Lawrence became aware of these duplicities, yet he went along with them, and thence his eventual humiliation and guilt. The “road to Damascus” was both a victory and a defeat for him, but his being complicit became the burden that led him to exile and hiding. The film, wisely, explores only one facet of his career, his two-year struggle in the Arab Revolt and his exit at Damascus; thus in the epic we have a unified whole—albeit a lengthy one—a small but important section of his life, his glorious ascent and defeat during that 27

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period (1916–1918). Despite chronological rearrangements and inevitable historical discrepancies between the original sources and the Lean film, this central idea of victory and betrayal holds the structural basis of the story together and gives it its epic/tragic character. Lawrence, the hero of this film, is loosely based on an actual figure, T. E. Lawrence, the legendary English officer who led Arabs in their liberation struggle against the Turks during World War I. The film has drawn its basic sources as much from the numerous biographies of Lawrence, which themselves relied mostly on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s autobiography, as on accounts of the man by several individuals who knew Lawrence personally, among the latter being Lowell Thomas, an American journalist,2 whose documentary films and series of lectures made Lawrence a celebrity in England and America in the 1920s.3 In post-Victorian England, and following World War I, Lawrence achieved the status of a mythical hero of the desert, a liberator of an oppressed people, and a man whose military genius endowed him with the glitter of Pompey or Alexander. Because of his nearly mythical stature, several attempts had been made to film Lawrence’s story during the 1950s, one of them by Alexander Korda, but they were thwarted either by financial exigencies or by Lawrence’s living brother, Professor Arnold W. Lawrence, who was his brother’s literary executor and had refused to sell the rights of Seven Pillars to cinema producers.4 Finally, Sam Spiegel, eager to make another blockbuster epic with Lean, bought the rights from Professor Lawrence for 22,500 pounds, and Michael Wilson, who had collaborated on the script of Kwai, was assigned to write the script. However, Lean disliked Wilson’s version, and Robert Bolt, unschooled in screenwriting but credited with the hugely successful stage play A Man for All Seasons, was asked to take over the project and rewrote the screenplay in its entirety, although the basic outlines of Wilson’s work remained in the final draft. Today’s video versions of the film assign credit for the screenplay to both authors. Lean had obtained permission from King Hussein of Jordan (a fan of Lean and admirer of The Bridge on the River Kwai) to film Lawrence in Jordan, with considerable help in logistical matters. Several known actors were considered for the lead—among them Marlon Brando and Albert Finney—but finally Lean picked an unknown, the Irish stage actor Peter O’Toole, and the project was launched in the fall of 1960 and took almost two years (twenty months to be specific) to complete in Jordan, Morocco, and Spain. Thomas Edward Lawrence, born in North Wales in 1888, was the illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Chapman, seventh baronet from Westmeath, Ireland, who eloped with his daughter’s governess, Sara Maden, and adopted the name of Mr. Lawrence for the rest of his life. Young Thomas Edward was the second of five illegitimate sons, and this fact may, according to some of his biographers,5 have affected his unusual personality, driving him to extremes to prove his supe-

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riority as a scholar, intelligence officer, and military leader. Lawrence attended Oxford (1906–1909), where he studied archaeology, before traveling to the Middle East on scholarships to study the influence of the Crusaders on modern architecture, writing a dissertation on the subject and receiving a first prize for modern history. He toured the Middle East extensively, traveling for months in Arabia during his youth, mostly on foot, making Arab friends and learning their language. At the outbreak of the war in 1914, when England allied with France against Germany and Turkey, Lawrence was dispatched to Cairo, Egypt, as an intelligence officer to work for the Bureau of Arab Affairs and became involved in the revolt of the Arabs against the Turks in 1916. He was assigned a position as a liaison officer to Prince Feisal, brother of Abdullah and Ali, the sons of Hussein Ibn Ali, emir of Mecca, and later took part in numerous military operations, blowing up Turkish trains and taking the city of Aqaba with the help of Auda Abu Tayi, sheik of the Howeitat. In 1918, under orders from General Edward Allenby, he led an army of Arab tribes to coordinate with the British forces in their attack and capture of Damascus. Subsequently, he served in diplomatic missions, acting as an advisor of Arab affairs in the Colonial Office. In 1922 he enlisted in the Royal Air Force under the name of John Ross, and later in the Royal Tank Corps as T. E. Shaw, a name he legally adopted in 1927. In 1935, he retired to a country cottage and died in a motorcycle accident, which some thought a suicide attempt. He was buried with unusual honors at St. Nicholas Church, Moreton, Dorset,6 drawing praise from such luminaries as Winston Churchill, who attended his funeral and called him “one of the greatest beings of our time.”7 In addition to his celebrity status gained by Lowell Thomas’s lectures,8 Lawrence was also praised for his accomplishments as a classical scholar (he translated the Odyssey of Homer, among other things), as a man of inventions, and as a man of action. He was ideally suited as a hero for an epic film. Despite his achievements and great reputation as a hero of modern times, he remained an enigmatic figure, and even some of the details in his own descriptions, his capture and alleged rape by the Turks at Deraa, for instance, have been doubted.9 Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), his own account of the two-year Arab campaign, proved him a literary master and historian, ranking among the greatest writers in English literature.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom Becomes Lawrence: Historical Notes Out of this medley—verified historical data, myth, literary sources, journalistic accounts, gossip—David Lean and Lawrence’s collaborators Michael Wilson and

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Robert Bolt fashioned a screenplay based on his two-year Arab campaign, the period during which Lawrence displayed his military genius. Both Wilson and Bolt used Seven Pillars as their basic source, but as Bolt took over the project entirely, according to a Lean biographer, “he chose to alter history for dramatic purposes.”10 Departures from their primary source, or other sources, will be noted as we go along, but some of the most significant will be touched upon here: (a) Lawrence’s expedition against Aqaba is shown as the first major event in the film, which omits an entire sequence of events described in Seven Pillars and in Revolt in the Desert.11 The historical Lawrence was indeed sent from Cairo to scout Feisal’s “intentions” at the beginning of the war, but his mission included several phases before the decision to attack the Aqaba Turkish stronghold took place. The opening chapters in Seven Pillars (books 1–3, chapters 1–37, nearly one-third of the book) describe Lawrence’s first meeting with Feisal, his return to Cairo, and his rejoining Feisal with British support that led to the successful defense of Yenbo and the recapturing of an important Turkish outpost, Wejh, after which the Turkish operations became defensive. The plan to attack Aqaba had first been instigated as a joint effort with Anglo-French naval forces,12 led by French colonel Bremond and Sir Archibald Murray, then still in charge of British operations in the Arab campaign. It was to be a frontal attack with a large navy force and troops descending on Aqaba from the western rugged terrain. Lawrence saw this as a suicidal effort, a repetition of the disaster of the Allied forces at Gallipoli. His own idea was to attack Aqaba from the interior northeast side with select Arab troops, coming out of the Nefud Desert, a move the Turks could not have anticipated. By the time this occurred, Lawrence was a seasoned veteran of the Arab campaign, knowledgeable of the language, geography, and history of the Middle East, and an experienced intelligence officer who had worked in Cairo for the Arab Bureau for some time, and not the enthusiastic but untested novice—not to say an often flippant youth—we first see in the film. The expedition against Aqaba, a key first episode in the film, is only one chapter in the massive Lawrence account of the war, and it is instigated by the joint agreement between Feisal and Auda Abu Tayi, and not inspired in a vision sequence during Lawrence’s first night at Feisal’s camp. (b) The numerous names of British officers deployed in the field during the two-year war mentioned in Seven Pillars are condensed into one, Colonel Brighton (Anthony Quayle), while the chief of the Arab Bureau Dryden (Claude Rains) is a combination of both General Clayton, the chief of intelligence in Egypt, and Ronald Storrs, oriental secretary of the residency in Egypt.13 Thus, the film avoids clutter, and possibly confusion, of the numerous British officers who played important roles in the campaign and are mentioned and sketched in Seven Pillars. (c) Bolt chose to make Lawrence ignorant of the Picot-Sykes14 agreement until a crucial scene in the later stages of the film, while the historical Lawrence, though initially un-

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aware of it, was soon fully cognizant of this development. His keeping it a secret is possibly a major factor in his feeling guilty for having betrayed his Arab friends and possibly the main reason for his precipitous departure from Damascus at the end of the Arab campaign. (d) Two of Lawrence’s Arab collaborators in the campaign, Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein of the Harith tribe (Omar Sharif) and Auda Abu Tayi of the Howeitat (Anthony Quinn), are reshaped to fit their roles in the film’s sequences; the historical Auda, for instance, had already been planning the expedition against Aqaba with Prince Feisal when the historical Lawrence appeared on the scene, while the film shows him meeting Lawrence and his group at the Howeitat well, after they had crossed the Nefud.15 Ali, a powerful ally of Feisal in Seven Pillars, is entirely absent from the Aqaba expedition and is shown as an important factor in subsequent campaigns, grouped with other chieftains in an attempt to blow up the great bridges of the Yarmuk Valley.16 Though a loyal companion much admired and often described by Lawrence,17 Ali is not nearly the central character who becomes Lawrence’s friend and intimate companion through the film. The film structure is to a great measure based on this relationship, Ali being the first major Arab figure Lawrence meets and the last one to leave him, in tears. More of this crucial relationship between the two men in the film will be detailed later. (e) The Lawrence of Seven Pillars, aside from his physical differences from the hero of Lawrence as rendered by Peter O’Toole (being much shorter, for instance), is in crucial ways an entirely different character from the film hero. Throughout his narrative, rendered of course in the first person, the historical Lawrence is, in his own words, presented as a rather self-effacing character, by and large respectful of his superiors and having a high regard for General Allenby, though he was far from naïve about the latter’s lack of experience in the Arab campaign, a newcomer as he was fresh from the European front but quickly adjusting and shrewdly taking over his new command. The film presents Allenby impressively, showing his firm grasp of the new front, his quick assessment of Lawrence, and his decisive actions. But it also presents him as a ruthless imperialist, “totally unscrupulous,” as Dryden sardonically describes him. In Lawrence, Peter O’Toole, under the guiding hand of Lean and as given by Bolt’s script, is at first shown a vain braggart, initially contemptuous of the Arabs, disrespectful of his superiors (as to some degree was Lawrence while in Cairo), and subject to abrupt shifts of mood, though later proven a valiant hero and brilliant strategist. The film also describes him as a rather unstable, “halfmad” (Dryden) individual, and even a bloodthirsty monster. The crucial event of his metamorphosis in the film is the episode at Deraa, after Lawrence is lashed and possibly raped (though the scene is only suggestive of what might have happened) by the Turks. Despite Ali’s protests, he returns to Allenby (by this time in Jerusalem) and asks to be released from his duties. When Allenby persuades him to stay on the campaign, Lawrence gives orders to

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Lawrence blows out a match in Dryden’s office. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

“take no prisoners” (in fairness, neither did the Turks), an order that leads to the massacre of a retreating Turkish column. Although this event is recorded in Seven Pillars, the main attention of the author is given to the drive to Damascus, during which Lawrence shows no signs of disobedience or any extraordinary change in personality. Lean, on the other hand, makes much of this change, and Lawrence is stained, at least in the eyes of Ali, who is the last of his Arab friends to leave him in disgust, never to see him again. Thus, Lean makes the history of Lawrence not so much a chronicle of the Arab campaign—as Seven Pillars does—but a story of personal relations, the rise and fall of a hero who is in many ways an unstable man, or at least a “flawed” character—a word used many times by Lean himself to describe the heroes he prefers. Lean makes Lawrence the central interest of the film, while in Seven Pillars he is the narrator who modestly recounts in his slow-paced style a multifaceted and weighty event, the Arab campaign. In the book, the war is the main subject; in the film, the war becomes the vehicle for the hero’s adventures.

Structural Patterns in Lawrence The film structure is based on the idea that action, less important in the Bolt script than in the first Wilson draft, gives way to character development. Coherence is achieved by the use of a flashback that first shows the death and funeral of Lawrence and subsequently the two years of the actual Arab campaign. Even so, the lengthy film that comes in two parts is, of necessity, somewhat episodic, especially in its second part. The action scenes are relatively sparse, and by and large describe events that actually took place. Historically speaking, Lawrence’s

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campaign in Arabia is given accurately in its broadest outlines, but Bolt strove to present the psychological portrait of a complex hero with the freedom of a literary artist; his is a tight, literate script, a play based on history rather than being an exact reproduction of history. David Lean, who was forced to wait until Bolt came into the picture, collaborated with him enthusiastically at first, though some accidental interruptions caused further delays and some friction between them, especially in shaping the second part of the script. Always an independent thinker when adapting material from either literary sources or history, Lean molded and shaped this material to comply to aesthetic criteria, important to cinema, rather than following a historical line suggested by a biography. Aesthetic principles required such things as great length (nearly four hours) to cover the subject matter adequately, the choice of the right actor to play the leading role, and the most suitable location, the Jordanian desert, not very far from where the actual events took place.18 To these practical considerations one has to add the director’s predilections and individual style, the multiple ironies created by the conflicts in the drama, and the numerous subthemes that emerge in attempting to film the life of a complex man at a crucial time in history. When one looks at the structure of Lawrence of Arabia, one can see the lengthy (and fully restored version of it in 1989) epic breaking naturally in Parts One and Two, and that the two parts differ in plot design, characterization, visual structure, and theme. These differences can be attributed in part to the fact that Part One of Lawrence was filmed almost in its entirety in the Jordanian desert, while Part Two was shot in Morocco and Spain. Among other things, the change of venue, and the disruption by the delay caused by Bolt’s arrest,19 affected the structure of the film, but the main reason was that the various incidents of the campaign described in Part Two are episodic in nature and do not link as coherently as in Part One. Part One starts with Lawrence’s death and funeral, followed by a flashback that begins with a few preliminary incidents at the British HQ in Cairo, before Lawrence is dispatched on his mission to meet Prince Feisal. Subsequently, he crosses the Nefud Desert, takes Aqaba, and gets back to Cairo, where he is glorified by his fellow officers and promoted to major by General Allenby. In Part One, the plot is unified by this single line of action. Characterization in Part One is also unified because the two major characters involved, Lawrence and Sherif Ali, both sharing in the victory, have a chance to start, continue, and cement their relationship—though it is Lawrence who dominates the action and achieves the greater glory. The main theme is thereby introduced and brought to partial conclusion: Lawrence enters the scene and assumes the mission assigned to him, but he expands it by conceiving and carrying out his aggressive plan of uniting the Arab tribes as they fight their oppressors, something that he hopes will ultimately lead to their independence. Part Two begins with Jackson Bent-

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ley’s seeking out Feisal and joining Lawrence in the field to record his exploits,20 and continues with Lawrence’s capture and torture by the Turks, his renewed alliance with Allenby, the massacre of the Turkish column, his drive toward Damascus, and his presiding over the Arab Council. The themes in Part Two are darker and more complex, as Lawrence gradually loses his grip on what he is trying to achieve, his actions are more violent, and the resolution amounts to the defeat of his ideals, as he is promoted to colonel while forced to leave the scene, literally fading into the sunset. The difference between the two parts is that in Part One it is Lawrence who initiates the action and becomes the driving force in determining the course of events. In Part Two, though Lawrence still leads the Arab tribes to destroy the Turkish railways, he is no longer the one who makes the important decisions of the campaign. When he arrives in Cairo, General Allenby quickly sees through Lawrence’s vanity and vulnerabilities and adroitly exploits them. More than anything else, Allenby uses Lawrence as a tool for his plans (something that to a large measure is true in Seven Pillars) and provides him with the means of continuing his campaign, which merely consists of harassing the Turks, blowing up their railroad system, and accelerating their defeat. When after his arrest at Deraa and his beating at the hands of the Turks, Lawrence wants to quit, Allenby craftily appeals to his vanity and persuades him to take part in the “push” for Damascus. The character of Lawrence must be explained within that context.

Structure and Character An important aspect of Lawrence’s character that Lean and Bolt understood and brought to a head is his self-knowledge of his grandiose illusions and the folly that accompanies them. Lawrence’s flaw, his “blasphemous conceit,” as Ali puts it to him, is the realization that his victory is achieved at a price, his own execution of Gasim and the drowning of Daud in quicksand as he crosses the Sinai desert. When Auda Abu Tayi wryly observes, “It was written then,” after Lawrence executes Gasim, the man he had saved, Lawrence has the first glimpse of the contradiction implicit in his own actions. He is forced to face a reality he hardly understands: that willpower alone, the notion cultivated so persistently in the West, is not sufficient to conquer, and that conquest becomes only a momentary glow that dissolves like the dust cloud bursts he frequently sees in his trek across the desert. Revelatory of Lawrence’s character in Part One are his encounters with various individuals in his path from the moment he leaves Cairo to the time he returns to it victorious. The same can be said in some measure of Part Two, although most of the individuals he meets there he has already met in the first

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part. Thus the structural pattern of the movie is also a key factor to elucidating his character. As a fictional hero in this film, Lawrence has been called “elusive” or “enigmatic,” terms that can be viewed as a failure to interpret the complexity of the personality he projects. Bolt and Lean, closely cooperating in finalizing the shooting script,21 fashioned Lawrence’s image as their hero progressed, incident by incident, to the climaxes of the story in Part One and Part Two. Thus a dual vision of Lawrence emerges as the story progresses: one is that of Lawrence given by the subjective reactions to him of each important individual he encounters; the other by an objective view of Lawrence as he reacts to those he encounters, the image gathered by the viewer. There are moments when only the viewer knows what he thinks or feels when under the scrutiny of the camera—as for instance when he is seen alone at the bottom of a sand dune, conceiving his scheme to attack Aqaba by land. Another such occasion is when Lawrence, having donned the Arab garb, unsheathes his knife, looks at his own image on it (an action repeated later when a bloodstained Lawrence looks at his dagger after the massacre), and dances at the foot of a hill, moments before Auda interrupts his trance. Let us review some of these encounters in sequence as they occur. After the initial scene (death and burial), Lawrence first comes to the attention of the viewer as a cartographer working in an office among other operatives, who regard him as odd (“balmy” is the expression used) when he snuffs out a lighted match with his fingers, saying to them that “the trick is not to mind that it hurts.” When summoned by General Murray, the latter threatens to have him arrested as insubordinate for not saluting properly, adding that he has difficulty telling whether Lawrence is merely “bloody insubordinate” or “bloody half-witted.” Lawrence responds that he has the same difficulty, then quotes Themistocles, “a Greek philosopher,” a remark that irks Murray, who can only respond with: “I know you are well educated, Lawrence; it says so in your dossier.” Under some pressure by Dryden, Murray consents to send him on a mission to find Prince Feisal, adding that such an experience “might make a man of him.” Up to this point, Lawrence has appeared to his superiors—and to the viewer—as a rather clownish, bumbling eccentric, capable of clever answers but inspiring no confidence that he is to be taken seriously when assigned a military mission. But instead of being abashed by Murray’s humiliating affronts, Lawrence grows in self-confidence as soon as he is alone with Dryden, who, evidently influenced by Murray’s disdain and Lawrence’s flippant answers before a superior (however dense the latter seems to be), tells Lawrence that “only gods and Bedouins” enjoy the desert, and that he is neither. In response, Lawrence lights a match for Dryden’s cigar, then blows it out, and in a famous cut, a blank purple is flashed across the screen showing the desert where the sun is about to rise. Dryden’s opinion of Lawrence may not have changed much, but the viewer now sees a bold, determined, perhaps foolhardy youth, “the man for the job,”

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as his superior calls him, itching to tackle the impossible, resembling the type of character that seems to Lean’s liking, occurring in several films and in various metamorphoses.22 The several encounters with the people he meets next—Tafas, Sherif Ali, Colonel Brighton, Prince Feisal, Auda Abu Tayi, Allenby—show Lawrence progressing through his adventures as an irresistible force but subject to abrupt shifts of mood, and having a tendency to fall from the heights of euphoria as quickly as he rose to them. The viewer gains insight as the camera captures Lawrence in his various poses, whether directly confronting a man opposite him or seen in a crowd or viewed alone. Lawrence does not “fit” any company (except perhaps those of his two servants, the boys Daud and Farraj) and his progress forward is a series of conflicts with the very people he collects along the way in his march to victory. In turn, those who view him as an irresistible force that drives them along to victory with him have alternating feelings of admiration, anger, revulsion, and fear. To them he is both a hero and a puzzle—a formidable, inspiring leader but also a blasphemer. Tafas, his Bedouin guide, sees him as a man who has come from a “fat country” but who himself says he is not fat. “I am different,” Lawrence responds to Tafas’s question, coining a phrase for himself that defines and sets him apart from the crowds he is mingling with. Tafas himself proves a most polite, dignified, and respectful guide, who actually teaches Lawrence his first lesson in riding a camel. He tells him when the time for him has come to drink, but when Lawrence prepares to do so, he himself does not drink, thus showing him the self-restraint needed to make a desert trek. And Lawrence pours the water back into the canteen, indicating he is equal to the task. Tafas expects no payment for his services, refusing Lawrence’s gun as a gift before his mission is completed, though Lawrence gives it to him anyway. This is the first major irony of the story because it is the gun, which Tafas draws when he sees Ali approaching, that is the cause of his death when the latter shoots him. Without quite realizing it, and having the best of intentions, Lawrence becomes responsible for a man’s death, compounding the irony by accusing Ali of “barbaric” behavior, when the latter only acted in self-defense. But the meeting with Sherif Ali is Lawrence’s first crucial personal encounter that shapes some of the main events of the story that follows. The nearly mystical entrance of Ali, a dot seemingly sailing through the air in the desert sun—the famous mirage sequence—announces the figure who will become the chief antagonist and admirer of Lawrence. Appropriately, he wears a black costume—an anomaly in the burning desert sun—to Lawrence’s later adopted white robes.23 After Tafas is shot, the two engage in a verbal duel, creating a tension that will define their relationship from now on. Lawrence would not have been the same character without the reactive presence of Ali, who follows, scru-

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tinizes, and influences most of Lawrence’s actions. In this introductory scene, the camera tracks both points of view. Ali, a proud El Harish chieftain, shows his ruthless nature by killing a man from an enemy tribe who is drinking at his well without authority to do so; but he also shows his innate forbearance, tolerating a Westerner’s insults and returning his compass, which he had snatched a moment earlier with his riding whip, not wanting Lawrence to be lost in the desert without it. Evidently, a white man who ignores fear (“My fear is my concern” is Lawrence’s proud answer) and who rejects his offer of help has impressed him. Tossing a “God help you, English,” he leaves him to his devices. Lawrence, on his part, finds in this encounter the type of an Arab that shows him what he is to expect from now on. Though he has called the Arabs “barbarous and cruel” to his face and holds him in low esteem for murdering his guide, he cannot help but be impressed by Ali’s nobility and dignity—a view that the historical Lawrence shares about the Arab people in general. Feisal, as played by Alec Guinness, seems the first person to sense Lawrence’s dual nature, for in him he discerns a youthful and somewhat impulsive enthusiast for leading a mission but also sees one more representative of a Western country, and thus, ultimately, a potential ally or an impediment to Arab independence. Feisal is more politically astute than Ali, and his mistrust of Lawrence is deeply rooted, but he knows the business of fighting the occupant Turks belongs to the young.24 He is the only one who seems to fathom Lawrence’s mentality almost immediately. Older and wiser than his younger cowarrior/tribesman Ali, Feisal is impressed by Lawrence’s passionate nature, which he contrasts to the comportment of Colonel Brighton, a stickler for military discipline. Brighton, on the other hand, sees Lawrence as an interfering nuisance, someone who could possibly damage his mission by giving impulsive advice to Feisal. (Later, after Aqaba is taken, Brighton will also become Lawrence’s admirer, recommending him for a decoration to Allenby.) Feisal encourages Lawrence to speak his mind in his tent, and later allows him to take fifty of his men for the Aqaba expedition, but he is the only Arab so far who does not hitch his wagon to Lawrence’s star. He seems suspicious of “desertloving” Englishmen and he is capable of thinking practically—“We need artillery”—mistrusting the generals in Cairo, only arriving at an uneasy truce with them at the end. In general, Feisal embodies the Easterner’s distrust of the intentions of the Westerner, and he knows the Arab tribes play the game designed for them by Western interests. But he sees Lawrence as a god-sent agent for his own designs and goes along with the latter’s enthusiastic undertaking to tackle a nearly impossible task, the one who can perform the “miracle” the Arabs need. Feisal is magnanimous enough to nurture a fatherly affection for young Lawrence—and in a sense he becomes another of Lawrence’s “disciples,” unable to resist Lawrence’s magnetic presence and irresistible force.

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Another person who soon crosses paths with Lawrence is Auda Abu Tayi, a battle-weary, cagey, greedy, half-barbaric Howeitat chieftain who flaunts his “generosity” (“I am a river to my people”), hiding his real motive to accumulate riches—and who sees the Aqaba expedition as an opportunity for looting.25 He sizes up Lawrence almost immediately when he sees that this narcissistic, halfmad Englishman can still deliver what he promises, and thus he goes along—in the end becoming an instrument of Lawrence’s designs—and perhaps his admirer; for Lawrence, in the guise of Peter O’Toole, seduces all the Arabs he meets. Lawrence, at least where his immediate goals are concerned, is a shrewd negotiator. He sees in Auda a potential ally and fierce fighter, and Auda performs the task he is recruited to do, though he too sees through Lawrence’s vulnerabilities: “He is not perfect,” he says to Ali after he fails to find the gold Lawrence promised him the Turks had in “a big box” at Aqaba. But the man who ultimately helps to define Lawrence to the viewer is Allenby, “a slim customer,” as Bentley describes him to Feisal in the beginning of Part Two. Allenby instantly recognizes Lawrence as an idealistic and vain dreamer, a guilt-ridden and possibly unstable man, but also as a brilliant military strategist. Shrewdly, though not entirely deceiving Lawrence, Allenby exploits the man’s vanity, adroitly feeding his ego while pretending to ease his scruples by mockingly sympathizing with him and posing as a surrogate father figure to him. It is also possible that he truly likes him.26 In a splendid mise-en-scène during their first encounter, Allenby is shown sitting at his desk, in full military regalia, his hat with the red band providing a demarcation node distinguishing him from Lawrence, who sits across from him in his now tattered Arab garb that had once made him El-Aurens, a worshipped figure in the eyes of his followers, but now an object of derision by his chief military superior. The scene includes Dryden and Brighton, both hunched in their chairs in the background, watching the unfolding scene—Allenby cynically attempting a brainwashing job on Lawrence, now his plaything and a potential useful tool in his campaign. After a few exchanges, Allenby moves from his desk and asks Lawrence for his headgear, scornfully calling it part of “amateur theatricals” as he asks Brighton, “How would I look in this, Harry?” “Damn ridiculous, sir,” is the latter’s answer. Dismissing Lawrence’s guilt for having killed two men with fake sympathy, Allenby states that he is promoting him to a major, expecting him “to go on with the good work.” He then marches with the whole group through the palatial headquarters, as martial music is heard in the soundtrack, to the courtyard, where he announces to the gathering crowd of officers, now informed of Lawrence’s feat, that they are having a drink “at the invitation of Major Lawrence.” Lawrence, who moments earlier had recoiled from Allenby’s promotion offer and the prospect of going back, has now reverted to his earlier self-assured, bragging pose.

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Fully aware that Allenby has trapped him, but having taken the bait, he dictates his terms for his return to the battlefield, making requests for small arms, money (and more later), two armored cars, and artillery. Allenby accedes to all requests (“I’ll do every blessed thing I can to help you”) and leaves the scene, but a moment later he tells his civilian advisor, Dryden, and his military one, Brighton, who both object to giving Lawrence artillery—something that would make the Arabs independent—that “I cannot give him artillery then.” He has his orders to carry, not like that “poor devil in there who is riding the whirlwind.” “Let us hope we are not,” counters Dryden. At the conclusion of Part One, Lawrence finds himself at the peak of his glory, as his admiring fellow officers, now fully cognizant of his brilliant victory,27 cheer him. But from this point on, Lawrence has no other place to go but down, having become Allenby’s puppet, for, although he is a confirmed leader of the Arab Revolt, he is now under the scrutiny of Brighton, and thence of the higher authorities. He begins blowing up trains, leading the united tribes, and taking the initiative in individual episodes, but following the British military plans to march to Jerusalem and ultimately to take Damascus. For a few moments Lawrence is seen in his apotheosis, nimbly stepping vaingloriously on a Turkish train blown off the tracks, his robes flying, as his Arab companions loot the ruined wagons and take valuables from the dead passengers. This incident also coincides with Jackson Bentley’s entrance and first meeting with Lawrence, who is from now on presented from multiple points of view: those of his superiors, of his followers, and of an interested third party who sees him for the first time. As he explains to Feisal upon being introduced, Bentley (Arthur Kennedy) seeks a heroic figure to kindle America’s interest (“We too were a colonial people once,” he reminds Feisal, seeking a tacit approval) in the war in Europe, and thence quicken its participation in it. His is not a “romantic” interest in Lawrence, he also assures Feisal, just curiosity of a professional journalist. In the scenes that follow, a broadly grinning Bentley is seen photographing Lawrence pushing a plunger setting off a train explosion. After the scenes of looting, Bentley asks Lawrence two pointed questions: What do “these people” expect to gain by their struggle? “Their freedom,” Lawrence answers tersely, repeating the word to Bentley, who shakes his head and mutters a stock response: “One is born every minute,” a common phrase reserved for those easily fooled.28 And when asked, “What is it that attracts you to the desert?” Lawrence replies, “It’s clean,” another terse answer that provokes one more amused smile and head shake from Bentley, who sees in Lawrence a character that is both naïve and entirely refreshing, for his head shaking is also expressive of wonderment. To him, Lawrence is one of those dreamers who are also the fighters for those ideals that are most betrayed. “I have an

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interest in this man,” he says later, when Lawrence has returned to Allenby’s headquarters. Bentley captures the essence of Lawrence, and his self-satisfied smiles tell the viewer how the world will perceive the Arab liberator: as a heroic figure fighting not only for the Arab cause, but also for the cause of Western powers—in this case a tentative America that needed him to spark interest in a conflict that served the interest of several superpowers. Thus, in the second part of the movie, Lawrence is caught between three forces, each promoting his own specific interests: Allenby wants him as an indispensable part of his campaign to capture Damascus (at the time an agreement had already been reached to divided the Arab liberated lands between England and France by the Picot-Sykes Treaty); the Arabs need him to lead them to take Damascus; and Bentley wants him as an instrument to spur America’s interest in the war. In each case Lawrence has become a tool of external forces beyond his control, knowingly being betrayed, but going along in hopes that he could unite—and liberate—the Arabs. The historical Lawrence says so in his autobiography;29 the film Lawrence suspects as much when Allenby attempts to recruit him for his final drive to Damascus after Lawrence tells him at a meeting in Jerusalem that he wishes to be “ordinary.” A crucial event preceding the second meeting with Allenby that shows the viewer another side of Lawrence’s character is his capture at Deraa and his torture by the Turks. Many biographers and commentators doubt that the account given by Lawrence of what happened is true, but the film presents this episode as based on truth. This obscure historical event was evidently a deeply traumatic experience for Lawrence and the film treats it as a turning point in Lawrence’s attitude and fortunes. Challenging his few remaining Arab companions to go with him to Deraa to reconnoiter an advance to that crucial city, and being refused, he elects to go alone, accompanied only by Ali, who tries in vain to dissuade him from being foolishly provocative. But Lawrence, who bragged earlier that he “could walk on water,” draws the attention of some Turkish guards passing by, and he is detained. When the Turkish Bey (José Ferrer), noticing his prisoner’s white skin and blue eyes (but having no suspicion that he has captured Lawrence), makes salacious advances, Lawrence punches him in the stomach, and the vindictive Bey orders his men to lash him. Lawrence comes out from that episode—which the film leaves somewhat vague30—a changed man. When he reaches Jerusalem by himself and announces to Allenby that he wants to get out of his military assignments in Arabia, the viewer has a clearer idea of Allenby’s manipulative powers, and of Lawrence’s weaker side. As he enters Allenby’s office, Lawrence finds two other men there—both looking at him with conspiratorial airs, for Lawrence is completely ignorant of what each of these men had in mind while he was in

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the field, fighting or being tortured. Feisal makes reference to a treaty between the French and the English to have Arabia carved between them after the war, and Dryden, coolly cynical, informs Lawrence of the Picot-Sykes agreement: “Mr. Sykes, an English civil servant, and Mr. Picot, a French civil servant, have reached an agreement, not a treaty.” When the astonished Lawrence responds indignantly that he has been kept in the darkness, Dryden composedly responds: “Let’s have no signs of indignation. If I told lies, you have told half lies; and the man who tells lies merely hides the truth, but the man who tells half lies has forgotten where he put it.” A moment later, as Dryden is exiting, he runs into an excited Bentley, who wants to know “What’s happening in there? I have an interest in that man.” Dryden at first refuses to say anything, but prodded by Bentley sums up the meeting with the terse response: “One of them in there is half mad, the other totally unscrupulous.” Moments later, Allenby, seeing Lawrence’s blood-stained uniform and faking a fatherly interest, persuades Lawrence to go back to the field, deftly using hyperbole: “You are the most extraordinary man I have ever met,” kindling once more Lawrence’s vanity. This scene sums up Lawrence’s relationship with these men, all older and noncombatants, whose interests he has served in some way or other. Feisal, being the most honest (but not altogether), has taken advantage of Lawrence’s leadership in the field, for, without Lawrence, the Arab Revolt would not have reached such a degree of success. Bentley has accomplished his goal of finding a fighter who fits the mold of a hero he wants. Dryden, lying to those around him but still truthful to the viewer for having revealed the denigration of moral principle for the sake of policy, departs from the scene in disgust, pitying Lawrence, for whose rise ironically he has been responsible. Dryden has nothing but contempt for those manipulating Lawrence, those who take a brave but vain fighter for a fool. As for Allenby, “totally unscrupulous” is a fitting description of him, an unprincipled general who kept saying, “I have orders to obey,” while the viewer sees him as a man acting at will but fully embodying British imperial interests.

Lawrence and the Desert It has often been said about the much-discussed epic that the desert is the main character, an argument that validates the justifiably large attention paid to Freddie Young’s Oscar-winning photography. This is a well-made point, for the desert, as highlighted by photography, provides a framework for the development of the main characters, especially Peter O’Toole’s presence in the film. But it must be stressed also that it was Lean’s decision to film the epic in the desert,

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as close to the location where it took place as possible, that must be given most of the credit. Lean’s predilection for filming Lawrence where the action actually happened became a certainty, even an obsession, after his first contact with the desert, which hit him like was a revelation. Here is how one of his biographers describes this experience: David’s encounter with desert was, for him, the greatest gift of the production. “I used to go out at night,” he said. “If there was no moon I’d walk across the flats and see the vague shape of these pyramids—not man-made but wind-made. And countless stars that one’s never realized before. When you are in the desert, you look into infinity. It’s no wonder that nearly all the great founders of religion came out of the desert. It makes you feel terribly small, and also in a strange way quite big.”31

One can compare the above passage to what the historical Lawrence said of the desert: The Bedouin of the desert . . . saw no virtue in poverty herself. . . . In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity of Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God. God was not to him anthropomorphic, not tangible, not moral or ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not natural: but the being Αχρω ´ματος, ασχημα´τιστος, αναφη´ ς32 thus qualified not by indivestiture, a comprehending Being, the end of all activity, with nature and matter just a glass reflecting Him.33

Though Lawrence’s passage is complex and more profound, Lean’s sentences capture essentially the same description of the effect the desert has on peoples or individuals. These phrases also remind one of what Feisal of the film said to Lawrence: “You are another one of those desert-loving Englishmen.” It may be said that Lean’s film is a projection of feelings about the desert described above, feelings reflected in Freddie Young’s photographic images. Lean would describe the frame he wanted for a certain shot and then leave it to Young to execute. They two were, for the most part, in total agreement. Photographing the Jordanian desert in a nine-month period was a complex enterprise, and countless examples could be noted, but here a few will suffice to show how this process worked. Following Lawrence’s blowing out the match in Dryden’s office, the camera cuts to a flaming expanse of the sunrise, then, after another cut, two dots appear in the desert, showing two riders on camels. The cut to the sunrise

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is abrupt, and justifiably praised for its shift from the dreary military setting in Murray’s office, and afterward from the ostentatious décor in Dryden’s, to a vast expanse of undulating sand dunes in a long shot of the awesome beauty of nature. At the same time, the music of Maurice Jarre bursts into a crescendo of the main Lawrence music theme, which adds tonal color to the atmospheric change.34 Here is a transformation from the dried-up environment of office life to a mysterious, exhilarating world of nature, which from now on will guide, challenge, and even obstruct an untried but undaunted youth in his infant steps to the beautiful and terrifying desert. While the historical Lawrence already knew this world minutely, the film wants us to assume that its hero is there for the first time. These opening shots forebode his metamorphosis from an untested, flippant novice to a hard-bitten man driven to the limits of human endurance. Another event that has called much attention is the entrance of Ali, alluded to earlier. This is Lawrence’s first encounter with his fate—as an elusive phantom comes his direction, materializing into a human of magnetic presence, underscoring Lawrence’s sudden awakening that he will deal with an intelligent and noble race, despite the fact that he has called them barbarous and greedy. Both the desert and its people define Lawrence’s dual struggle, for he has to deal with both from now on. The desert is not only breathtakingly beautiful, but also a curse, “God’s anvil,” as Ali calls the Nefud, where one has to physically burn trying to stay alive, but also to win. Its people (and its camels)35 show Lawrence that the desert is also a curse for their lives (“There is nothing in the desert,” says Feisal to Lawrence in the tent, “and no one wants nothing”), but they cope with its vagaries and even survive under the harshest conditions. Another event that fully demonstrates this is Gasim’s fall from his camel, not seen, and Lawrence’s

Lawrence and Tafas ride in the desert. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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quest to find him. A low shot shows Gasim from the back agonizingly staggering along and shedding his cartridge belt as the sun rises before him. But he struggles on doggedly, long enough for Lawrence to find him. Still another is the echoing rock formations of a ravine as Lawrence is approaching Feisal’s camp, singing, “The man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo.” Stunned, Lawrence stops in wonderment, listening, until a clapping of hands—Colonel Brighton’s—puts an end to his trance. (Incidentally, one is reminded of Mrs. Moore’s terror at the echo in the caves, in A Passage to India, an event that has an effect on her metamorphosis—or even became a factor in her death.) An echo, according to many ancient legends, “can be seen as the symbol of regression and passivity, which may only be passing phases preceding transformation.”36 The above and many other episodes could demonstrate the idea that Lawrence’s experiences in the desert had an effect on him: not only the new people he encountered but the environment he was thrust into played a role in his transformation from a rather immature and flippant novice to a man capable of dealing with both new environment and independently minded and hardy people, leading them to victory. The desert tested him, the people he met honed his appetite for glory, and this is the stuff that makes heroes. But achieving purely aesthetic effects was not the only reasons for choosing the desert to make his film. Lean’s decision to make the desert a larger factor in the film is found in his letter to Sam Spiegel, as the latter complained (repeatedly) about his delays and the length of shooting while the unit was still in the Jordanian desert: But listen to me, Sam. The thing that’s going to make this a very exceptional picture in the world-beater class are the backgrounds, the camels, horses, and uniqueness of the strange atmosphere we are putting around our intimate story. Audiences have seen good scenes and good characters before; they haven’t seen what we have shown them to date in the first half of this picture. This is our great spectacle that will pull the crowd from university professor to newsboy. For God’s sake, I beg of you, don’t underestimate it. This can be one of greats. It’s the most wonderful combination of spectacle and intimate character study which ever fell into a filmmaker’s lap.37

This quotation raises two points which needed to be mentioned here. One is merely practical and related to the logistics of film production: Sam Spiegel was about to move the location of filming from Jordan to Spain and Morocco, and the loss of the Jordanian desert would affect the outcome in one way or another, authenticity of historical spectacle being one factor. But the larger point is that Lean knew how grand spectacle in such rare cases as this affects characterization. The decline of Lawrence as a hero in Part Two

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of the film—his ambiguities, self-doubts, and final collapse into an almost brutish character and sad exit—is to be partly attributed to the loss of the original filming environment. Photographing his epics in real landscapes—real or made to look as real as possible—had become a modus operandi for Lean, who had realized that placing intimate (for the most part) stories onto large

Lawrence and Auda ready to charge against Damascus. Columbia Pictures/ Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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canvases was essential to filming an epic. As Richard Goodwin notes in his commentary to A Passage to India, “no one, but no one had mastered the long shot as David Lean had.”38 That is a guidepost to defining the epic form, at least one of the many devices used by Lean and the photographer of three of his epics, Freddie Young, though the principle applies to all epics to a greater or lesser extent. The long shot alternates at critical points with close-ups or medium shots, and gives the viewer the sense of the expanse and vastness of the desert, where a small dot or two seem lost in infinity, an idea that suggests what we have seen in the two previous quotations from Lean and Lawrence when they spoke of the mystique of the desert. Lean associates it with the place where prophets were inspired and religions born, while Lawrence talks of a “comprehending Being,” expressing almost an identical idea. The juxtaposition of long shots/close-ups can be an effective means of inspiring the feeling of vastness and closeness with the “Being” that the viewer experiences subliminally. This experience then, in a most tangible way, defines the art of viewing a film. Among other things, Lean teaches an audience the utmost importance of using the long shot as a tool in comprehending his aesthetic. The long shot (abandoned by most filmmakers according to the above commentator) demarcates the epic as a cinematic form and distinguishes it from the routine action movie, which contains epic elements but is not an epic in the truest sense. That is how Lean saw the epic—a term, incidentally, that he rarely uses, as he does not want to associate his own works with the run-of-the-mill epics of the fifties, overwrought with massive spectacle but with slipshod plots and shallow characterizations. As many commentators have noted, Lean was “obsessed” with perfectionism, particularly where selection of shots—framing, lighting, or motion and stillness included—was concerned because he wanted to associate character(s) with specific, and real, locations in such a way as to establish the tone and mood of a scene; and the shot is the basic unit of a film—although one has to add music, and sound in general, for that extremely difficult task to be accomplished. Take the scene where Omar Sharif arrives at the well, already mentioned. The long shot here alternates with medium close-ups of Lawrence and Tafas, who look in wonderment at the phenomenon that the mirage creates. The finished sequence is regarded as cinematic masterpiece, and the main reason is the expert use of the length shot that alternates at key points with medium shots, although the soundtrack performs an equally difficult task, in alternating utter silence and increasingly soft sounds, dotted with sudden small explosions of a bucket splashing and a gunshot (that kills Tafas) to culminate it.

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The Modernity of Lawrence: Political Aspects When Lean made Lawrence, he could not have imagined then that his film would become a chapter of continuing history, for the historical Lawrence’s alliance with Prince Feisal, who later became the king of Iraq, a country created by the British, is still in central stage in today’s world. Of course when one talks of historical continuity, one has to admit that the shifting sands of history acquire different meanings at different periods. For instance, the topics touched in Lawrence of Arabia did not seem as pressingly relevant in 1962, a time when fresh memories of the Second World War and the ongoing Cold War dominated choices for screen epics. Epics like The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, or war melodramas like From Here to Eternity and In Harm’s Way seemed more in tune with the temperament of then recent events and were more familiar as part of history. It did not matter that most of the accounts they gave of war episodes were fictional, as long as myths of war heroes and archetypes were being created.39 But today filmmakers who dabble in historical material are more stringently scrutinized40 and falsities stated as facts are more easily exposed, probably because the proliferation of the media (DVD commentaries, online publications) has made historical sources more accessible to audiences. But since historical truth is only one factor in assessing the effectiveness of an epic film that professes to be based on history, a second look at Lawrence of Arabia might reveal similarities with our own age in a broader sense than strict historical accuracy. The conflict of the First World War was concentrated in Europe, and the then geographically vague region called Arabia was not known (and still not well known) or understood by Western cultures. Simply put, the film concentrates on Lawrence not exclusively as an archetypal Western hero, usual in the epics of the previous decades that were based on good versus evil, heroes pitted against villains, but it explores the psyche of a hero with flaws and gives more than a few hints of the broader picture of the world he was to fight in and for. The film seems to be concentrating almost exclusively on two items: breathtaking shots of the Arabian desert (some say the real hero of the film) and Lawrence himself. As given by Peter O’Toole, Lawrence was a man invading a land whose people he insults by calling them “a little people, barbarous and cruel,” and unable to unite for a common cause. By telling them how to win a war on grounds they were familiar with, he humiliates them first, and then leads them to incredible military victories—the taking

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of Aqaba and later of Damascus. To the Arabs he seems to be arrogant, blasphemous, defying the law they believe in, and a typical go-getter Westerner. Here Lean does well to describe the clash of cultures, a pervasive theme in his epics. The clash is a clash of ideologies, but also a portrait of contrasts. Eastern peoples, whether in India or Arabia, whether Hindus or Moslems, believe in more than one dimension of reality, one visible and comprehensible, the other invisible and known only to the sages. Lawrence was an invader in a world he had studied diligently but, at least in the film, had failed to understand fully. He is an ambiguous character in that his two selves—the European side and his Arabian assimilation—do not entirely coalesce, thus leaving him vulnerable to internal conflicts that he does not seem able to handle. Is he a demigod, or is he a deluded man who frequently discovers the horror of some of his actions, like the extermination of a Turkish detachment that he could have taken prisoner? There are other differences between film and history. Bolt and Lean did not attempt the prospect of reproducing Lawrence in exact detail in appearance and character. As noted, they were physically different, despite some resemblance in their facial features. The historical Lawrence was scholarly, methodical, serious, idealistic, and politically astute, decisive but rarely giving in to impulsive behavior on the field. He is perfectly capable of understanding his “double” nature—his links to his Arab friends and his English identity (and his Christianity)—something that makes his position untenable, costing him great guilt and uneasiness to promise freedom to Arabs knowing full well that the British would not keep these promises. As a writer, Lawrence was an accomplished literary master and archaeologist, a fact that comes through in his writings (Seven Pillars, The Revolt in the Desert, The Mint), which were a blending of poetic prose and serious analysis, with opinions offered on Semitic genealogy, Biblical events, and anthropological and archaeological insights, while the events he describes show him an astute military strategist. Lawrence was a thinker and visionary before he became a warrior and military genius. Lean’s character, on the other hand, at first seems to have no idea of what his assignment in the Arab campaign is going to be, and when he is told by Dryden that he is “to appreciate the situation,” he responds that “that it is going to be fun.” Soon he is transformed into a hero and inspiring leader but so riddled with personal insecurities that it is impossible to connect him with the epic heroes produced by Hollywood before Lawrence of Arabia became “the epic to end all epics.”41 Just as they sectioned only bits and pieces of the historical Lawrence’s expedition, Bolt and Lean practically invented a character closer to legend and myth than to history, presenting a unique figure torn out of the pages of history but as enigmatic and illusory as the desert dunes he crosses

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Lawrence, Allenby, Feisal, and Dryden at a peace conference in Damascus. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

riding a camel. The viewer knows at once this is not real history, but also accepts that epics rarely are. Still, in this concoction of myth and history, Bolt and Lean have outlined certain themes that can be found in the works of both, and some, in particular, in Lean’s opus. In at least three of his major epics,42 Lean explores the theme of colonialism, of the British Empire’s manipulation of international conflicts, tilting them to its favor whenever occasion permitted and using any and every means afforded to gain land or control. The liberation of Arabia from the Turks was seen as a means of advancing the interests of France and England in that region, at a time when they had trouble with the war in Europe and saw that a defeat of Turkey would counteract some of their heavy losses, such as the disaster the British had suffered at Gallipoli. In the film’s historical context, Lawrence becomes a tool of those interests, and, as the film reveals, knowingly. When Dryden reveals what the Sykes-Picot agreement is to an astonished Lawrence, he adds, “Even if you did not know, you certainly had suspicions.” At the end of the film, Lawrence is fully cognizant of this duplicity when he is told by Allenby that he is promoted to colonel,

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so he can have a better cabin during his travel home. In a room full of “old men”—Feisal, Allenby, Dryden, Brighton—he realizes that though the “young men” had won the war, they had left it to old men to “make the peace.” Here, both the historical and the fictional Lawrence coincide, for both felt the guilt of having betrayed their friends, the Arabs, whom they had led to victory, letting them believe that the country they had fought to liberate would be their united nation after the war. This is where Lean makes a statement in this film: the collusion of the great powers of that day was responsible for the lack of national unity among the Arabs; after the breakup of the Arabs at Damascus, fully accepted by historians, and the subsequent divisions of Arabia into different nations—Syria goes to France, Palestine and Iraq to Britain—the dream of a unified Arab nation—a dream shared by both Lawrence and the Arabs—collapses. The origin of today’s troubles in the Middle East goes back to the era, Dr. Kabul Abu Jaber, ex-foreign minister of Jordan, asserts.43 “The whole deal smells with oil,” and “oil has been a curse for the Arabs,” he continues.44 Whether Lean would have anticipated such comments forty years after making his epic is doubtful, for the cycle of history has brought the Arab/Middle Eastern question at the epicenter once more. But there is no doubt he was fully conscious that the then superpowers were carving an emerging nation for their own political aims and economic gains. One thing is certain, that he hammered away at the anti-imperialist theme even more so than Lawrence himself did in Seven Pillars. Further, one can say, in particular about the British Empire, that four of the five Lean epics have to do with the excesses and blindness of imperial powers, there and in other parts of the world. In that, Lean shares Forster’s opinion that the British Empire “rests on sand.” Lean lived to see its collapse, and whether the queen’s awarding Lean a knighthood in 1985 was recognition of his vision as a filmmaker or acknowledgment of a high-quality entertainer remains uncertain.45

Notes 1. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 24. 2. In the film he appears as Jackson Bentley, excellently played by the American actor Arthur Kennedy. 3. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 408. 4. Brownlow, David Lean, 406. 5. Several biographies of Lawrence exist, one by the poet and friend of Lawrence, Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs (London: J. Cape, 1927).

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6. In Lean’s film, Lawrence is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. 7. “The Legend of Lawrence,” quoted in the original 1962 souvenir booklet, DVD, Columbia Pictures, 2001. 8. In the film, Bentley only takes photographs. In reality, Lowell had a crew with him and took extensive documentary footage, which he used later to seam together feature-length films accompanied by lectures. 9. See the documentary Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World (PBS DVD Gold, 2003), by director James Hawes, an excellent source of materials, including comments by historians on the historical Lawrence. 10. Brownlow, David Lean, 430. 11. T. E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert (New York: Garden Publishing Company, Inc., 1926). A condensed version of Lawrence’s campaign that may be a quicker, and no less accurate, guide to a reader interested in comparing essential features of the campaign with the events given in the film. 12. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 167. 13. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 57. Gene D. Phillips claims that Dryden was based on David Hogarth, the deputy director of the Arab Bureau. See Phillips’s Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 275. 14. The Sykes-Picot agreement: Georges Picot, French ambassador to England, and Sir Mark Sykes struck an agreement that, following the war, France would occupy Syria, while England would be awarded Palestine and Mesopotamia, something the historical Lawrence suspected but did not know as a fact. See Seven Pillars, 455, 555. 15. Erroneously, Gene D. Phillips states that Auda of the film crossed the Nefud Desert with Lawrence’s group. See Beyond the Epic, 308. 16. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert, 154. This attempt failed, but Ali remained with Lawrence and they did not part until they succeeded in blowing up a Turkish train subsequently. 17. Lawrence also adds that Ali had a young lover, Turki, son of a Bedu chieftain, Mifleh, and that Ali and Turki “wandered about inseparably, taking pleasure in touch and silence.” See Seven Pillars, 406. 18. Portions of the film were also shot in Morocco and Spain, before a few interior scenes were filmed in England’s Shepperton Studios. 19. Both biographers of Lean, Kevin Brownlow and Gene D. Phillips, refer to the incident that occurred in September of 1961, when Bolt was jailed after a massive rally in Trafalgar Square against the use of the atomic bomb. Bolt was freed after the intervention of Spiegel, but inevitable delays in completing the script were caused. See Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 276. 20. Lowell Thomas stayed a total of eight days in the desert and actually took motion picture images of Lawrence, later turned to documentaries shown to audiences in Britain and America. Bentley only takes photographs and stays in the field of action until Lawrence enters Damascus. 21. Stephen Silverman, David Lean (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 141. 22. Aside from Nicholson, in The Bridge on the River Kwai, we have young Joyce, who has left a tedious desk job to tackle an impossibly difficult mission, blowing up a

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bridge in the middle of jungle. Incidentally, Pierre Boulle’s character is even more eager to single-handedly accomplish the task all by himself. See Pierre Boulle, The Bridge over the River Kwai (New York, Presidio Press, 2007), 156. 23. The historical Ali is described as wearing both black and white, but Lean kept him in black uniform. 24. The historical Feisal was about Lawrence’s age, but Lean, in the person of Alec Guinness, “ages” him to appear a generation older. Thence, the references of Feisal in the film to the notion that “old men make the peace.” 25. Of course, to the Arabs Auda was a great hero, a uniter of the scattered tribes, and, aside from Feisal, the most important leader in the Arab campaign. See commentary by his granddaughter, Dr. Alia Abu-Tayeh, in the aforementioned James Hawes DVD. Auda occupies a great deal more space than Ali does in Seven Pillars (and Revolt in the Desert), where he appears as a complex personality, the lever of operations and loyal companion of Lawrence through the early part of the campaign. 26. As is the case with the historical Allenby, who pays close attention to Lawrence’s advice and summons him frequently for a consultation about the campaign. For instance, when Allenby plans his push toward Damascus, Lawrence advises him that it would be best to take Mann first, a big fortress northeast of Aqaba, so that he will not leave this Turkish bastion in his rear. See “The Siege of Mann,” in Revolt in the Desert, 223. 27. Historically, the taking of Aqaba coincides with major defeats in the Western front in Europe, and one can understand the deep significance of Lawrence’s victory and lionizing he receives from his fellow officers. See Hawes, Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle of the Arab World, DVD commentary. 28. “There is sucker born every minute” is said to have originated with P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), a cofounder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. 29. See the quoted epigraph in the opening of this chapter. 30. The scenes of torture and repeated rapes by several individuals during his capture by the Turks are described by Lawrence in great detail in chapter 80 of Seven Pillars (442–45). This episode is far more graphic than anything a film made in 1962 could have attempted to describe. 31. Brownlow, David Lean, 433. 32. “Uncolored, unshaped, untouched,” a reference to Plato’s Phaedrus (24C) of Hermes Trismegisthos, a phrase occurring in Seven Pillars, 40. This is where Lawrence describes Dahoum, his Bedouin young friend, who inspires a lyric description of the spirit of God in the desert (Dahoum, Lawrence’s presumed lover in his precampaign days, according to some). Dahoum’s real name was Salem Ahmed (Seven Pillars was dedicated to S.A.). Dahoum died of typhoid fever in 1917, an event that plunged Lawrence into despair. See Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 266. 33. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 40. 34. For an extensive and perceptive analysis of the music themes in Lawrence, see Moraitis’s The Art of David Lean (Canterbury: Author House, 2004), 140–76. 35. The historical Lawrence has a great deal to say about the camel he rides, its endurance and spirit, and the camels in general, the major transportation force in the Arab army. 36. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 336.

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37. Quoted in Brownlow, David Lean, 455. 38. The quotation is taken from the end of the lengthy commentary to A Passage to India, disc 2, Sony Pictures “Collector’s Edition,” 2008. 39. For further discussion of this point, see Mark C. Carnes (ed.), Past Imperfect: History according to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995). See the introduction by Carnes, 9–11. 40. Steven Spielberg, an ardent admirer both of Lean and his film, states that “today Lean wouldn’t have gotten away” with the historical distortions of the film. “A Conversation with Steven Spielberg,” disc 2, “Columbia Classics,” Sony Pictures DVD, 2008. 41. This opinion was attributed to Sydney Pollack in his introduction to the 1962 film on the Turner Classic Movies series, “The Essentials,” August 3, 2003. 42. The Bridge of the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and A Passage to India. 43. See Hawes, Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World, 2003 DVD commentary. 44. See Hawes, Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World, 2003 DVD commentary. 45. During the premiere of Lawrence in London in 1962, the duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip) greeted Lean with, “Good evening. Good flick?” Lean interpreted this not as an insult by the prince, but as something representing the British attitude toward filmmakers, not considering film an art. Brownlow, David Lean, 479.

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Doctor Zhivago Crew Director: Screenplay:

Set Decorator: Costume Design:

David Lean Robert Bolt, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak Carlo Ponti/MGM Freddie Young Norman Savage Maurice Jarre John Box Terence Marsh, Ernest Archer, Roy Walker, Bill Hutchinson Dario Simoni Phyllis Dalton

Sound Editors: Assistant Directors: Second Unit DP: Property Master:

Paddy Cunningham, Winston Ryder Roy Stevens, Pedro Vidal Manuel Berenguer Eddie Fowlie

Cast Yuri Zhivago: Tonya: Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov: Lara Antipova: Yevgrav Zhivago: The Girl/Tonya Komarovskaya: Victor Komarovsky: Alexander Gromeko: Anna Gromeko: Lara’s Mother: Professor Kurt: Shasha: Katya: Razin: Liberius: Kostoyed: Young Yuri:

Omar Sharif Geraldine Chaplin Tom Courtenay Julie Christie Alec Guinness Rita Tushingham Rod Steiger Ralph Richardson Siobhan McKenna Adrienne Corri Geoffrey Keen Jeffrey Rockland Lucy Westmore Noel William Gerard Tichy Klaus Kinski Tarek Sharif

Producer: Cinematography: Editor: Musical Score: Production Design: Art Directors:

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CHAPTER 3

Doctor Zhivago (1966)

General Background Primitive art, Egyptian, Greek, our own, is surely one and the same art in the course of the millennia and always remains in the singular. It is some thought, some assertion about life, which, in its all-embracing breadth, cannot be broken down into separate words, and one grain of that force enters into the composition of some more complex mixture, this admixture of art outweighs the significance of all the rest and turns out to be the essence, the soul, and the foundation of what is depicted.1 —Boris Pasternak

Of the five epic movies2 that David Lean made between 1957 and 1984, Doctor Zhivago, produced by MGM, was the most popular, grossed more money (approximately $200 million worldwide) than all the others combined, and garnered ten Oscar nominations, as many as Lawrence of Arabia. But it only received five Oscar nods3 and critics balked, claiming this epic was a mishmash of styles, and with a soundtrack that won fame as a popular tune but sounded too obtrusive or sentimental for some tastes. Negative critics included Judith Crist, who asserted that Lean’s successes in his two previous epics were due to his association with Spiegel; Pauline Kael, who opined that Lean made uninteresting spectacles in good taste (!); and the London critic Alexander Walker, who held that when a famous director dies, he becomes a photographer. On the positive side, Richard Schickel wrote a laudatory essay in Time, and filmmaker John Schlesinger, who directed Julie Christie in Darling (1965), commended Lean for his successful handling of a new star.4 The film premiered on December 21, in order to qualify 55

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for Oscar nominations. After a dismal reception at the theaters, Lean, assisted by Norman Savage, set out to reedit the film, while MGM boss Bob O’Brien spent an additional million dollars to advertise the movie, which gradually drew more patrons and eventually broke records at the box office, becoming one of the most popular movies of all time. Time proved that this is not a forgotten movie, and viewers continued to see it on VHS tape and in the digitally remastered DVD edition in 2001, and in the Blu-ray and forty-fifth anniversary DVD edition, both in 2010, which helped the film regain some of its original status as a gloriously photographed love story set within a defined historical period of a bygone era. Lean worked meticulously with a number of gifted crew members—art designer John Box, noted cinematographer Freddie Young, screenwriter Robert Bolt—and a vast army of extras, among them some intimate friends in previous efforts. MGM provided him with an ample budget, eager to have the famous Pasternak novel brought to the screen by a highly regarded director, who had won Oscars in his two previous works. At that time, Lean sat at the height of his power, and was one of the most sought-after directors of his era. The rights to the Pasternak novel had been obtained by the Italian producer, Carlo Ponti, who asked Lean to direct the picture. A great deal of excitement had been generated in anticipation of a grand spectacle of a story with political implications, since Pasternak gained fame as a man who stood up to the Soviet giant at the height of the Cold War. Today, the film still has its proponents and is mostly favored by the new attention paid to the Lean epics, thanks mainly to the digital revolution that has produced restored versions of older film masterpieces in their pristine condition. Doctor Zhivago is still a favorite with today’s audiences, perhaps more so as a love story than a film whose immediate political stance is no longer relevant—or relevant for different reasons. Despite certain similarities with Lean’s epic ambitions—setting an intimate story on a large canvas—a new look at Doctor Zhivago reveals that it has its own special appeal: it is a story set in the past but with contemporary (of the time it was made) repercussions. Thus, it presented its writer(s) with unusual challenges, for it came from a literary work of great fame but structurally and historically too complex to transform into a workable script, and also presented enormous technical challenges for the film crews, for Lean’s two previous epics were filmed on location, or on locations closely resembling the locations represented. Since filming in the Soviet Union was out of the question, Spain was chosen, with some sequences filmed in Finland. From that point of view alone, this was a huge undertaking requiring special sets, unusual art design, and generally technical excellence at every level. It also required a cast with such special talents as to bring to life Pasternak’s original—something that took a great deal of imagination and a long search before the actors in question were secured. In the Lean epic opus, Doctor Zhivago remains a landmark, an intimate story set

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on a vast canvas, but mostly treasured as a love story during one of the most turbulent periods of recent human history—the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. It portrays the life of a man who strove to maintain two impossible relationships—his wife and his lover—while remaining loyal to his call as a poet. The film is a story of love, but also the story of an artist, Zhivago, Pasternak’s mouthpiece during a tragic era when free expression was brutally repressed. The artist becomes the mouthpiece for both novelist and filmmaker and thus serves as a link between the novelistic and cinematic art and, as usual, reveals the creative tension that has existed since cinematic works have borrowed their materials from their patron saints—music, literature, poetry, and other arts.

From Boris Pasternak’s Novel to Robert Bolt’s Script Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, of mixed Jewish parentage, and was educated in Moscow, Germany, and Venice, where he traveled in his youth, before the Revolution of 1917 broke out. His father, Leonid Pasternak, was an artist who painted portraits of the likes of Leo Tolstoy (whom young Boris had known), Feodor Chaliapin,5 Rainer Maria Rilke,6 and Alexander Scriabin, the composer, friend, and mentor of the younger poet. Surrounded by artists and writers, Boris quickly rose in the estimation of his colleagues and an admiring public as a young poet of significance, both in Russia and abroad.7 But during the revolution and the ensuing civil war (1917–1923), the new Soviet regime placed severe restrictions on writers, and Pasternak took to translating the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller for many years. Doctor Zhivago was begun as early as 1934, but it wasn’t until 1946 that he worked on it in earnest, and it took him ten more years to complete the massive novel. When it was finished and published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago became an international literary sensation and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. But he declined the honor, after a warning by the Soviet government that he would not be admitted back to Russia if he accepted. When Ponti obtained the rights to film the novel, the lot fell on Lean, who one more time faced the task of transforming a massive literary work into film. And one more time, he asked Robert Bolt, the Academy-nominated author of the script of Lawrence of Arabia, to become the screenwriter for a new Lean epic undertaking. Bolt understood the challenges of turning literary works into films, especially of such long, complex works of high standing as Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and devoted all his professional skill to the new Lean project. He spent a whole year, first in London, then in Madrid, where he and Lean

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labored to finish the script for Zhivago, the initial treatment of which reached 250 pages. The final shooting script, complex, detailed, and lucid, has since then been treated as a yardstick of epic screenwriting.8 Bolt envisioned a script that would encompass essential elements of Pasternak’s novel without compromising the demands of practical filmmaking. He excised a great many secondary characters in the novel and most of the descriptive passages of the horrors of the Russian Revolution but retained the essential lines of Pasternak’s plot—Yuri Andreevich’s connection with the Gromeko family, his marrying Tonya, his participating in the war, the escape of his family from Moscow and the train trip to Varykino, his connection with Lara through coincidental encounters including her affair with Komarovsky, and his becoming her ill-fated lover. Bolt and Lean added the introduction and conclusion scenes with Yevgrav (Guinness), and this “framing device” becomes the structural pattern for the film. Bolt and Lean collaborated closely on the final script, but it was Bolt’s positions expressed in his preliminary notes that defined his general approach and his working plan to transform a complex literary work into the final a screenplay of Doctor Zhivago.9 Let us examine some of these notes as significant factors in the evolution of the script, in some detail.

BOLT’S NOTES In Note #1, Bolt states that the style of Pasternak’s novel is poetic; therefore, he argues, “the film too must be a poem.” It is a long book, and a complex story, but it must not be rushed and be told in two, two and a half hours but must be told at leisure, to contain the essence of the book.10 In its original release, the film ran at 197 minutes,11 nearly three and a half hours. The film begins with Zhivago’s half brother, Yevgrav, seeking his niece, Yuri and Lara’s daughter, and subsequently telling the story of Yuri and Lara through flashbacks (whenever he appears he always talks in the past tense), which places the entire narrative in a reflective mode. It is a story of memory, told backward, from the end, to the beginning, middle, and back to the end. Yevgrav’s voice (Guinness’s) gives the narrative the quality of a fairy tale about two ill-fated lovers caught in the web of circumstances, united by chance and separated by force. Yevgrav, though not a poet himself, is an admirer of Yuri’s poetry and shows a volume of Yuri’s poems—“now” permitted to circulate12—to the young girl he is investigating, hoping she is his brother’s child. This volume of poems, with the photographs of the two lovers in it, is the first significant node of what is to follow: a love story. The two photographs of the lovers, especially of Lara, the woman to whom the volume is dedicated (“She is nice,” young Tonya observes), serve as a guidepost of exposition punctuated by a series

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Yevgrav shows the Lara Poems to younger Tonya. MGM/Photofest © MGM

of signifiers throughout. Doctor Zhivago is an “imagistic” narrative, an expanse of visual nodes: the dry branch that hits against the window, as the boy Yuri experiences after his mother’s burial; the balalaika, carried from person to person until it becomes means of identification; the sunflowers at the parting scene between Yuri and Lara; the blooming spring tree flowers Tonya sees at Varykino, and so forth. Feelings are evoked by looking at these images. The enormous, snow-covered vistas of a frozen landscape are seen against the intimate moments that contain the essence of the story. What makes the film poetic is that most of these large vistas and the tumultuous events of the revolution are seen through the eyes of a poet, who is shown writing poems but who never reads them to us. His facial expressions while he is writing, or thinking “poetically,” change, as his eyes become the mirrors of his feelings. Lean intends the visual images to be poetic. Zhivago, as played by Omar Sharif, is frequently described as “passive,” his eyes reflecting the reality he sees in reaction shots; his eyes then become the mirror of reality we ourselves see, and what we see are poetic images that have sprung out of the pages of Pasternak. He also remains the center of our attention, though he is not active in the usual manner of epic hero who drives the action of the story. This “poetic” effect, though, is also achieved by Freddie Young’s fluent shots and the grading of colors, grays, and blacks that reflect the harsh reality and bleakness of the environment, alternating with bright colors

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such as flowers and splashes of red that symbolize the decadent atmosphere of a Moscow restaurant or the dress of a “scarlet” woman, Lara, after her seduction by Komarovsky. It is also achieved by Maurice Jarre’s musical score, a favorite popular tune, always bursting in at moments when Zhivago’s thoughts turn to his beloved woman. Thus, photographic empathy, imagery, color, and sound define cinematic poetry—which cannot be expressed by lines read (none of the poems is read to the audience) but by means that can only be the essential process of the poetic medium. In Note #2, Bolt argues that Pasternak’s novel is “a mind and heart adventure.” Yuri Zhivago is a character, “almost physically passive,” a poet: action, therefore, must be subservient to this idea, “as in the first part of LOA, but even more so.” The action “must follow a poetic, atmospheric, not logical, continuity, climax or dénouement.” Bolt makes several other comments concerning the action in the movie. “We must see how Pasternak contrasts its harshness”—the ruthless, inhuman treatment of protesters in a peaceful parade, for instance—“to the inner life of Zhivago.” The action must stay in the background. The hero, Zhivago, must not be a part of it. Zhivago sees action from the outside. Physical action must not outweigh the inner, spiritual side of Zhivago. Ergo, this must be “a quiet, thoughtful film.” Told through the eyes of a poet, and thence subjectively, Doctor Zhivago is not a quiet film, at least not to the degree that Bolt first imagined. Its soundtrack is filled with a resounding musical score; it shows intense battle scenes (not all witnessed by Zhivago), parades with loud drums and revolutionary songs, explosions, mass executions, and some horrid conditions in the epic train ride of the Zhivago family to the Urals. All these make for a rather bulky saga, crowded with events, as the main characters struggle to remain alive during a fast-changing, tumultuous period of history. But Lean succeeded in keeping the simplicity of the main story at the center of such plethora of events, never losing focus of the story, making the war the backdrop of the developing thread of the lovers’ destiny. Thus, the usual pitfalls of an episodic narrative are largely circumvented, and the pace of the movie is energetic, even though the plot appears somewhat serpentine. Its prologue—the Yevgrav episode—is followed by a voice-over narrator who “binds” the narrative together, and its epilogue provides a logical conclusion, since the object of the narrator’s intent—finding Yuri and Lara’s child—has been reached. Still it is a tall order for any filmmaker to achieve smooth transition scenes in a lengthy epic movie that covers so many events and historical sequences without losing the interest of the viewer. Bolt’s statement that “physical action must not outweigh the inner, spiritual part of Zhivago” is perhaps the key to understanding the film’s unity. Yet the flow of emotions is never lost in mere noise or the kaleidoscope of its complex settings. Here, it must be added that

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the two women leads are, like Zhivago, physically passive but morally active, and that their own inner lives are also part of the flow of revelations that ties the narrative together. Tonya is almost entirely a background figure, but she intuits her husband’s emotions and judges him accordingly. Even when she is forced to leave her home at Varykino in his absence, she is not judgmental of Lara. She endures her numerous ordeals and perhaps knows that Yuri is a victim of circumstances and pardons his weaknesses. There is no malice in her, and she retains her dignity to the end. Lara is more active—nurse, lover, and mother, a hunted figure and abused teenager—but she never takes initiative (aside from shooting Komarovsky) and follows Zhivago’s steps while their affair lasts. She and Zhivago are well matched by disposition but separated by class, circumstance, and human conniving. Both are flawed characters, unable to give up a relationship that hurts others. Still, Lara is more of a leader than Tonya; she takes up a position, searches for her lost husband in the front lines, serves as nurse, looks after her daughter with genuine affection, and takes Zhivago back and restores him to health when he returns physically ruined by his harsh treatment by the Red partisans and his trek through the frozen tundra. She is not jealous of Tonya and does not demand that Zhivago take action, as a jealous woman would, to divorce his wife and marry her. But she does record her impressions (“We live at an awful time!”) and shows her moral dignity, and finally she sees the necessity to part with Zhivago and go off away with Komarovsky, mindful that she has a daughter to take care of and that she carries Yuri’s child. Bolt also states (Note #5) that the film “must be delicate, and that it must be rhythmic.” We must see the action as a poet sees it. The film “must move forward by mood, state-of-mind, image, rhythmically controlled, not by plot development.” It must be “rhythmically controllable.” That being said, rhythm and mood are hard to achieve in a film, especially one that covers multiple subjects—war, politics, love. But Lean manages, as a director and editor (Norman Savage did the editing, but Lean, as always, had a hand in the final product), to achieve a rhythmic, rather than a “logical development” plot. There is, of course, not a total absence of logic in the design of episodes; as Yevgrav Zhivago begins his investigation to find his niece, it is logical to expect that his narrative voice, sporadically intrusive as it may be, will bring the audience information regarding his search, which begins and concludes the story. However, the incidents are related in a certain cyclic manner of telling the story, which begins with the first “casual” encounter of Yuri and Lara at the streetcar,13 and the subsequent meeting of her and Pasha Antipov—her future husband—as the latter distributes his pamphlets in the street and almost gets arrested. Thence, we learn more about Lara, her developing relationship with Komarovsky, and the incidents that lead to Yuri’s crossing paths with her, first when her mother attempts suicide and Dr. Boris Kurt with his assistant Zhivago come to Komarovsky’s rescue, and secondly

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with Lara’s shooting of Komarovsky at the Christmas party, when again Yuri, this time by himself, tends to Komarovsky’s wound. Meanwhile, Tonya has arrived from Paris. Thus, all the principals have been introduced in the first half hour or so of the film. What makes this story rhythmical is first the cycle that begins there and is not to be completed until the final narrative of Yevgrav summarizing the end; and at the same time, the external conflicts that are to dominate the lives of several people from now on have also been set into motion, as a parade of revolutionaries, led by Pasha Antipov, is cut down by dragoons, leaving many dead and maimed. Though used almost as a backdrop, the external events serve as the rhythmical counterpoint to the state of mind of all the main characters involved, especially Yuri. In practice, he is involved in both incidents only as a doctor. But his witnessing of the massacre, in combination with his indignant response to Komarovsky’s relationship with Lara, seeing her kissing him after he has attended to her mother, triggers his poet’s sensibilities. These events make him judge the perpetrators—Komarovsky, and to some extent Lara, and the murderous dragoons—and thus develop his moral angle. From now on, what we witness is the reawakening of a poet’s sensibilities: anger, indignation, human empathy for all victims of cruelty—these are quite evident to the audience, who clearly sees his reactions in his face, in his eyes (bulging almost unnaturally), and in his body language in general. Though his actions are confined to healing his patients or fending for his family—his “passive” attitude—his emotions, and thence most of his reactions, give us proof not only that is he moved, but that many of his judgments become the moral center of the story. Though not “heroic,” he is the hero of the story. But his heroism is revealed not with swords, pistols, or laser beams, the usual weapons of epic heroes of all calibrations, but by his asserting his moral center. In his Note #7, Bolt declares that music must not be played by an orchestra, and it must remain intimate: “The music must strengthen the story, must not side with the background.” In view of the actual final soundtrack, only one of these points was placed into effect: Maurice Jarre’s “Lara’s Theme” was incorporated into a large orchestral piece that became, as Stephen Silverman said in a 2010 DVD commentary, one of the main reasons for the immense popularity the epic finally achieved. Lean was very sensitive about soundtracks for his films (one remembers the effect the musical theme of Brief Encounter— Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto—had on the audience), and his first three epics were characteristically identified by their musical themes. The Bridge on the River Kwai was associated with the “Colonel Bogey” tune whistled by the worn-out prisoners as they marched into Saito’s camp, and the film was called by a commentator “the epic that whistled itself around the world.” Maurice Jarre’s theme in Lawrence of Arabia became just as famous and closely associated with the film. “Lara’s Theme” was not Lean’s first choice, according to Sandra Lean,

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Komarovsky dances with Lara at a decadent restaurant. MGM/Photofest © MGM

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who says in her commentary (DVD, 2010) to the movie that he rejected several versions until Jarre finally hit the right notes after a tryst with his girlfriend on a weekend vacation. One can say the music had much to do with the popularity of the first three epics. The themes of the last two epics, also composed by Jarre, were not as popular, perhaps because, regardless of their musical merits as such, they lack that distinctive tune that usually contributes to a movie’s popular success. Bolt (Note #6) thinks Pasternak is “dangerously modest” about Zhivago. He adds, “We must take it upon ourselves to be less so. We may have to emphasize the gentleness and humanity of the hero.” Zhivago “is not a saint.” But we admire the “fineness of his perception,” his “moral integrity,” since he makes “very crisp judgments and decisions.” He is not the “hero of the action,” but “the hero of the film.” Bolt is saying here that Zhivago’s novel persona comes off as that of a rather too modest and self-effacing character whose presence is often buried in the tumultuous events that the author is busy describing. In fairness, Zhivago in the novel (referred to as Yura first, Yuri Andreevich subsequently) is much more expansive when he speaks for the author expressing his own thoughts on art and love. In Yura’s “notes,” for instance, midway through the novel, Pasternak makes him a richer character than he is in the film in his scenes with Lara when they become intimate lovers in the latter stages of the story. Still, in the film Zhivago’s physical presence in almost every important scene controls the tone of the narrative, though he does not commit one single act of violence, except when he throws Komarovsky down the stairs, after he and Lara reject the latter’s offer to save them if they go with him. Also not to be forgotten is his crisp response to Strelnikov in the train scene, when the latter tells him that he has made his point by burning a village that supported the Whites: “Your point, their village.” Zhivago shows courage but is also a man of peace. It is his moral integrity rather than his physical prowess that controls the tone of the action, for, though a flawed man swept by passion, he still can stand up, telling exactly what is in his mind to those he confronts. For instance, he tells a commissar that a patient he visits suffers from “starvation,” not typhus, thus provoking the latter’s disapproval with, “Your attitude is noticed, you know. It is noticed.”14 When aroused, Zhivago has the moral stamina to point out an injustice. The main moral conflict in the film—aside from the obvious question of adultery— is whether man (or woman) can accept the new political order, which excludes human emotions. “The personal life is dead in Russia,” Strelnikov tells Zhivago. “History has killed it.” This soulless principle is emphasized repeatedly by the party members. Razin, one of the leaders of the Red partisan group, knowing that Zhivago is not only a good doctor but also a poet, declares that human emotions, or even military records, will not count and that everyone from now

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on will be judged “politically.” Zhivago detests this bankrupt ideology and he continues to show compassion to those he treats and to care for those he loves, despite his betrayal to his wife and family. Here, as elsewhere, Lean provokes the viewer to judge for himself a good man with flaws—or perhaps a weak man with redeeming qualities. Moreover, Bolt and Lean, following the account of the novel’s author, uphold such universally admitted truths held by their hero, and being outside the Soviet sphere of authority (while Pasternak, being inside it, had to be cautiously apolitical), they even make these statements an important theme of the film. And at the center of all this, again, is Zhivago himself. It is his moral integrity in the face of the unmasked repression of the new regime that sets him apart and makes him a hero. Upon his return from the front, seeing his house occupied by strangers and his family’s property being stolen, he is angry enough to express his indignation openly, when Tonya whisks him upstairs to save him from arrest. He realizes that his feelings, had they been expressed openly, would have endangered his family and responds to the commissariat’s threats that this is “a better arrangement, more just.” Bolt also mentions (Note #8) the importance of the cast, and a few remarks are due here. Once Lean got the go-ahead from MGM, he was granted freedom to choose his cast at will. The cast he assembled is to a large measure responsible for the movie’s popularity. Each of the five male leads—Omar Sharif as Yuri Zhivago, Tom Courtenay as Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov, Ralph Richardson as Alexander Gromeko, Rod Steiger (the only American actor) as Victor Komarovsky, and Alec Guinness (who at first balked but was persuaded by Lean to take the role of Yevgrav)—displayed his professional skills, as usual. But the casting of the two women leads, Tonya and Lara, presented some difficulties. Geraldine Chaplin at first seemed too young to play a maturing mother and deceived wife, but Lean decided to give her the role. The role of Lara went to Julie Christie, whose persona as a sixties swinging girl was defined in Billy Liar (with Courtenay, 1963) and Darling (1965),15 her screen image fitting that era. But, under Lean’s guiding hand, she played her period role convincingly. “Women must have dignity,” Bolt had written in his remarks about the casting. And both young actresses acquitted themselves admirably. Chaplin played Tonya with reserve and dignity in the face of her tragic circumstances, and Christie showed unusual maturity in the critical scenes with both her seducer Komarovsky and her loving fiancé, Courtenay, and during the love scenes with Zhivago. She seemed entirely natural restraining her passion for him in the hospital parting scene, and then when she and Zhivago were unable to hold back their feelings and carried on an affair, she was conscious of the damage she had inflicted on another person. In fact, the film structure pivots on the critical decisions these two women are forced to face, loving the same man but neither of them being capable of hating or even disliking the other. That intensifies Zhivago’s dilemma, since he knows that both women are victimized

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because of him. Komarovsky’s fortunes are also affected by Lara’s choice to marry Antipov, despite his warning, and by her liaison with Zhivago. In a sense, he, too, is a betrayed lover. Hateful as he may seem to the viewer, his own happiness is tied to what happens to the object of his love. In the final scenes with him, Lara handles him with aloofness and dignity. In the train, departing with him, she first calls him a fool (justifiably), and then nails him with the announcement that she is carrying Yuri’s child. Two women, three men, lovers or husbands, are at the core of the movie’s sprawling structure. It is worth noting, however, that, aside from Komarovsky, all the major characters are victims of circumstances who are either lost or killed in the chaotic turbulence of the times they live in. None of them is a typical hero of an epic. This movie, as some people have called it, is an intimate epic telling the story of a handful of dignified (and undignified) humans, puppets in the hands of superior forces. Bolt declared (Note #9)16 that the cutting must be “bold,” “authoritative”; the editor should start at a certain point, then select the incidents to embody it—not exposition. This is done in a dual fashion. The cutting is bold; witness the scene when Tonya and Yuri’s engagement is being announced, a loud shot is heard, and the camera cuts to Lara’s holding a gun. Then we see Komarovsky stand up, the camera showing blood trickling down the sleeve of his left arm. Such transformational shots link ideas; thus imagery must be employed, rather than dialogue. In the second part, in a montage of images, as Zhivago looks at the yellow daffodils in his garden, a close-up shows one, large enough to occupy the entire screen, then the shot dissolves to the face of Lara, as she suddenly sees Yuri in the library. Exposition is revealed in the imagery: Lara’s angry face after Komarovsky has raped her—tossing the words, “And don’t delude yourself that this was a rape; that would flatter both of us.” This is a scene where minimal dialogue is used not just for exposition but for reinforcing the imagery. The imagery takes precedence over dialogue—and this process is by and large a function of editing. Still, Zhivago’s editing is geared to stressing imagery rather than the rapid pacing achieved both in Kwai and to some extent in Lawrence, where the camera lovingly lingers on the undulating sand dunes. In those two epics, the hero’s actions advance the plot and thence the quick pacing and the logical linking of incidents. The same is not quite true in Zhivago. Though there certainly is no lack of logic in the larger sense—the viewer, for instance, is prompted to expect a romance following the display of photographs of Yuri and Lara that Yevgrav shows to Tonya II—the linkages of episodes in the film is achieved by superimpositions. Examples can be seen in the daffodil close-up dissolving into the face of Lara as mentioned above; the montage showing Antipov rushing into battle shouting, then hit; or of Yuri’s breaking the window, then a piece of glass falling; and then there is a shot of a green light signal of a train starting, carrying away Komarovsky and Lara. All of these validate the point that Lean’s editing techniques could be adapted to the subject and the pacing of the film.

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Bolt declares (Note #10) that Pasternak is unsentimental, and that the film must follow his lead and avoid sentimentality. Lean’s movie follows that principle, though the subject is rife with scenes that could easily slip into sentimentality. His characters are emotional, but emotion must not be “generalized”—a point made be Sharif in his DVD commentary—but must come as a result of great distress, not in repeated overindulgence of tears. Emotional displays are carefully controlled in Doctor Zhivago. Lara is seen in tears on one or two occasions, but rarely cries. Pasha does cry when he reads Lara’s letter, but the scene is photographed behind glass, which acts like a filter to keep the viewer at a distance, in mute shadows, and then he turns his face down. (The same can be said of Saito in Kwai, crying in his hut but throwing his face downward on his bed, so we do not see it.) Tonya at the door sees her husband rushing to Yuriatin, presumably to get morphine, but she knows he is meeting someone there. She has guessed; yet she just looks distressed, her pain and anguish painted on her face, in her eyes, but she refrains from been tearful. She only cries, her face down and away, when Yuri reprimands her for letting the stove go out, not knowing she had reserved the fuel only for when he was in the house. Just this amount of reserve on her part saves her scenes from being crassly sentimental. Zhivago’s face is also a case in point. It shows his feelings, but they are rarely externalized in words, though we know he is angry, appalled, guilty, allowing his body language to show his feelings but not bursting into angry shouting. Lean manages to keep actors in rein at moments of passion or distress, and in this way, Doctor Zhivago is a story where dreadful things happen to reasonably decent people, but in which their reactions are carefully controlled. Only once do we see Lara’s face tear drenched, when Zhivago tells her they must not meet again. The tone is also carefully controlled during the filming of distressful scenes, some of which are witnessed by Zhivago and thus also seen by the viewer but through a glass, as when he sees Lara embracing Komarovsky, when the latter tells her her mother will live. Also scenes in the streets or behind glass are bleak, by means of lighting and color grading, and thus they can represent the horrors people go through, a means of maintaining a subdued tone. The colors in each of the Lean epics, as some have commented,17 fit the environment in which they were filmed. Kwai was filmed in a jungle (Ceylon–Sri Lanka), and the color temperature is adjusted to show vivid foliage, torrential rains, lush environment; Lawrence was filmed in the desert, where the brown-yellow of the desert expanses dominate, and then one “feels” the heat; and to add an example, Ryan’s Daughter in the rocky beaches of western Ireland also gives the feeling of the stormy rains and saline water (“You feel the smell of it,” Lean commented).18 Zhivago, Gary Ross states, makes you feel the cold of the steppes as Yuri is plodding through the snow to get back home. Silverman comments on the alternation of red—Lara’s “scarlet” red dress, indicating sin—with the yellow daffodils in the Varykino garden when Yuri thinks of Lara, as spring arrives. He also mentions the yellow sunflowers, looking withered as their petals fall, as Lara has left Zhivago at the hospital. While the interiors of Zhivago were filmed in suffocating

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heat,19 the people wearing furs to simulate the Russian winter, the exterior scenes, and the snow-covered streets of Moscow contrasted well to create a wintry impression. Many scenes where Zhivago returns to Yuriatin show his feet cracking ice, or plodding in the snow, often haunted by hallucinations of his family. Even the fake “ice palace,” covered with wax to simulate the frozen conditions, where the two lovers take refuge before they are parted, adds a note of isolation, a place where the two lovers are isolated by both man and nature. The love story, Bolt says (Note #11), “Must be heartbreaking; I’m not sure Pasternak has done enough for us here. We will have to improve on him.” The whole must not be airborne, but “built.” Here his observation is especially felicitous in view of the fact that, had this sensitive process not quite come off, the film would have sunk into sappiness, something Lean was especially careful to avoid. Thus, a film of a love story coupled with an adulterous affair could be called a soap opera—as indeed it was—not a love story of tragic overtones. The story is heartbreaking because a wife learns that her husband cheats, and because the lovers have to part in the end, a storyline endlessly used by filmmakers without achieving a tragic impact. The manner of parting is also important. If they had parted at the train station—if Yuri had rushed to catch up with her and didn’t make it, this would not have worked as well. But letting her go with Komarovsky, knowing at that point that he would never see her again—his running to the window and breaking the glass is a tragic moment. She must leave him and reach safety with Komarovsky, given the situation he has described— that she would be arrested soon being the wife of Strelnikov. But to reach this point, the love story had gone through many phases of a relationship slow to build—it took several years—but from the start doomed to failure. The lovers are reunited, but a good future is not written in the cards for them; they have to give each other up. Circumstance, their invisible enemy, does not allow it.

Structure in Doctor Zhivago Bolt states (Note #9) that “Pasternak’s story is second-rate, melodramatic, full of coincidences, pointless.”20 Bolt tempered these harsh observations with, “But in the manner of the telling, the odd incidents, it’s superb.” And when the film was finished, and after he was awarded an Oscar for the screenplay, he was generous, saying that the film was “tremendously good,” and that “anyone who doesn’t like it condemns himself.”21 This last statement, combined with Lean’s remark to Omar Sharif, when in the process of explaining to him how his role was to be played,22 reveals how the process of writing the screenplay evolved. As Lean put it, portraying a hero in film who was a poet, he could not have him read poems (as he would have

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a pianist playing the piano), but he could have him see the action of the movie “poetically.”23 Thence, he decided to have Yuri Zhivago stand back and observe what happens in a series of reaction shots, as when he is looking at the Cossacks’ attack on the demonstrating crowd, in a passive rather than an active stance. Though this approach affected significantly Sharif’s understated acting, it did not entirely resolve the structural problems of transforming a lengthy, sprawling novel into a tight plot that a movie, even an epic, demands. There had to be an additional device that would tie a great many loose episodes in the novel together, and that was the addition of a narrator who would provide a “commentary,” a voice-over narration by Yevgrav’s telling the tale of his brother while analyzing it, and appearing in person only at key moments of the action. As he wrote in his introduction to the screenplay,24 Bolt encountered a variety of problems, one of them being the ending of the book, especially in the last two chapters. In chapter 14, after Yuri and Lara part when Komarovsky takes Lara away, the Yuri-Lara romance comes to a virtual end. But the book continues, and in chapter 15, the last eight years of Yuri’s life are given in lengthy descriptions, among these being his third “marriage” to a Marina, a worker in Moscow, with whom he has two more children. This problem was circumvented

Cossacks attack demonstrators. MGM/Photofest © MGM, Photographer: Kenneth Danvers

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in the film either by entirely omitting these events or condensing them into a synopsis narrated by Yevgrav, telling about Yuri’s return to Moscow, where he served as a doctor while his heart deteriorated (a condition mentioned much earlier in the novel), so his death of a heart attack when he sees Lara in the street while riding a trolley comes as an “expected” surprise. In chapter 16, Yuri and Lara’s daughter, Tonya II, appears, grown up, and her tale is told at length in the novel. In the film, we know her in the beginning of the story and again at the end when Yevgrav is convinced she is his niece. Her scenes with Yevgrav at the beginning and end of the film are not in the novel; by placing her there, Bolt and Lean give the film its structural design through a “framing device.” And in chapter 17, Pasternak reflects at length on Yuri’s place in Russian literature, after the Stalinist thaw era ends. This chapter is entirely omitted from the film, although some hints are given when Yevgrav talks to Tonya II “about those years” and shows her a volume of Zhivago’s poems, whose publication is now allowed. Bolt also states that in a novel these loose ends—“vigorously wagging tails”—are tolerated by the reader, as extra bonuses. In film, there is “an overriding need for continuity.” Therefore, the function of Yevgrav, an entirely background figure in the novel, where he appears as Granya Evgraf visiting Yuri when the latter falls sick of typhus and again when he returns to Moscow, will be used as a narrative vehicle, beginning and ending the story. So Tonya II, Yuri and Lara’s daughter, appears at the beginning as a lost child, and her identity must be ascertained; hence the film is structured along the lines of that particular search, to spark the first stage of the long narrative and to rouse the curiosity of the viewer about the two main characters who will be involved in the love story—the main interest of the film. Yevgrav shows young Tonya the inside covers of the published volume of Yuri’s poems, which show the photographs of both Zhivago and Lara. Thus the viewer easily gathers that these two figures will meet and fall in love, and as many commentators put it,25 this early imagery will give a hint that the epic is going to be a love story. Aside from the beginning and the end, Yevgrav makes sporadic appearances throughout the film, some of which relate to the story as a whole, especially when he enlists in the army as Petrov at the beginning of the war with instructions from the party to undermine the war effort and ensure Russia’s defeat. His comments continue to offer perspective in a number of montage sequences, not referring to Yuri but describing how the army eventually wore out and returned home, the lost war triggering the beginning of the revolution. Then, at a turning point of the story, he appears as deus ex machina when the Zhivago family faces starvation in Moscow26 (not to mention Yuri’s potential troubles with authorities) and helps them to go off to the Urals, Yuriatin, an obscure place where the former aristocrat Alexander Gromeko had a place in the country—Varykino.

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From then on, Moscow ceases to be the center of action, and the Zhivago family takes an epic train trip and settles at that distant provincial place. The train trip has its own interest, structurally speaking, for it becomes the “link” (as trains are generally transitional and thematic means in Lean films) between city and country, marital and extramarital love, war and peace—even a brief one. During this trip some coincidences occur that also affect structure. Zhivago, entirely by chance, meets with the now strongman Strelnikov, who provides him with some information that will turn out to be crucial later: that Strelnikov’s wife, Lara—renounced now as part of “private life”—inhabits at Yuriatin, near where the family is headed. Thus, after reaching Varykino, when winter blocks communication with the outside world and Yuri feels lonesome, the idea occurs to him, at the suggestion of his wife and father-in-law, to visit Yuriatin. Thus, seemingly entirely by chance, Yuri and Lara can meet again—and this time they instantly become passionate lovers. Again, structure is affected by coincidence, which, as in the novel, is a major factor in plot development. In his comments on Doctor Zhivago, Alec Guinness expressed no enthusiasm for the film in which he had been a key secondary figure. He called the finished film “romantically wonderful to look at,”27 but he confessed he had never read the book, having found it boring—so, he said, his opinion did not count. His lukewarm opinion of Zhivago contrasts with the one he gave when he saw the

Zhivago in bed with Lara: “What are we going to do?” MGM/Photofest © MGM

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finished Kwai, which, despite his notorious brawls with Lean on the set of that movie, he called “terrific,” and his enthusiasm for Lawrence, in which he wholeheartedly played Prince Feisal as an important figure in the historical context and in the movie. Guinness needed a great deal of persuasion to play the role of Yevgrav, not thinking the role important enough. Lean convinced him that Yevgrav ties the story together, starting and ending it and appearing as the half brother and savior of Yuri at crucial turning points in the plot. “I wonder if you remember Brief Encounter,” Lean wrote Guinness. “It was almost fifty-fifty commentary and dialogue, and the curious thing is that no-one remembers it as such.”28 Convinced, Guinness undertook to play the role and did a creditable job with it, but his persona in the story—both at the beginning and the end—does not quite connect with the flow of events that follow; nor does it merge well with the rest of the cast. The device of the narrator in the scene where he visits Yuri and his family in Moscow and helps them escape is what keeps him in the background as a shadowy figure. While Yuri talks to him, we hear only the narrator’s voice (Yevgrav’s) explaining to the audience what he had said—and thought. While some commentators admire the technical excellence of this cinematic trick, it might seem to others that Yevgrav stays “outside” the action—appearing too detached and remote from the emotions of the present. An animated conversation between the two brothers might have given him a more human dimension, for, after all, the two half brothers unite at a rare moment—important in their lives. (In the book Yevgrav visits his brother and finds him unconscious with typhoid fever.) Furthermore, why is the device of introducing Tonya II at the beginning of the story a sound one? As said already, these two scenes do not exist in Pasternak’s novel, but they were introduced by Bolt and Lean as a means of tying the plot together. However, it seems that the love story eventually takes over and overwhelms the viewer with its intensity, and Yevgrav’s commentary in wrapping up the story, though well delivered, seems anticlimactic. The two lines of the story do not merge—the appearances of Yevgrav seem added, not built into the plot—as they do in Kwai, where Shears appears first as a very real character, well developed before he escapes, and when he rejoins the action, he is already a well-known figure to the audience. (To a lesser extent, this is true of A Passage to India, where the climax of the story is Aziz’s trial, after which the visit of Fielding to Kashmir, visually dazzling, seems to lose its dramatic momentum.) Alec Guinness’s Yevgrav remains remote, coolly detached, lacking the immediacy and warmth of other secondary characters, for example, Alexander Gromeko (Ralph Richardson), whose part, incidentally, Guinness wanted to play.29 The personality of Yuri Zhivago has already been discussed, but what needs to be added here is that Zhivago, though the hero of the film, a title that seems superfluous, is not truly heroic, at least not as in the established epic tradition. Lean made a deliberate decision to keep him a passive observer through whose eyes the events he watches become the “poem” that Pasternak was writing about that tumultuous era. The novel itself demanded such a treatment, although Bolt

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suggested, as pointed out, that the character of Zhivago must be strengthened. When Sharif complained30 after seeing the daily rushes that his presence in the film was hardly felt, Lean reassured him, saying, “If am correct, if I get it right, no one will remember anyone else in the film but you.” Lean gambled in presenting his leading man as a passive figure who observes and judges. That, in part, was the result of the necessity of preserving Pasternak’s hero in the film more or less as he was. Zhivago was patterned after Pasternak, who led a passive life, preferring the career of a writer, translator, and poet, a teller of the story of the revolution, but not one who rebels and fights openly against the regime, and who chose to reject the Nobel Prize at the price of being banned from his own country. Again, structurally speaking, it is hard to feature a hero who is passive in an epic. Lean also believed that he found it hard to make a hero of a “good man”; he thought that “flawed” heroes suited better the dramatic interests of a film. This principle surfaced in his films from the start of his career, if one remembers the cowardly sailor in In Which We Serve, the flawed lovers in Brief Encounter, Jaggers in Great Expectations, and the dictatorial Sir John Ridgefield (also played by Richardson) in The Sound Barrier. But in the epics it is harder than it is in average-length feature films to have a no-action hero. It is because of Colonel Nicholson’s blind drive to build a bridge for his enemy, and his unquestioned courage in standing up to Saito, that The Bridge on the River Kwai became such a powerful story. Lawrence becomes a hero despite his great flaws—self-doubt, guilt, and savagery—because his fierce willpower becomes the main force that drives the Arab campaign. A look outside the Lean oeuvre to other epics of the period, Ben-Hur and Spartacus, for instance, will reveal that it is the hero who propels the action forward. Thus, in the epics (as of course in many other film genres) it is the hero who becomes the main structural device that frames the story. Judah Ben-Hur, suffering humiliation at the hands of his ex-friend, the arrogant Messala, endures four years of slavery in a Roman galley, becomes free when adopted by a Roman consul, and returns to confront his nemesis Messala in the famous chariot race, winning the day and destroying his opponent in the field of action. And Spartacus is the leading figure in the slave rebellion against the Roman army, becoming a hero with his sword as gladiator and as a leader of the rebellion. A passive hero, as in the case of Zhivago, is a gamble at best. The movie is not a failure, for it is splendidly photographed and compensates the viewer with a passionate love story, but it does not deliver a compelling epic, as the two previous Lean epics had done, and thus loses some of its power. Interestingly, two secondary characters, Antipov/Strelnikov and Komarovsky, possess the willpower and stamina—not to mention the aggressive personalities— to drive action forward. Antipov appears as a passionate, idealistic, even fanatical youth, who distributes pamphlets in a main street at the risk of being arrested, but is saved by his commonsensical fiancée, Lara, in her first appearance. Antipov believes that people want the revolution, even if they do not know it. He is next seen leading a peaceful parade of ordinary people, cut down mercilessly by a

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platoon of attacking Cossacks. His face distorted by a saber slash, he returns to Lara and bluntly tells her, “There will be no more peaceful demonstrations.” From now on he will join those who will fight. His courage is also displayed when he rescues Lara from possible lynching (or surrendering to the police—as happens in the novel) after she has shot Komarovsky; and later on he is seen during the war inspiring worn-out soldiers in a trench to attack. This is also a key moment in plot structure, as mentioned above. Much later in the film, he is seen transformed into the fearsome and feared General Strelnikov, his notoriety as a ruthless strongman having preceded him after he has burned a village for having provided horses to the Whites. Antipov’s/Strelnikov’s sporadic appearances have consequences, for they are essential tools for driving the plot. It is because of his showing up at the Christmas party that Yuri Andreevich establishes his credibility with Strelnikov at their train encounter. When Strelnikov senses that Zhivago recognized him the moment he saw him enter, Yuri explains to him that he met him six years before, thus warding off suspicion that he is a spy, and Strelnikov lets him go. In the novel, Zhivago and Strelnikov never meet until the latter arrives at Varykino, after Lara has left. By having Zhivago remember seeing Strelnikov previously, Bolt and Lean make the coincidence of the train encounter seem more natural. Also, it is because of Antipov’s enlisting into the army that Lara becomes a nurse (a fact much more elaborately related in the novel) to search for her husband and that she meets Zhivago and the first phase of their relationship develops. Structurally, Strelnikov’s appearances become links in plot design and development. Komarovsky is another important figure in plot structure. Amoral, conniving, ruthless, unreliable, and a crass seducer of a teenager, Komarovsky operates on several levels that drive the plot forward. Yuri first sees him at the night when Lara’s mother, Amelia, attempts suicide after she has guessed her daughter’s relationship with Komarovsky. Thus he becomes a means of identification for Yuri, who through the glass sees clearly that Lara has been seduced. Again, when Komarovsky is shot at the Christmas party, Yuri remembers the incident and of course knows now who Lara is and tells her so during their encounter at the Ukrainian front, where they rejoin and work together. By the end of the story, when Komarovsky appears again, Yuri knows him and throws him down the stairs when he proposes that he and Lara go with him. And, after Lara leaves with him, Yuri, declining to go with such a man, leaves her to Komarovsky’s devices. Komarovsky frames the plot more so than any other secondary character. Aside from that, he is also the one character hated by the audience, the villain in the story, and possibly the most interesting character in it. Komarovsky also serves as the antagonist—more so in the film than in the novel31—the man with the black hair, horseshoe mustache, and beard, resembling a Mephistopheles who bets that the man will yield, while the woman in the story will become his. It compounds the ironies in a film that shows him succeeding on all levels: he stays alive during a turbulent period, “landing on all four like a cat,” as Steiger, who

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plays him, tells; and shifts with the wind, maintaining connections and stealing the girl from her distraught lover. Steiger interprets his character as “a romantic,” a man obsessed with the object of his lust, driven to drink, and by saving Lara, he is “even heroic at the end.”32 He is the villain of the story, but structurally he manages to move the plot forward more so than anyone else—even Zhivago himself, who impotently watches him drive off with the woman he loves.

Tragic Themes in Doctor Zhivago Like the other epics of Lean, Zhivago contains tragic themes, but it cannot be called tragic in the same sense that Kwai and Lawrence can. Structurally, those two were designed, by plot and structural devices, to be fully tragic. Both Colonel Nicholson and Lawrence plant the seeds of their downfall by their own actions—Nicholson when he proposes to build a bridge for the enemy, in a classic reversal, while Lawrence undertakes to lead the Arab campaign first suspecting and later fully knowing that he is also betraying their struggles. To give such a status to Yuri Zhivago would be impossible, for he, along with his family and countless others, is swept by events beyond his control. They are trapped by fate and are unable to escape. Their ruin is the ruin of an entire country, where disasters that seem to have been set in motion by historical forces, merciless and irreversible, pluck them out of their homes and toss them into a rootless existence that ends in countless sufferings. This tragic situation is more evident in Pasternak’s novel, where these events are described in horrific detail and at length, while the film glosses over the general chaos and avoids description of the most poignant atrocities committed during the revolution. Still, one cannot fail to see the fact that all the major characters were forced to make, or willingly made, decisions that affected their lives for the worse. The five major characters involved in the action of the movie—Zhivago, Tonya, Lara, Strelnikov, Komarovsky—are, to some degree, all responsible for their fates and thus tragic to a degree. Two others, Yevgrav and Alexander Gromeko, only bear witness or share the tragedy of others. Yuri, “passive” throughout the movie by design, is still responsible for what happens to him by letting an illicit passion for another woman bring him to unforeseen, catastrophic consequences—his arrest by the Red partisans following his visit to his mistress. Ironically, this happens after he has decided this will be his final meeting with Lara (or so he thinks). He remains passive to the end—except for his heroic decision to let Lara go with Komarovsky in order to protect her from certain arrest had she stayed with him. From that point, we see him only through Yevgrav’s commentary, ill with a heart ailment, which will leave him dead on a street of Moscow while chasing a phantom that looks like Lara.33

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Lara is responsible for her disgrace and exile by letting Komarovsky seduce her, a teenager dazzled by the elegance of this cosmopolitan man, who turns out to be her destroyer. Her shooting of her tormentor at the Christmas party sets her apart from the world—an act that would have stigmatized her for life whether there had been a revolution or not. The self-reformation of Lara is partly the theme of the movie. She repents and confesses to Pasha, they get married, and when she hears rumors that he was killed or wounded, she leaves for the front to find her husband. She shows herself not an immoral person when she rebuffs Yuri’s advances at the hospital, and when, finally, she succumbs to passion and becomes his mistress, she becomes a tragic heroine, trapped by her conflicting emotions and sense of morality. She fully knows her affair with Yuri is doomed. And in the end, she has lost her child and disappears, as per Yevgrav’s narrative, into the nameless crowds of the labor camps. Pasha Antipov is also tragic. A self-made man with a promising future, intelligent and idealistic, he stubbornly adheres to radical forces that raise him in rank but then destroy him. Caught between his idealism and his love for Lara, he says he will devote his life to the revolution. “Nothing,” he tells Komarovsky, “is more important for me. Not even Lara.” Yet he breaks into sobs reading Lara’s letter to him, after she has shot Komarovsky and he has brought her home. Shortly before he enlists into the army (Pasternak’s novel describes his metamorphosis in much greater detail), we see him and Lara carrying a baby and settling in Yuriatin, before he is shown at the trenches—still as Antipov—leading a group of worn-out soldiers to battle. Much later, he appears briefly as the stern revolutionary military figure riding a red-painted train, and then he appears in the scene with Yuri, after the latter has been captured and investigated by him. However, Strelnikov is a Red official, but not a Bolshevik, something that may have been the cause of his persecution and downfall. In the film, the news of his death is brought to Yuri by Komarovsky, and that becomes the reason Yuri decides to let Lara go without him—for she would be safer with Komarovsky, he surmises, while he could not offer her any protection. Strelnikov, unlike Komarovsky, is too ideologically unbending to survive; for he is not cut from the same cloth as those who can adapt. Of course the film does not give the full picture of Strelnikov. In the novel, he returns to Varykino after Lara has left, finds Yuri Andreevich still there, and spends an entire night with him confessing his rise and fall, his idealism and betrayal, his trek through Siberia to reach home in hopes of finding Lara and his daughter still there, and revealing that his arrest and execution are imminent. In the morning Yuri finds him across his yard outside shot by his own hand. Pasternak’s Antipov/Strelnikov is more fully developed, and a far more tragic figure than the one the movie gives. The abbreviation of his story was a necessity for Bolt and Lean, who felt that another appearance by him would lengthen the already long film. His full tale would have necessitated

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a double plotline, establishing his great love for Lara, her love for him, and her scruples for having betrayed him (in the film Lara had assumed he was dead), and would have made her an adulteress as well. As for Komarovsky, one can argue both ways. The viewer sees him as a villain, an amoral pedophile, a manipulator, a cynic who offers his ex-paramour to Yuri, and a man who finally plans to steal his ex-lover from her present one. Rod Steiger, who played him, sees him as a man who likes to sleep with many women—not a crime, he claims—but whose passion for Lara drove him to drunkenness, a successful man done in by “instinct.” Despite his intrigues, his amorality, and his ability to adapt, he too is destroyed by a woman’s love. Lean stated more than once that he preferred “flawed” heroes, and that casting a “good man” would be “boring” to the audience. A flawed hero would be more fertile ground to build the action in a movie. Thence, he had problems casting Yuri Zhivago, who, though flawed to some degree, is basically a decent man, especially on the screen as embodied by Sharif. Lean once remarked that in a novel a character, once introduced, is known by what he does or thinks. In a movie, he is constantly present, his expressions, body language, voice, seen and heard by a viewer. This changes the configuration of presenting character in a movie, both for director and actor. In the novel, both Zhivago and Lara are known by their thoughts and actions, while their physical appearances are only sporadically mentioned. Lara’s description as she is first seen by Zhivago at the library at Yuriatin is briefly given, in a few sentences, vivid enough to give an unforgettable impression of her: He saw her almost from behind, her back half turned. She was wearing a light-colored checkered blouse tied with a belt, and was reading eagerly, with self-abandon, as children do, her head slightly inclined towards her right shoulder. Now and then she lapsed into thought, raising her eyes to the ceiling or narrowing them and peering somewhere far ahead of her, and then again, propped on her elbow, her head resting on her hand, in a quick, sweeping movement she penciled some notes in her notebook.34

Zhivago had already fallen in love with her in their earlier meeting at the front, where she had served as nurse, but now, as he sees her again, his love is revived, irresistibly drawing him to her. The encounter has an electric attraction on both sides. The novel, of course, is a lengthy follow-up, for they meet at Lara’s house and exchange political views: Zhivago has turned bitter against the revolution he once admired, while Lara had been studying Marxism, to keep in line with the changing regime. Both are grown-up adults with spouses, and Lara of the book reveals a great deal about Strelnikov and her child. But this meeting will seal their fate. Zhivago’s failure to obtain the object of his love, Lara, and his loss of family could categorize him as a tragic hero. Besides, Lean dealt with Bolt’s definition

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of tragedy, which he articulated more than once. In his introduction, he stated that Pasternak’s hero is not “a man of great stature,” a model needed for a tragic hero. To resolve this dilemma, Bolt made some suggestions: 1. Must make Zhivago a hero. How? He is a passive figure. Lara also must be the equivalent of a heroine. 2. Situation at Varykino, “When everything is closing in on them.” “What they are doing, in a practical sense, is nonsense,” “if not highly irresponsible.” 3. “The only justification is the intensity of their love.” The solution was to show that they are “unusually mature people.” So the audience would believe that this was a Tristan and Iseult (Isolde) situation. Theirs must be a “great, grand passion.” The climax would be the “writing of his poetry.”35 Yuri writes poetry, at night, in candlelight, wearing an overcoat and earmuffs, desperate and exhilarated at the same time. His grand passion has inspired his poetry. In a sense, this poetry justifies his existence and relieves his suffering. This is the immortal part of him—the poems are titled “Lara”—therefore, she lives on in the memory of men. Since Zhivago was already a mature artist, this was not the work of an impulsive youth, but the structured composition of a seasoned poet. The many pages neatly arranged at the table show that he had thought things out, that the subject matter had already taken hold of his imagination, and that he was ready to express it. Though the audience neither hears nor sees (reads) the poems, it has visualized the images: the howling of the wolves in the distance—which wakes Lara who hears the howling in terror—and the frozen environment, the little candle at the table illuminating their faces; these things make the audience feel the depth of their bond. This is a quiet intensity, and a prelude to the separation. For Yuri must know that this writing signals also the beginning of the end—and his inner self—his intense feeling—bursts out on the page; the viewer clearly sees that, and subliminally understands the plight of the lovers. Hopeless hope; desperate flight of one; separation forever; one moment of release of the tension is the writing. All this is done in an unsentimental fashion, for not a word is said by Yuri when he writes—not a word to her, not a tear is shed. Only his facial expressions—a determined look, a lock of hair as always curving over his forehead—can render his inner world. His is a decisive action. The tears only come to his eyes when he runs at the window, breaking the glass to see the sled disappear in the horizon.

Politics in Doctor Zhivago Politics in a Lean epic—or for that matter in any Lean film—is always a matter of understatement. Lean’s films are regarded as either artistic achievements (mostly his early endeavors) or big Hollywood spectacles aimed at entertainment.

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Critiques of his works have focused on Lean’s techniques, his narratives, and his compelling storytelling. No wonder some critics have called him a “novelistic filmmaker.”36 Lean seems to have avoided politics, controversial topics, science fiction, and gratuitous violence—which he abhorred. Yet all his epics contain cultural clashes, massive confrontations, and conflicts that contain political turmoil, such as revolutions, repression, racial friction, and, above all, criticism of imperial powers. The Bridge on the River Kwai features antagonisms not only of enemies, but of Eastern and Western cultures. Saito has contempt for the British, and Nicholson is an embodiment of British arrogance displayed in all his actions. Lawrence describes the Arab Revolt, with both overt and metaphorical political statements. Ryan’s Daughter is a love story but with a parallel action line of the Irish rebellion of 1916. And A Passage to India relates, in no uncertain terms, British imperial repression and caustic, if not bitter, Indian reactions (the trial of Aziz is proof of that). As for Doctor Zhivago, most critics, commentators, and the audiences (and that does not discount the MGM promoters) regarded Zhivago as a love story, set in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917. During the time it was released, however, many viewers saw Doctor Zhivago, at least in part, as a condemnation of a repressive regime that threatened the world with annihilation. When Pasternak’s book came out, and he was denied a trip to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize, these feelings of hostility to the regime reached their highest point. Lean and Bolt were very much aware of such feelings and chose to make, by their own admission, a glossy Hollywood movie, so their approach seemed wavering and free of political overstatements. On this point, their thematic development might seem evasive or ambiguous, and this attitude may be partly owing to Pasternak’s ambivalence on the subject. Initially, Pasternak sympathized with the revolution, but his attitude changed over the years. In his introduction to the new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Richard Pevear writes: Pasternak always had a double view of the revolution. He saw it, on the one hand, as a justified expression of the need of the people, and, on the other, as a program imposed by “professional revolutionaries” that was leading to deadly uniformity and mediocrity. His doubts began as early as 1918 and increased as time went on.37

This duality is reflected in the observations of his hero, who becomes aware of the social upheaval and the consequent changes confronting his society soon upon his return to Moscow from the front. This is how Pasternak describes Yuri Andreevich’s thoughts: In the course of the next few days it became clear how alone he was. He did not blame anyone for that. Evidently he himself had wanted it and achieved it. His friends had suddenly become dull and colorless.

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C HA P TER 3 None of them had held on to his own world, his own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. Apparently he had overestimated them earlier. As long as the order of things had allowed the well-to-do to be whimsical and eccentric at the expense of the deprived, how easy it had been to mistake for a real face and originality that whimsicality and the right to idleness which the minority enjoyed while the majority suffered!38

Pasternak was never himself involved politically, but he belonged to the Soviet Writer’s Union, which was established in 193239 with the aim of revitalizing the “stagnation” of literature, which was caused by “rivalries between the various literary factions.”40 This was in the aftermath of Lenin’s death, which had occurred in 1924 and which had provoked the political struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, ending with the prevalence of Stalin and the exile of Trotsky in 1929. Following the purges in 1937, Pasternak chose to remain in Russia, though his parents had immigrated to Germany (their Jewish origin forced them to escape to Britain, after Hitler had taken over in 1933). Pasternak had hoped that his writings—he had published several books in poetry and prose and had translated the works of Shakespeare (Hamlet being one of them) for the Constantin Stanislavski Moscow Theater41—might have influenced the Communist regime to soften its attitude toward the arts, but as the years went on his hopes were almost completely crushed, though he never openly rebelled. In the postwar years, he was ready to undertake the writing of a great epic novel in the tradition of the great literary novels of the nineteenth century, but the work was not finished until the end of the Stalinist era, which occurred with the death of Stalin in 1953. It took him ten years (1946–1956) to write it, but when it was finished, he was not permitted to publish it in the Soviet Union, his book being considered critical of the regime. But the manuscript was smuggled out of Russia in 1956 and was published by an Italian publisher,42 and subsequently translated into several languages, quickly becoming an international best seller. It was regarded as not only a great story but a provocation against the Soviet regime, and when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958, he was initially elated by this honor, yet he refused to go to Sweden to accept the prize, under pressure by the Soviets that if he did so he would not be permitted to return to Russia. Though Pasternak thought his book apolitical and intended it as a love story, politics is embedded in it, for it exposes the amorality of the Soviet state, the mechanization of the Russian society, and the loss of freedom of expression under a totalitarian regime. At least the West gave it such a reception, and Pasternak, who died in 1960, was regarded as a giant that single-handedly stood up against the greatest and most threatening totalitarian regime following the Second World War. Today, the movie can be viewed from three historical perspectives: the time the story takes place, spanning about five decades of the novel, from about 1905, the funeral of Yuri’s mother, to the 1950s, when Yevgrav interviews Tonya II; the

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time the movie was made (1965); and today (2011), after the book was reprinted in a new translation (2010) by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, while a new Blu-ray edition of Lean’s film came out with extra materials43 relevant to its present status. Both the new translation (the book had been translated several times before in English) and the new forty-fifth anniversary DVD and Blu-ray editions show renewed interest in Doctor Zhivago, book and film. Gene Phillips reports that the film has received more recognition in recent years, citing that, along with Gone with the Wind, Doctor Zhivago was cited as among the ten best love stories of all time by the American Film Institute.44 Lean’s reputation has received a boost from both viewers and a new generation of filmmakers,45 who continue to value and reappraise Lean film art. Lean always enjoyed the support of filmmakers more so than of the critics, and a group of his contemporaries, such as Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, John Ford, and others gave him support. A later generation, which included Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and John Milius, also honored him in a variety of ways, and some filmmakers today—Gary Ross, Nicholas Mayer, Mikael Solomon, among others46—also see him as an influential director whose work has endured the test of time. None of the above critics and commentators, however, considers Lean a political filmmaker. That was possibly because Lean himself focused primarily on the specifics of his film art: a good script, photographing techniques, music, imagery, performances, and, above all, the editing of his works, ensuring clarity of narrative. This seems like art for art’s sake—and one could categorize it as such. But it is impossible to ignore that the theme building was also a strong component of many of his movies, especially the epics. He was not as demonstrative of his themes as Stanley Kubrick and Stanley Kramer—and some others of his time—were, but all his epics (and some of his previous works) show, among other things, a tendency to criticize imperial or totalitarian power. All five epics showed that imperialism, in one form or other, was one of his targets. Kwai highlights the arrogance of a British officer who built a bridge for his enemies, the Japanese, to show the moral and technical superiority of the British, compared to the ineptness of their Eastern counterparts. Lawrence shows a man who leads the Arab tribes to victory, after condescendingly calling them “greedy, barbarous and cruel”; but also a man who is racked by guilt when he thinks he had betrayed them. Ryan’s Daughter describes a love story in the frame of the Irish revolution, a captured and wounded Tim O’Leary’s “Get out of my country!” to his captor Major Doryan being perhaps the most dramatic moment in the epic; and in A Passage to India we hear Mahmoud Ali saying to Fielding, “How is England justified in holding India?” Doctor Zhivago, admittedly a love story (perhaps the reason why most audiences went to see it), is also an indictment of a totalitarian power that, by the mid-twentieth century, kept a large part of the world under sway, suppressing rebellions from native peoples, as in the case of uprisings in Hungary in 1956

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and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and threatening the West with nuclear war. As said, while Lean stayed away from overt statements, in Zhivago he shows his hero as a man pondering the pros and cons of the revolution, or at least reacting to the falsities of some of its representatives with abhorrence. The political nodes in Zhivago may be sporadic, but they are unmistakable. Early on, we see Antipov distributing leaflets about the coming demonstration, dismissing the objections of Lara, who finds his action dangerous, and telling her that “the people want the revolution” although they don’t know it yet. He also states that he dislikes the Bolsheviks because “they do not know right from wrong.” Komarovsky tells Yuri, while the latter is bandaging his wound, that the Bolsheviks “may win.” Such statements reveal the oncoming social unrest that shook Russia early in the twentieth century, while the main characters in the story are crucially affected in one way or other. Komarovsky, amoral but able to adjust to a changing political climate, survives. Lara remains apolitical (though Pasternak shows her studying Marxism at the library in Yuriatin), but her fate is largely determined by her husband’s decision to enlist, abandoning his family and teaching post. When Yuri returns to Moscow after his service at the front, he finds his house expropriated by the commissariat and distributed to “thirteen” families, a “more just” arrangement, he admits. At the same time, as he is obviously revolted by the cover-up of typhus and starvation in the city and he insists that these truths be admitted, he is told that “his attitude is noticed.” Yevgrav’s appearance midway through the action saves his half brother and his family from destruction, but it also signals the suppression of free speech in writing, and that Yuri’s poetry will spell his doom (“He did not know he had a noose around his neck,” we hear Yevgrav’s voice in his commentary). And the train sequence, as the Zhivago/Gromeko family travels east, reveals the devastation the revolution and civil strife have brought to innocent, displaced persons. One incident cannot escape the viewer’s notice: in a unique brief appearance, Klaus Kinski, unnamed in the film,47 one of those conscripted for “forced labor,” is seen banging his chains, and shouting to those around him, “I am the only free man here. The rest of you are cattle!” Omar Sharif recalls that Kinski’s presence remains imprinted in his mind.48 Lean shows in this scene a proud man subdued by brutal force but still untamed by his captors, though destined for servitude in a gulag. On the whole, though, defiance to authority was not one of Zhivago’s strong points, and that perhaps deprives him of the title of a fighting hero, so common in epics. But on one or two occasions, he is capable of emerging from his passivity, which is largely shown in reaction shots as he is looking at an atrocity with eyes shining with indignation and suppressed anger. On occasion, he becomes more assertive of his anger, giving vent to it with sharply phrased words, despite dangers lurking in this oppressive environment. Omar Sharif recalls that Lean commended his performance at the train meeting with Strelnikov, saying it was “very intelligent,” a compliment not often given by him to actors. In this scene, Zhivago confronts Strelnikov (whose reputation for burning hostile villages has

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preceded him), immediately recognizes who he is, and defiantly responds to him that he has burned the wrong village and that killing and destroying in the name of ideology are still crimes. His bold words even spark a guilt-revealing grimace (or one of perhaps jealousy) from Strelnikov, who watches through the train window as Zhivago goes free to rejoin his family. This incident shows—as Pasternak’s novel does—that passive resistance may be just as worthy and heroic an act as shooting down a hated villain. In fact, the ambiguities established in this scene are as worthy of attention as the straightforward dialogue: the harsh ideologue, formerly the compassionate, idealistic Pasha, feels something of the compunctions of committing crime for the sake of an idea, while Zhivago is seen aroused in righteous indignation and stimulated to defiance—though such behavior might endanger him and his family. In a larger sense, this attitude reemerges in Yuri when he is captured returning from Yuriatin and forced to serve as a medical man with the Red partisans. One of the scenes during this time shows him witnessing the massacre of young school cadets of a military academy cut down mercilessly by machine-gun fire—among the blooming yellow ripening wheat—a scene whose message is reinforced by the astonishing imagery. While attending to one of the dying youths, Zhivago confronts Razin, who callously comments that deaths don’t matter in the revolution—he himself has lost his entire family. In fact, Zhivago’s life, shown from beginning to end, is an indictment of cruelty, of man’s inhumanity to man. In this, the message that comes from observing his actions closely—which both the novel and film do—is consistent with what happens to almost every character who surrounds his life: Lara is horrified by the lovers’ ill fate when she says that this is a horrible time to live in; Zhivago’s wife endures the indignities of their fate uncomplainingly; Zhivago’s uncle Alexander Gromeko is appalled by the tsar’s and his family’s execution; while two other secondary but strong characters, Strelnikov and Komarovsky, show two different approaches to the adversity of violent change. Strelnikov kills himself after fighting for a revolution he believed would be a more just regime for his country (and humanity), while Komarovsky, an amoral manipulator, survives by “adjusting” to change. Rod Steiger, who played him, states (in a commentary) that the man is “like a cat,” always landing on his feet. The political message of Doctor Zhivago may be that political stress, perhaps revolution itself, may determine the fate of innocent humans who are by nature pacifist and do not necessarily take up sword (or machine gun) to right wrongs. It is not a politically weak message to say that change can be obtained by peaceful means—being a doctor and a poet, or a nurse, or housewife—by dignity and moral rectitude, rather than by indiscriminate slaughter. The Red rebels that abduct Zhivago state that, when the revolution prevails, all men will be judged politically, not by what they are or do in their practical lives. That attitude dehumanizes humanity; it is the credo of dictatorships, whether by totalitarian states or individual dictators, whose emergence dotted the history of the twentieth century and plunged the world into chaos and unspeakable acts of inhumanity. Lean does have a political statement to make: peace on earth!

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Notes 1. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 253. 2. Chronologically: The Bridge of the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1966), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), A Passage to India (1984). 3. Robert Bolt for screenplay, Freddie Young for photography, John Box for special effects/art direction, Maurice Jarre for music score, Norman Savage for film editing. 4. See Gene D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 354–56. 5. A famous Russian singer at the time. 6. A German-Austrian poet. 7. The film shows Zhivago walking from the train station reading plaudits of his poetry in a newspaper young Tonya had brought from Paris, telling her fiancé he was leading the list of Russian poets. 8. Kathleen Kennedy, producer of Seabiscuit, in “A Celebration,” Blu-ray edition, 2010. 9. Reproduced in their entirety in Sandra Lean’s David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001), 26–27. 10. All the quotations from Bolt’s notes are from the source mentioned in the previous footnote. 11. Two hundred minutes in the restored film in the 2001 DVD version and the Blu-ray edition of 2010. 12. The date is uncertain, but some commentators assume it was in the 1950s, during the post-Stalinist thaw. 13. An incident not in Pasternak’s novel. 14. The actual phrase, not “It is noted,” as Gene Phillips writes, but “It is noticed.” Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 322. 15. Both movies directed by John Schlesinger. 16. Erroneously numbered as #7 in the text. 17. One of the commentators in the special features segment “A Celebration,” DVD and Blu-ray editions (2010). Gary Ross, Stephen Silverman, and Nicholas Meyer all make comments on color grading. 18. Commentary in special features, 2006 DVD edition. 19. According to Omar Sharif, in his commentary in the 2010 DVD and Blu-ray editions. 20. Letter in Sandra Lean, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait, 26–27. 21. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biograpy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 541. 22. Commentary in 2010 DVD disc 2. 23. Commentary in 2010 DVD disc 2. 24. See Brownlow, David Lean, 506–7. 25. Stephen M. Silverman, a Lean biographer, makes that statement in the 2010 Bluray edition (disc 1), “Doctor Zhivago: A Celebration.”

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26. As said earlier, Yevgrav appeared when Yuri was sick with typhus, an event omitted from the film. 27. Brownlow, David Lean, 541. 28. Brownlow, David Lean, 514–15. 29. Brownlow, David Lean, 515. 30. In his commentary to the film (2001, 2010 DVD and Blu-ray editions), Sharif related that he had deep doubts as to his effectiveness as a hero, but that Lean came over to his hotel in the middle of the night to reassure him about the need of underplaying his role, that the finished film would show him as the most remembered person in the story. Lean’s answer to him is in the same commentary. 31. The story of his seduction of Lara is told by her to Yuri during their second meeting at Yuriatin. 32. Commentary in 2000 and 2010 DVD and Blu-ray editions. 33. Lean leaves the audience to guess whether this was actually Lara (it was the actress herself) or a woman closely resembling her. 34. Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Doctor Zhivago, 262. 35. Brownlow, David Lean, 507. 36. Hugh Hudson, a filmmaker, does use this expression in his commentary in the DVD running commentary track of Ryan’s Daughter, 2006. 37. Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Doctor Zhivago, xvi. 38. Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Doctor Zhivago, 154. For convenience, the three paragraphs of the above were merged into one. 39. Maxim Gorky, its first president, resigned and left Russia after the Soviet Union came to power. 40. Pasternak, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Doctor Zhivago, xvi. 41. See “Pasternak,” in special features, 2000 and 2010 DVD and Blu-ray editions. 42. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli of Milan, Brownlow, David Lean, 498. 43. Comments by a new generation of various filmmakers, who see Lean’s work in a new light. 44. Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 360. 45. See the following footnote. 46. In the special features section of the 2010 DVD and Blu-ray editions (W/B), several contemporary producers/directors/writers, such as Nicholas Mayer, Gary Ross, Mikael Solomon, Martin Campbell, and Taylor Hackford, have high praise for Doctor Zhivago, showing a renewed interest in Lean and his epics. 47. In the novel Kostoyed Amoursky, arrested and headed for forced labor because of his counterrevolutionary views. 48. “The only thing I remember,” says Sharif, is how hot it was while filming this scene and the performance of Klaus Kinski. 2010 DVD commentary by Omar Sharif and Sandra Lean.

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Ryan’s Daughter Crew Director: Screenplay: Producer: Cinematography: Editor: Music Score: Production Design: Art Direction: Costumes: Sound: Assistant Directors: Second Unit Directors: Property Master:

David Lean Robert Bolt Anthony Havelock-Allen/MGM Freddie Young Norman Savage Maurice Jarre Stephen Grimes Roy Walker Jocelyn Richards John Bramall Pedro Vidal, Michael Stevenson Roy Stevens, Charles Frend Eddie Fowlie

Cast Charles Shaughnessy: Rosy Ryan/Shaughnessy: Major Randolph Doryan: Father Hugh Collins: Michael: Thomas Ryan: Tim O’Leary: McCardle: Mrs. McCardle: Maureen Cassidy: Corporal: Driver: Paddy: Captain Smith: Private: Maureen’s Boyfriend: Constable O’Conner: Bernard:

Robert Mitchum Sarah Miles Christopher Jones Trevor Howard John Mills Leo McKern Barry Foster Archie O’Sullivan Marie Kean Evin Crowley Barry Jackson Douglas Sheldon Philip O’Flynn Gerald Sim Des Keogh Donald Neligan Brian O’Higgins Niall O’Brien

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CHAPTER 4

Ryan’s Daughter (1970)

General Background Of all the Lean epics, Ryan’s Daughter was given the lowest marks by critics, won fewer Oscars (only two)1 than the previous three, and was the least popular by box office standards, although it ran for two years in London and eventually made a profit.2 Its poor critical reception in general, especially by the National Society of Film Critics at the Algonquin Hotel a few days after its premiere in 1970,3 was so bitterly disappointing to Lean (and to his collaborators) that he stayed away from trying another venture for a long time and even thought of quitting making films altogether.4 Though an opportunity offered itself for a remake of The Mutiny on the Bounty in the South Pacific, based on Richard Hough’s novel, Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian (1972),5 this project never got under way, mostly frustrated by John Box’s refusal to build sets for several native villages in Tahiti, to him an unattainable task. Lean also contemplated making a biography of Gandhi, but this project was undertaken by Richard Attenborough, and his Gandhi (1982) received several Oscars and many international awards. Though Ryan’s Daughter garnered sporadic praise for individual performances6—Sarah Miles and Trevor Howard were nominated for Oscars, while John Mills and Freddie Young won, the first for a supporting role and the second for cinematography—the poor critical reception of the film had a shattering effect on Lean, and it took nearly fourteen years of indecision and wrecked projects before he attempted what turned out to be his last film, A Passage to India, which partially restored his marred reputation with both public and critics. Today Ryan’s Daughter can be seen in a different light, partly because of what seems a revival of interest in Lean films, as new publications have come to light,7 and also thanks8 to video editions of the movie that helped the public reacquaint 87

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itself with it, and particularly the 2006 DVD two-disc, thirty-fifth-anniversary reissue in a new digital transfer from the restored sixty-five-millimeter original print, which contains a running commentary by surviving members of the cast and crew. The second disc also contains comments by directors and film historians, who express their views in the “Making of Ryan’s Daughter” feature,9 providing an opportunity for younger viewers to reassess the classic Lean movie and reach their own conclusions about its success or failure. Of particular interest is the participation of Richard Schickel,10 who speaks out about the Algonquin meeting and his role in it, asserting11 that he merely passed on the general opinion of those critics present in that meeting to Lean, who left the room amid Pauline Kael’s jeers. Schickel, sounding defensive on the DVD track, refuses to take any responsibility (“take a fall,” as he puts it) for Lean’s absence from filmmaking for fourteen years, attributing it to other factors, such as his failure with the Mutiny project during his hiatus at Bora Bora. Schickel finds it quite unfair that Lean’s “contumely” should be directed at him exclusively, rather than to the entire Algonquin group, whose hostile comments were much more virulent than his.12 The commentators on this DVD edition include Sarah Miles, Eddie Fowlie, Sandra Lean, Petrine Day Mitchum, and Lean biographer Stephen M. Silverman, most offering laudatory remarks.13 But the details that emerge from these reminiscences should prove useful to those seeking to gauge the critical dispute or to gather source materials about this lengthy production. Regardless of what one thinks of the rejection of this film by critics in 1970, or others since,14 Ryan’s Daughter constitutes a set piece on the canvas painted by the five Lean epics, adding a unique and irreplaceable part to it. If one is to reevaluate Lean’s epics and their standing today, Ryan’s Daughter is a film that must be seen for its own merits as well as a flowing continuation of his previous epics and his work as a whole. Each of his epics tends to revisit certain earlier themes, broadening and expanding on topics already found elsewhere. For instance, it is readily apparent to a viewer that the conflicts between East and West are built into the Lean canon from the start of the epic cycle, and at least three of his epics15 deal with that subject. That some of these conflicts have resurfaced today is a reason to take a new look at the Lean epics, which can offer insights as to the origin of these conflicts, provided one makes allowances for changes in time and specific settings. The power struggles of the British Empire early in the twentieth century, for instance, to hold on to its colonial territories or rearrange them for its convenience—as did other European colonial powers—were replaced by the current fight against terrorism or the shake-off of brutal regimes, taking place on approximately the same geographical regions described in some of the Lean epics. A case in point is Lawrence of Arabia, and to a lesser extent The Bridge on the River Kwai and A Passage to India, all offering examples of cultural rifts and political maneuverings between East and West, some continuing to this day. Ryan’s Daughter, a love story, can also be seen in a similar

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light, for, though set in Ireland, where the English had a foothold that lasted centuries, it deals in its broad outlines with the perils of repression of a people struggling for their freedom. Almost all the Lean epics feature clashes between individuals set in broader contexts, but often these are dismissed as decorative canvases for a small story. Ryan’s Daughter was first conceived as a film “of the little gem variety,” as per Lean’s comment,16 but it grew into epic size as soon as Lean saw the west coast of Ireland and decided to set the action in 1916, during the time of the Irish Troubles. Though this was mostly seen as a structural contrivance at the time of its release, today many viewers have found in it a tale of adultery and passion that dovetails smoothly with the Irish revolt and the story of betrayal, despite earlier critical assertions to the contrary.17

Plot Synopsis Ryan’s Daughter tells the story of Rosy Ryan, a young woman married to the local schoolteacher, Charles Shaughnessy, whose failure to satisfy her sexually leads her to an affair with a British officer of the local guard. Their story is set against the turmoil of the Irish revolution early in the twentieth century, when Irish rebels, the Irish Republican Brotherhood,18 led by Tim O’Leary, a real figure, tried to enlist help from the local villagers in order to import weapons to help their cause. Their scheme goes awry when Rosy’s father, Thomas Ryan, owner of the local pub and a paid informer of the British, betrays O’Leary and his companions, who are captured by the British. The two stories develop along parallel lines. Randolph Doryan, a decorated war hero just back from the French front, arrives to take charge of the military outpost in that remote village, peaceful on the surface but suspected of harboring Irish rebels who will use it as a rendezvous point to smuggle in weapons floating on rafts dropped from a cargo ship by their German allies. Doryan soon meets and has a torrid affair with Rosy, which soon becomes the subject of village gossip, especially among the groups of local women headed by the local food-store owner, Mrs. McCardle. Charles suspects the goings-on between the handsome officer and his wife almost from the start, but he withholds his rancor, thinking that the passion of the young lovers will burn itself out and he can reclaim his wife. Meanwhile, Tim O’Leary and his comrades prepare for a battle with the British forces in Northern Ireland on an unspecified date in the near future.19 When packages are dropped by a cargo ship during a windy and stormy night, O’Leary and his coconspirators enlist the help of Ryan to recruit twelve ablebodied men to help the group to get the materiel ashore. When he is ordered to cut the telephone line by O’Leary, Ryan does so but not before informing the local British guard of O’Leary’s operation. The village population in its entirety,

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with the exception of Rosy and Charles, help O’Leary and his men salvage enough ammunition and weapons washed on the rocky beaches to fill their lorry, but when they try to escape, they are confronted by Doryan and his armed guards. When O’Leary attempts to flee, he is shot in the leg by Doryan and the revolutionary group is taken away to be hanged. The enraged villagers turn on Rosy, for they think that she is the one who betrayed O’Leary to her lover. As she and her husband are discussing the terms of their separation, the village mob storms their home and forces her out, and she is stripped of her clothes and her hair shorn. The priest arrives to disperse the crowd, while Ryan, the real culprit, runs away in shame, not revealing his betrayal even for the sake of his daughter. Doryan commits suicide, and Charles and Rosy leave the village for Dublin, passing through the village street amid the jeers and cries of “Informer!” by the locals. When the bus arrives, the priest, knowing they intend to separate, gives them an address in Dublin, of a good woman who rents rooms, assuring them they could not find better or cheaper accommodations. Rosy takes it, giving it to Charles. Father Hugh stops Charles as he is about to go in, telling him he knows they intend to part, but that “he doubts it.” “And that doubt is my parting gift to you,” he concludes his farewell. He and Michael turn toward the village as the bus gradually disappears in the distance.

The Bovary Connection The idea for Ryan’s Daughter was suggested to Lean by Robert Bolt, his collaborator and screenwriter for Lawrence and Zhivago, who proposed making a film based on Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s novel, published in 1856. Lean, initially not enthusiastic about the project, kept the basis of the idea in mind, and as his correspondence on the subject with Bolt grew, he thought of the movie as a story of love cast against a larger conflict, possibly political in nature. Already having three enormously popular epics under his belt, Lean, by now an exile from England, had become a world traveler and shooting on location and framing his stories in large canvases had become his modus operandi. But for reasons not entirely clear, he did not want to shoot this film in France, and he thought of alternatives such as India, Sicily, and Sardinia,20 finally settling on Ireland, placing the action around 1916, when the Irish Easter rebellion was to become the framework for the love story. Bolt pressed on with the project, sending Lean a treatment incorporating details about the characters and plot that eventually became the structural framework for Ryan’s Daughter. Bolt’s script repeats Flaubert’s pattern to a certain extent but the endings differ: in Bovary, a young woman, dreaming of a better life than offered in the stifling provincial town, married to a man who lacks the qualities she had dreamed of,

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embarks on a love affair that leads to her suicide, the death of her husband, and the total destruction of her family. Up to a point, the Bovary storyline was followed almost literally by Bolt/Lean, but there were also significant divergences. Madam Bovary, told almost entirely from Emma’s point of view, was a linear narrative, with only a few major plot complications that led to a single but powerful conclusion, while Ryan’s Daughter had to intercut in order to accommodate the story of O’Leary and his accomplices. Thus, a thin storyline cast against the vast canvas of the western Ireland landscape was diluted beyond the endurance of some viewers who found it toilsome to sit at a three-hour-plus movie, with an intermission, before learning what happened to Charles and Rosy.21 Comparisons with the Bovary novel did not help; neither did memories of the tersely told Brief Encounter, which still held the attention of both viewers and critics, to Lean’s occasional discomfort when confronted by suggestions that he had lost the ability to make short, compelling narratives.22 In a sense Ryan’s Daughter had two predecessors, both of which worked against it: one was Lean’s own movie on the same subject or a similar one, adultery (a subject of some of his earlier movies);23 the other, a revered novel, a masterpiece of French literature. Unavoidable comparisons with these may have had an effect in diminishing the reputation of the epic movie—which some saw as a less engaging replication of both. But despite the affinities with these previous works—which are real enough— Ryan’s Daughter still strikes an independent course. Since Lean and Bolt were never in complete agreement (“They fought like cats and dogs,” says Sarah Miles in her commentary)24 as to the structure of the story—not to mention every line in the dialogue and every shot (they wrote down to the last everything that was said or shown in the script)—and since the idea of filming in Ireland was Lean’s, the comparison with Bovary may offer an insight into the differences between the collaborators, as well as those between Flaubert’s storyline—because after all this is what prompted the story to take its formal structure—and the Lean/Bolt plot. After Bolt and Lean had fleshed out the idea on a broad basis and the question of filming in Ireland had been settled, the main lines of the Bovary story were retained, at least initially, and even the first names of the two male protagonists—Charles for both husbands and Randolph/Rudolphe for the lovers—were identical. But despite that and obvious similarities between Flaubert’s novel and the Lean/Bolt film version of it, there are significant departures both in the thematic and character development of the two tales. Bolt himself intended to follow the Bovary story almost verbatim, and some critics claim that he did.25 Both similarities and differences must be put on the table in order to show the thematic complications that affect the structure of the film story. While Ryan’s Daughter was conceived as a story of marital betrayal during times of political turbulence with tragic consequences, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, abstaining entirely from politics, had been conceived as a virulent anti-Romantic tract launched against the excesses of nineteenth-century

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Romanticism, which officially ended (at least in English literature) with the death of Walter Scott in 1832. However, the Romantic movement remained potent long after that date,26 influencing social mores, fashion, behavior, and all the arts in general, including music and painting. Emma Bovary is the ironic portrait of a married woman fantasizing about an exotic lover similar to the heroes in cheap novels she had read while being brought up in a nunnery. To Flaubert, fantasizing, rightly or wrongly, is a form of illness that afflicts the female psyche (not that men are free from it—but in a different way). And the flames that fan fantasy are the unbridled tales told in tawdry novels, aimed at public consumption. The novel, as we know from Henry James,27 did not enjoy a good reputation in the nineteenth century—at least the popular brand known in America as the “dime novel.” The romantic novel especially was a means, as Flaubert understood it, of inflaming female fantasies with tales of lovers serenading ladies in lagoons and damsels in distress being swept away by knights on dark horses at night. To some degree, Rosy is a copy of Emma, for she is first seen “mooning” about the beaches reading a tawdry romance, The King’s Mistress, for which she is reproached by Father Collins, who perceives danger in those daydreaming walks of hers. As her marriage flounders, Father Collins sees her on the beach looking distraught and again warns her: “Don’t nurse your wishes, Rosy! You can’t help having them, but do not nurse them! Otherwise, you’ll get what you wished for.” Though the time of Ryan’s Daughter is early twentieth century, when late Victorianism still carried Romantic traits, this warning may have sounded outdated in 1970, when the movie was made, and not as relevant as during Flaubert’s time. Thus, most of the ironies in Flaubert’s detailed descriptions of his protagonist’s state of mind in the novel are lost in the film. It did not help that Ryan’s Daughter was made at a time when drugs, nudity, and violence had invaded the screen with popular hits like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and The Wild Bunch (1969), which had altered the movie landscape and offered audiences harsher realities in tune with the convulsions of the late sixties. These new audiences did not seem to be sensitized to the yearnings of a postadolescent girl for her former schoolteacher in a remote village in western Ireland. It is not known to what degree Bolt and Lean were aware of these important distinctions or that they indeed cared about the perils of Romanticism, as described by Flaubert, in our time. Yet both Bolt and Lean were romantics in a wider sense. Lean consistently showed heroes—male or female—nurturing grandiose dreams like building a supersonic plane28 or a bridge that would last for six hundred years or performing “miracles,” as Lawrence promises to do in taking Aqaba, while some of his heroines defied social convention by taking lovers, as in Madeleine, thus earning the condemnation of their social milieu. Romantic aspirations form the core of action in some of Lean’s famous works, Brief Encounter, Summertime, and Doctor Zhivago, where women’s love stories with

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their near-tragic endings are deliberately highlighted.29 Lean and Bolt thought Flaubert’s story had elements in it that were “universal”; hence their heroine in Ryan’s Daughter was also a victim of fantasy, at first almost identical to Emma Bovary, a young woman married to a man whom she had imagined as a romantic hero (despite his warning that he wasn’t like the heroes he taught) but who could not satisfy her normal sexual desires after they were married. Here, the lines that Flaubert set forth were followed, as Rosy’s fantasies can be seen as a dangerous social affliction, one that encouraged fancy in the face of reality. Literature, painting, music, the arts of the Romantic period in general had conspired to give humankind a falsified sense of reality. Flaubert blamed Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and other authors of the Romantic era who fanned passionate responses in their readers—and in particular the cheap novels spun in the wake of the Romantic movement. Bolt and Lean localized Rosy’s difficulties in the same vein. Living in a stifling social environment, she roams the beaches, reads cheap novels, and has a crush on her former teacher, who, like her, is a loner and out of place in his environment, and a music lover who plays Beethoven—an interesting choice of composer, for in Beethoven’s time his music was considered dangerous to youth for arousing passions. (Ironically, in the film, Shaughnessy states upon his return from Dublin that Beethoven’s, and all German, music had been banned because of the war against Germany then.) But Flaubert’s attack on Romanticism is given in much broader strokes, described in minute detail in his novel, and it becomes the focus of Emma’s misplaced emotions. A romantic opera for instance, Lucia du Lamermoor, based on a Walter Scott poem, is given, at least partly, as the reason for Emma Bovary’s decision to embark on a second adulterous affair with a city clerk, following a serious illness after her first lover, Rudolphe Boulanger, ditched her. This life of unguarded abandonment to romantic feeling was labeled “Bovarism” by twentieth-century critics—a name meant as a general slur on the romanticism of our days, still in force, which characterizes the attractions and glitter of Hollywood, responsible for perpetuating the image of a romantic male lover, often without scruples. “Bovarism,” however, is a term that connotes more than suppression of sexual drives. It implies a woman’s general dissatisfaction with life, a state of mind that may be responsible for ruinous tendencies, perhaps a sense of entrapment in a provincial environment driving her to escape it by fantasizing, with unforeseen consequences. Such differences extend to the development of character. Flaubert’s heroine completely lacks common sense or moral scruples and is destroyed by making disastrous financial decisions, finally coming to an impasse having failed to pay back her debtors and committing suicide, after which her husband dies of despair and sorrow. (The film Little Children [2006] deals with the Bovary subject.) Though Rosy is first seen as a full-blown case of Bovarism, mooning about the beaches and fantasizing about the schoolteacher as a man of intellect, she

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evolves into an entirely different character from that of Emma. She is quite scrupulous in learning about marital duties—in a scene on the beach where Father Collins explains them—and is a morally conscious woman quite capable of seeing through her own straying actions. Mistaken as to the heroic status of her husband and disenchanted by his lack of sexual ardor, she gives in to passion in a moment of sudden sexual awakening. Although a brazen liar when she invents stories for her distressed husband, she is also perfectly capable of understanding her moral breach and is plagued by guilt, while Emma, utterly contemptuous of her husband, takes the path of destruction consciously and deliberately, inventing the falsity of piano lessons or urging Leon, her second lover, to steal money from his office so that the two can fly off together. Rosy is swept away by passion for the young British officer, but she is capable of fully admitting her error to her distraught husband and, after being humiliated and tortured by the village mob, she goes away with him, though their final reunion remains only a wish by the priest. In the eyes of the viewer, Rosy is seen as a victim, victimizer, and heroine, and her humiliation makes her worthy of forgiveness. She redeems herself by fully admitting her guilt and sees her rejection by Charles as a totally justified act. She even admits that she is not worthy of accepting half his fortune when Charles, in generosity of spirit, offers it to her. Contrite, beaten, and humiliated, followed by a jeering village mob as she exits, Rosy even stops to say good-bye to her father, who had not come to her defense, and for whom she harbors no ill will. Both Emma and Rosy become heroines at the end, but their personas are drawn on divergent images. Also, Charles Shaughnessy is not Charles Bovary. The latter—given convincingly by Jean-Francois Bulmer as a nice man but a dim-witted doctor in the 1990 Claude Chabrol film, Madame Bovary—is described by Flaubert as a foolish (albeit good-hearted) man having no idea what his wife is cooking behind his back. When he fails to perform surgery on a clubfoot, Hyppolyte—on whose image of a “village idiot” John Mills’s Michael is based—Charles loses his wife’s respect, for Emma had imagined that her dull husband, a mediocre doctor, could have won money and fame by performing a successful operation. Shaughnessy is indeed no hero and modestly admits his low self-esteem to Rosy before he marries her. Older, educated, a man of culture, he evidently stands out as an idol to Rosy, but it is he who warns her not to see him as an equal to Beethoven, Byron, or Captain Blood. (“I am a penny mirror,” he warns Rosy, “not the shining sun.”) In contrast to Charles Bovary, Shaughnessy discovers Rose’s infidelity almost right away as he is seen shaking the sand grains from her hat after she has denied she has been to the beach. And although he is on to her deception early, he considers it a passing fancy, and only after he is convinced that their marriage is wrecked does he give up on the hope that “this thing will burn itself out” and decide that the two should separate, making no big fuss, harboring no rancor, and dividing their small assets on an equal basis.

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Charles tells Rosy he is not good enough for her. MGM/Photofest © MGM

Lastly, contrast the two lovers: In Ryan’s Daughter, Doryan’s passion for Rosy was not the result of design, while Flaubert’s Rudolphe Boulanger is an unscrupulous Don Juan, adept in the use of Romantic clichés of the times, cynically seducing Emma during a country fair. Flaubert’s ironic portrait of Rudolphe as a caddish philanderer is intended as a warning of the dangers of Bovarism.

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For that reason, Rudolphe is presented as an unrepentant rake to the very end, drinking beer and offering the crushed Charles his “condolences,” readying himself for new “expeditions” against foolish romantic women. He is entirely unmoved by Emma’s despair and guilt when she pleads for his help, partly being responsible for her suicide—a tragic act lyrically described in Flaubert’s pages. In the Bolt/Lean version of the story, Major Doryan is a wounded, shell-shocked war veteran haunted by his memories of his cowardice in battle, more a victim of a mental disorder than a seducer. In general, the two stories have antithetical aims: Flaubert’s work is a polemic against Romanticism and its perils, while Lean and Bolt, at heart romantics, glamorize Rosy’s idyll as the apex of lovemaking between two people in love—a love still impossible in real life.

Tragic Themes In his contentious collaboration with Bolt, Lean chose to end the story on a more or less positive note, deciding to put Charles and Rosy on a bus to Dublin, where a possible reconciliation could take place. This decision was frustrating to Bolt, who felt that the material at hand, as he had imagined it, had all the makings of “high tragedy.”30 Three flawed people—a sexually impotent husband, a straying wife, and a shell-shocked war veteran scarred from battles in the front (albeit touted as a hero)—were perfect material of a complete breakdown of human relations, provided that the script would be set in the tragic mode from the beginning, Bolt wrote in his (unsent) letter to David Lean.31 His point may have been well taken, especially in view of the fact that the three previous epics by Lean had ended tragically: Nicholson blowing up his own bridge, Lawrence driving away after he had failed to deliver Arabia to the Arabs in the Damascus debacle, and Yuri collapsing of a heart attack after seeing someone looking like Lara walking in the street. Bolt had written the last two of those epics and thought that Ryan’s Daughter also had the potential for tragedy. Bolt, in general, both in his own plays and in the scripts he wrote for Lean, believed in tragedy, expressing views that would have fitted a definition of a Greek play: “Tragedy,” he wrote to Lean when they were considering making a film of Captain Bligh’s story at Bora Bora, “is not pessimism, it is the opposite of pessimism because it shows that even at its worst and most unjust life is worth living.”32 In Ryan’s Daughter, he thought that the first two-thirds of the plot were moving in that direction, up to the moment of Charles’s desperate flight to the beach in his nightshirt, witnessing with his own eyes his wife’s nocturnal tryst with her lover. But Lean chose to use that occasion for Charles to reconsider his earlier decision to wait things out and, upon his return, to announce to his wife that he is going to leave her. That seems like a softer, gentler solution to the drama, one that would morally elevate Charles in the eyes of the viewer. Thus,

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Charles is not truly a tragic character. Overall, he acts as a benign father figure to the two young lovers. He harbors no malice toward them, and he is even in a forgiving mode. After his return from the beach, where he thought things out, he becomes a pillar of strength, despite having to witness, impotently, his wife’s humiliation of him. But he is determined to exit the village and its bigoted villagers with dignity, and he does so escorting his wife—and offering his arm to her when she stumbles walking along the village street, where the villagers peer from behind their window shutters, howling “informer,” as the little group moves away. Thus Charles rises in the estimation of the viewer, especially after Ryan’s encomium of him as Rosy stops to say good-bye to her father: he admits to her that he had thought that she could have done much better when she married him, but now, he tells her, he doesn’t think “they come much better.” Rosy is to transfer that message to Charles from him. This somewhat redeems Ryan, coward that he is, for he can value Charles’s courage in taking a blemished woman along, despite her disloyalty to him. If tragedy touches anyone, it is Ryan, who will have to live with the knowledge of his cowardice and betrayal. These final scenes soften the tragic tone of the story, potentially redeeming human error on all sides. Magnanimously, just before they leave the schoolhouse, Charles tells his wife not to blame herself, for the fault was his: “I should not have married you.” There is some cruelty in that remark but also a saving grace in admitting his mistake, as she has hers. Though mild mannered, Charles is a handsome, imposing man and young girls in his classes could easily have crushes on him. An example is Kathy, a teenage student of his, who follows him around, senses his troubles, and offers him a bunch of flowers when he trots through the village street. Charles stands above the fray in such cases, it seems, but his desire for Rosy had been too strong to be resisted. Knowing better now, he admits it was a mistake to have married a younger woman, a mistake that cost the life of a man and shattered his own and his wife’s life. In the end, though, he proves strong enough and moral enough—and he knows what to do. Overwhelmed by the mob’s vicious attacks, and certain it could not have been she who betrayed O’Leary, he does what a decent man would do—help this dishonored woman whom he still loves, at least until she is out of there. He shows no resentment, admits the mistake was his, and even expresses sympathy for the dead lover. Philosophically, he must have admitted this was a combination of human error and chance that shattered three people’s lives—and he is the only one (along with the priest) who is strong enough to stand up to the villagers. Tragedy has struck, but has not destroyed him. And it is in him the priest plants the seed of hope with his well-chosen parting words, speaking of a separation he had guessed: “I doubt it. And that is my parting gift to you.” Thus, Lean allows room for a potential reconciliation for the two main characters, and it is impossible to know whether the story would have been

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more acceptable to critics or audiences had he followed Bolt’s suggestion (though Bolt did not send the letter, the two were constantly arguing about plot design). One can only speculate about his motives, but at least some suggestions concerning the logical flow of the narrative can be offered here, of necessity paralleling the events in Madame Bovary. As already hinted, there are fundamental differences between Rosy and Emma Bovary. The latter chose to die not because of guilt her adulterous trysts had caused, but because she had reached a financial impasse. Lheureux, her lender, had already sent her notices and agents had arrived to confiscate hers and her husband’s properties. She would have to face a double disgrace, exposure of infidelity and utter financial ruin. By choosing suicide, Emma finally rises as a heroine in the eyes of the reader and she even becomes worthy of admiration and pity. Her death is sad and shattering, and eventually destroys her husband, who dies of a broken heart, and his little girl is sent to work in a cotton mill. How would this or a similar pattern fit Rosy’s story? For one thing, Rosy was not an immoral person in any other sense, and when her husband reveals to her what he knows, she humbly confesses her guilt—“It’s busted, Charles. I busted it.”—and accepts his offer of sharing their few belongings and his request for a separation. Her public disgrace by the village mob and the shearing of her hair are punishments that today might appear monstrous and outdated, but certainly they constitute punishment enough. As for Charles, why would anybody assume that he would, or should, commit suicide, or even die of a broken heart? He walks off in his shirt at night, but instead of jumping off a cliff (which would have made bad cinema), he thinks “about myself mainly,” as he tells Father Collins. In his isolation and despair, he maps a plan of action. The worst that happens to him is to watch his wife impotently while she is being stripped and shorn and disgraced. But his flight to the beach in his nightshirt is one of the master strokes in the story, and the one that Bolt thought ought to lead to a tragic ending. It is a crucial turning point, both for the story itself and for the divergence of the two coauthors of the script. Lean, having the deciding vote, must have seen this differently. For Charles, witnessing his wife’s nocturnal flight in her nightgown to meet her lover on the hills was probably the most painful moment in his life. His flight to the beach smacks of a tragic end. But Charles, at the crossroads to insanity, makes a rational—and the only possible—decision: to separate from Rosy. Until then he had thought, falsely as he had already admitted to her, that “this thing” would burn itself out. Ironically, this was the very same moment Rosy had decided the affair between herself and Doryan was over. The two lovers are never shown discussing such a decision, but Rosy had realized that he was a man devastated by his war wounds and the loss of his wife, and that loving Rosy had been his solace. But she must have seen that her lover was also a man too overwrought by his guilt for wrecking a decent family man’s life, and

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without stating this in that many words, he must have decided to put an end to the affair. Rosy knows that she has lost her ardent lover; that she has committed a sin, warned against by Father Collins; and that she has hurt her husband, the most decent of men. Another irony is that it is Charles, the wronged one, who picks her up, bolsters her morale, and offers her half his fortune as they are about to separate. What happens next may not be the most shattering ending possible, but at least it is a logical outcome in the storyline, and even a touching one. After hearing the explosion, a troubled Rosy, suspecting Doryan’s suicide, darts out of the schoolhouse to see a distraught Michael from whose gestures and facial language she guesses the truth. Lean cuts to the scene of departure, showing Rosy with Charles passing through the village street, Michael and the priest carrying packages accompanying the couple, and Kathleen depositing a bunch of flowers on the sidewalk and called back by a threatening voice inside the house. Rosy’s father is the only stop the departing couple makes, and it is there that the viewer gets a glimpse at his guilty face and awkwardness as his sees the very person he loves leaving in disgrace, caused by his cowardly reticence. Tragic irony is not entirely absent from the ending, but it is not a catastrophe, just a realization by that little group that people’s flaws, including their own, must be accepted if members of a society are to coexist as individuals as well as a whole. The villagers, still feeling righteous about their behavior to an adulteress, and someone they are convinced is a traitor, come out of hiding as they open their doors and whistle jeeringly, shouting, “Informer!” at Rosy and her husband. Their hatred will accompany characters shamed and driven out of their community, but they must have also felt that Charles and Rosy are not without their pride or even defiance. That the two principals have to leave the place of their birth amid “howls of execration” by the jeering crowd adds a tragic note to the story, for they are now outcasts forever. Not one of the villagers will ever know that Rosy was innocent of treason. But Doryan’s suicide evokes “pity and fear,” for it marks his inability to cope with all the burdens he carries—his dead (or estranged) wife, a sense of worthlessness in battle despite his decorations, and a failed love affair that may have ruined the lives of others. Though a silent person—almost matching the handicapped Michael (who speaks a body language so eloquently)—and saying little in the long-drawn-out movie, he is shown as a man grieved and shattered beyond repair, responsible for wrecking a marriage and perhaps quite uneasy when the whole village jeers at him after the capture of Tim O’Leary, who tells him to his face that he is an invader in his country. Doryan is a man impossibly trapped by circumstances—war, his physical handicap, his unacknowledged weakness in battle (while the captain he replaces confesses his), and his inner turmoil that brings him to the ultimate act.

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Structure and Meaning The ironies in the plot underscore another important element in the story: its perfect symmetrical structure. Despite its deliberately slow pace, not a shot is wasted, whether during a storm photographed under hazardous conditions or during Rosy’s endless beach walks or in Charles’s dream sequences or during the village mob scenes. Thus richly photographed, the various strands of the plot are smoothly modulated, gaining certain momentum as they flow to reach an emotionally charged and logical end. Not all of Lean’s five epics have perfectly structured plotlines (not always needed in the epics—most of which have loose structures, mainly because of their length). Lawrence is perfectly plotted in its first part, which ends with Lawrence reaching Cairo to announce his victory in taking Aqaba; after that point, the second part is episodic—almost a different movie. Zhivago follows a rather broken plotline, ending with the collapse of Zhivago in the street, and A Passage to India seems to linger on for twenty minutes after the climactic trial. Only The Bridge on the River Kwai and Ryan’s Daughter are flawlessly (or almost so) plotted. Kwai is sufficiently praised for its powerful ending. Ryan’s Daughter is not, and some of the reasons have already been advanced. In his recent (2006) book, Gene D. Phillips writes: That Ryan’s Daughter falls below the exacting standard set by Lean in his previous epic films is due in the last analysis to Robert Bolt’s script, which failed to create a dramatic line strong enough to support the weight of a film over three hours in length. Ryan’s Daughter really had two subjects: Rosy Ryan’s love affair and the Irish Troubles. Unfortunately, the two subjects are barely on speaking terms with one another in the movie. Whereas the Russian Revolution is a constant presence in Doctor Zhivago, the Easter rebellion hardly ever intrudes on the story of Rosy, beyond provoking the horror of the townsfolk when they discover that she is two-timing her husband with an officer of the British occupation forces.33

While this criticism may contain some merit—the love story of Rosy may be too thin a plotline to support the weight of a three-hour-plus movie—it is not true that the two subjects are not “on speaking terms,” or that that they fail to integrate. In fact, the opposite is true. From the very start, indeed after the opening sequences at the beach, the occupiers’ boots are heard clacking down the village street, as two British soldiers are taunted by Maureen Cassidy and the idle youths gathered outside Constable O’Connor’s office. A scene or two later into the film, Shaughnessy arrives from his Dublin trip; stops at Ryan’s pub, where he is questioned by both Ryan and McCardle about conditions in Dublin; and is found wanting by these two when he fails to bring back

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Rosy and Charles’s wedding, with Michael in foreground. MGM/Photofest © MGM

essential information. In fact, Shaughnessy is perceived as childish—or indifferent to the cause—having spent most of his time with children, as McCardle sardonically remarks. Not long afterward, while the main thread of the story develops with the approaching marriage of Charles and Rosy, a British constable is murdered by O’Leary in cold blood and tossed down a mine shaft. A few moments later, O’Leary and his companion Pat, posing as “tinkers” while scouting the coastline where the weapons are to be dropped, are seen with a lorry to be used to carry explosives. Here the second plot begins with these minor but pivotal events, essential in the development of the second line of the story—just as the escape of Shears in Kwai leaves a gap in that storyline until he returns as a commando with Warden to blow up the bridge. The Irish rebellion strand, thin at first, slowly builds with O’Leary’s reappearance in a leading role during the storm sequence to salvage the weapons and climaxes with his being shot in the leg by Doryan and arrested. The viewer has already developed an interest in O’Leary, who wounded and taken to be hanged, cries out defiantly to Doryan, “Get out of my country!” (At this point we also sympathize with the village crowds, who had helped him salvage the weapons and

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who jeer at Doryan as the latter is driven away with his captives.) The viewer is reminded that the storm sequences also include the treachery of Ryan, without which the powerful tragic ironies of the explosive lynching scene would have been lost or diluted. Indeed, the lynching scene only becomes a plot necessity because of the capture of O’Leary and his companions.

Structure and Character Growth In examining Greek plays and epics, Aristotle stated that a good plot is the first requirement, while character takes second place. More than two thousand years later, in discussing the novel, Henry James stated that the two are inseparable: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”34 In film, these two elements are also inseparable. That is why structure must depend not only on the unity of the main strands of the story but also on the development of each of the characters affecting the action in it. In Ryan’s Daughter, Rosy is the main character, and five men—Charles, Doryan, Michael, Ryan, O’Leary—are all players in the evolution of her fortunes. Two, Charles and Doryan, husband and lover, are the major players and the rest, though in supporting roles, have a direct or indirect impact on her life. Besides Rosy, all five males contribute to the symmetry of Ryan’s Daughter’s structure, for to some extent all affect her fortunes while they themselves undergo growth, each adding a separate strand to the narrative until it achieves an organic whole. One essential trait in a major or minor character, especially in a lengthy epic, is change, for it is change that will affect the plot more than mere plot devices and bring about a resolution. A character must exhibit growth, beginning at a certain point and through interaction with others, sheer drive, and plot twists brought on by chance and circumstance, and must undergo some deep change— for good or ill. Examples frequently cited are Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Scarlett changes from a spoiled prewar southern belle to a harassed war fugitive to a not-so-defenseless damsel in distress (when she shoots a Yankee intruder) to a hard-boiled, rough-hewn businesswoman who does not hesitate to stoop to conniving to gain her ends. Michael Corleone changes from a decorated war hero to a leader/defender of his family in peril to a ruthless, hard-hearted mafioso who exterminates any opposition, including his own brother. Charles Shaughnessy, the main male player in the story, in a much quieter fashion, changes from a sexually impotent, meek schoolteacher who stands by in torpid paralysis while seeing clearly that his wife cheats on him to a man who is capable of weathering the blows life has dealt him and making decisions that show his mettle and dignity. Weak at the beginning, Shaughnessy becomes a tower of strength at the end. As for Rosy, her change,

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too, has something remarkable to it. A dreamer, willful, spoiled by her father’s lavish gifts, stubborn and unmannerly when the priest warns her, she gets what she “wished for” (the priest’s warning) and falls into the trap she has herself laid, wrecking her domestic life and her husband’s peace of mind. Also the victim of a vengeful village mob, she suffers verbal abuse by the likes of Mrs. McCardle (“There are whores and there are whores, but also British officers’ whores”) even before her public humiliation and disgrace, something that would never have happened had she remained loyal to her marital vows. Rosy’s deeper change, however, is her awareness of her guilt and her crushingly felt shame that makes her hang her head when Charles tells her that he knows. That Rosy sees the wreckage that she has wrought on two men—because she is conscious of her lover’s despair—is also a sign of her growth into a more mature human being whose repentance is genuine, and who thinks she deserves neither pity nor sympathy, both of which Charles generously gives. The part she plays could have sunk to sentimentality had it not been for Sarah Miles’s understated performance—given in dejected looks and facial expressions—under the guiding hand of Lean, who abhorred sentimentality. But what makes Rosy rise at the end to the status of a heroine is the false accusation at the lynching scene, which saves her from the condemnation of the viewer. She gains our sympathy because punishment for what she has not done cleanses her, partly at least. The final irony is her forgiveness of her father, as she stops to say good-bye to him at his pub, without knowledge that he is the traitor but also conscious of the fact that he had failed to defend her. Rosy stumbles as she passes by the village houses, a small detail that shows that she now exists on the borderline between sanity and inner collapse. (Public cursing and disgrace do not sit well with human beings who are run out of their communities carrying the burden of shame and guilt with them.) Rosy is well served by her tower-of-strength husband, who offers her his arm, a gesture showing that he has now freed himself from the onus of the cuckolded husband by passing defiantly through the main street, assured by the knowledge that, though his wife cheated on him, she is not a traitoress and he is not the pussyfooting teacher they thought—a scene made more convincing by Mitchum’s massively swaggering trot. Major Doryan is the third major player in the story who also changes, and some space must be given him in that sense. Despite what many consider an uneven performance by Christopher Jones as Randolph Doryan, the actor has screen presence and on the whole is convincing as the tragic hero he embodies. Doryan’s first appearance happens one hour into the movie, following a scene on the beach where Father Collins had issued a warning to Rosy. Doryan is seen coming off the bus, first in a long shot, shown silhouetted against the cloudy sky, a darkly handsome specter beheld by Michael, who happens to be nearby collecting wildflowers in the swamp. The camera closes in, showing Doryan limping toward his

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bag and reaching for a cigarette in a silver cigarette case—a gesture that becomes iconic of his isolation and inner turmoil. A fussy corporal arrives in a few minutes, excusing his delay caused by a blown tire. They pick up Michael, who mutely begs for a ride, Doryan showing his kind nature. They soon arrive at the camp, passing by the schoolhouse, where Doryan notices a woman’s red undergarment blown in the wind, hanging on a rope, a visual node emblematic of things to come. At the camp he is met by Captain Smith (Gerald Sim), who welcomes the hero from the front with an obsequiously voluble appraisal of the duties of the camp’s commander. Militarily, there is nothing to do—“more like police work,” he tells his superior. Ryan, “the publican,” is the informer—one has to slip him a fiver now and then. “There is no local crumpet,” he informs him confidentially, only married women and virgins; so “why not bring the wife?” he asks, seeing the photograph of a “bonnie woman”35 that Jimmy, the corporal, has just placed on the table. Quickly, Smith apologizes for his blunder, as he realizes from Doryan’s sullen look that she is dead. (Whether she is dead or merely estranged, as some critic suggests, is not established.) Smith, who has just received his “embarkation orders,” confesses that he is a coward (“always have been”), that he can’t stand the “shakes,” ironically underscoring Doryan’s mental disorder to be revealed to the viewer a few scenes later. While the garrulous Smith lavishes praise on the decorated hero, Doryan sits sunk in his chair mutely, hardly making an effort to be cordial or communicative. “Sir, you are just about finished!” cries the obliging Smith, offering him a glass of brandy. “Good stuff. Cheap too,” he adds. Whether Jones’s lifeless response is a result of the “method acting” he had studied under Lee Strasberg or poor acting, as some have assumed, is left to the viewer to determine. But whatever the case, Jones’s persona is tellingly established in this scene: a wounded war hero whose inner life has been derailed beyond repair. Out of such an unpromising beginning, the image of Doryan slowly achieves acceptable levels of subtlety as the movie progresses. In the scenes that follow, we see him as an ardent lover, a man capable of heroic action—when he shoots O’Leary—and a man of some taste, as Ryan states, “Ah! You have a large mind, sir!” when Doryan proves a connoisseur of fine horses. Doryan’s portrait is skillfully painted by Bolt and Lean to show him as a truly romantic hero, wounded by a cruel war—“a worldwide suicide pact,” as Bolt describes World War I—but still capable of passionate, though hopeless, love. He is a hero who would have suited the Hemingway era, with its war-scarred heroes (Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises comes to mind), rather than the swinging sixties, when a romantic/tragic hero seemed an anachronism. He is withdrawn, practically mute (resembling Michael, as both limp), exchanging only a few monosyllabic words with anyone around him and saying very little throughout the movie, even in the love scenes. This is something that may be attributed in part to the fact that his voice was dubbed, but his facial expressions and body language reveal his inner

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turmoil. Despite these drawbacks, Jones has a powerful screen presence, a fact Lean acknowledged. Proof of that comes soon, following his introductory scene with Captain Smith, when he is seen limping through the village street (out for his constitutional—“five miles a day”) in a ground-level, wide-angle shot, approaching two village hussies, one of the them the acid-tongued Maureen Cassidy, who tosses a rude remark, “Peg leg!” as he limps by. Doryan turns his head and pins her with a prolonged stare that sends Maureen Cassidy scuttling into the house, shutting the door behind her. A more powerful scene follows, when he enters Ryan’s pub, where Rosy happens to be minding the store and sees the handsome figure with some astonishment enter and only murmur, “Whiskey,” when she asks him what he wants. He seems distracted, absent from his environment, obviously traumatized by Maureen’s rude remark. In a moment things get worse, as an insensible Michael starts pounding his shoe against the wall, making a racket that sends Doryan under a table covering his ears, as a flashback cuts into a war scene where he crawls inside a trench on his knees while shells burst outside. The irony is that he provides an example of the “shakes” that Smith was describing to him during his welcome session. The hero is crippled not only physically, but also mentally.

Rosy and Randolph prepare to make love in the woods. MGM/Photofest © MGM

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An unexpected consequence is that Rosy, who locks the doors when Michael runs out terrified, goes near him and touches his head, obviously to calm the troubled young man. But as he looks up at her, and their eyes meet in wordless yearning, they both begin to kiss as if a repressed inner force inside both suddenly explodes, transforming Doryan from a war-wounded wreck to a blazing lover. Only a few words are exchanged between them, enough for Doryan to know who she is and where she lives. That same night, in a spectral shot silhouetting him against the sky, he is seen limping downhill to the schoolhouse, where Rosy has left her husband inside grading student papers and exchanges a few words with him, telling him where and when to meet. In the lushly photographed forest scene where the two make love for the first time—a scene dismissed by some critics as too romantic—Jones retains the mask of an impenetrable affliction, his moves being in tune with a Byronic melancholia of yesteryear. “Corny, corny, if you like . . .” comments Sarah Miles, “but I’d much rather have them make love out there in nature than grinding it out on a bloody bed.”36 Doryan gains substance as a lover, albeit a fragile one, though their meetings in the second part of the movie are hinted at or dreamed about by Charles rather than shown explicitly. Aside from the forest scene, the lovers are never seen again talking to each other or making love. While Doryan has a chance to show why he was a war hero by taking a shot that brings down O’Leary, Rosy patently lies to Charles and even defies Father Collins when he reprimands her for her shameless trysts (“You are bold as brass!”). Doryan makes no appearance other than when seen with his troops scouring the beach for washed-up explosives and has no part at all in the lynching scene. But he must have known of it and realized the havoc his actions—shooting a patriot and taking a local woman for a lover—must have wrought. He is hated as both an occupier and a home wrecker. His suicide comes as the logical outcome of his loss of love and his anticipation of going back to the war front, but his exit can also be seen as a magnanimous act of release, for Rosy can now be free to return to her husband. Suicide releases him from both his suffering and his guilt. His exit fits. (“He was a man who suffered,” Charles says, equally magnanimously, to Father Collins, following his question whether Rosy thought he had killed himself.) Seeing him tossing the fuse up and down before throwing it on the dynamite sticks that Michael has shown him, we realize how deep is the pain he feels, caught as he is between a tortured past and a future that promises more of the “shakes” in the front line. Freddie Young’s camera cuts from his face to the clouded horizon to assure that the end must come as inevitably as the dipping, dying red sun. His tragic end, however, endows him with an aura of redemption, at least in the eye of an observer, who may even see him as a hero realizing he must pay for his trespasses. Next to Charles and Doryan, the two characters who influence the action most are Michael and the priest. Both appear at key points and, either directly

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or indirectly, bring about a change in plot or affect a principal character’s subsequent actions. First Michael—the film was originally to be named Michael’s Day, after all. Though often unwittingly, he pops up at key moments, thus creating new twists in propelling the story forward. Slow to grasp ideas,37 despised and mocked by the villagers, and leading a subhuman existence,38 still Michael is capable of perceiving nearly every major event (save for Ryan’s treachery) that transpires in the movie. He is the first to suspect Rosy’s adultery when he is seen under a bridge dropping a fish he has caught as the two lovers pass over it and are heard talking about their next assignation. Thus, he knows of the affair even before Shaughnessy does. As the action progresses Michael shows growth, although it is hard to tell what “conclusions” he might have arrived at, not speaking a word throughout the movie. But his body language tells a great deal. He is first seen snapping off the claw of a lobster (a mutilation symbolic of his own disability) to please Rosy—instead provoking her disgust and the wrath of Father Collins. Here he shows he is unable to link ideas, to understand a suggestion other than in its literal sense. But his love of Rosy cannot be repressed and he later does display much acumen, when he traces the steps of the lovers on the sand and, like a good detective, picks up a missing button torn from the major’s uniform during their lovemaking at the cave. In his simplicity (which never leaves him) he imagines that he too can appear as a major, decking himself with a cap and a fake ribbon, provoking a chiding from Father Collins and the crude mockery of Maureen Cassidy. When Rosy, back from her love tryst, passes through the village, Michael salutes her militarily, causing the guffaws of the crowd before a cloudburst disperses them. To the villagers, that is proof of Rosy’s adultery. But Michael, the “knower,” is also the harbinger of news of Doryan’s death to Rosy, after she and Charles hear the explosion at the beach. An unrequited lover, Michael feels the stabbings of jealousy but is gradually reconciled to the fact that his love for her is hopeless. His presence at their departure also lends dimension to Rosy as a character, when, just before she boards the bus, she deposits a kiss on Michael’s moist cheeks. Both are “outcasts,” both downtrodden, as one of the commentators admits.39 Mills’s mute look—similar to a loyal dog’s—saves the scene from banality. Michael resembles Quasimodo or even Caliban (both lovelorn satyrs)—a half-animal, half-human creature touched by the shafts of love. Acceptance of one’s poor lot—for what is left for him in life other than the derision of the villagers?—is a sign of growth, a speck of humanity. Neither exactly pathetic nor tragic, Michael becomes fully human. As for the priest, he is a major player who influences practically every plot development from the beginning to the end of the story. Every time he intervenes, he causes another twist in the plot or adds to character development. One can cite numerous examples: his berating Rosy at the very beginning of the story for “doing nothing” shows her rebellious tendencies and leaves her with her

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growing sense of guilt. At the same time, he is a watchdog of village behavior, castigating the crowd of unruly youths who torment Michael; but he also later leads them to help O’Leary and his comrades to salvage the weapons during the storm. Another example of his influencing the main events in the story is his search for the lost Charles, whose footpaths in the sand he traces like a good detective (giving Doryan a verbal dousing in the process), finding him sitting on a remote, craggy part of the beach and helping him recoup and return home. Charles’s return provides the denouement for the couple, for it is at that point that he explains to Rosy his decision to finally part with her. Charles’s return possibly saves Rosy’s life as well, for it is his presence and timely, if unsuccessful, resistance that prolong the mob action enough for Father Collins to be back at the scene and disperse the crowd. Without Father Collins’s presence as the “moral center” of the village, the various strands of the plot would not have been connected, but more importantly we the viewers would have missed connections on the development of characters around him. As we have seen, he and Michael escort Charles and Rosy through the village, showing their alliance to the outcasts up to their last destination: the bus to Dublin. But when they are gone, he still has a few words for Michael—and the viewer: “I don’t know. I don’t know at all.” What is it that Father Collins means? At this point we have seen him grow into a somewhat disillusioned, if not bitter, priest. The guardian of moral order in this small society, he has seen its members collectively go mad; a valiant decorated hero— albeit belonging to the other side—blow himself up; a good woman whom he has carefully nurtured in the ethics of marriage go astray; and a proud man and husband humiliated and trampled under. He has seen his flock torment an unfortunate that deserves sympathy in a civilized society. The world he inhabits and instructs in doing good acts is a fallen order. A last symbol is the piece from St. Patrick’s staff he gives Rosy as a parting gift. “I don’t suppose it is, though,” he adds with a sad smile. Yet Father Collins still entertains hope: a doubt that the couple will part—that order will prevail despite the chaos around him. In the Lean epics, things come full circle: every transgression is paid for, but, in the end, a cosmic order might prevail: the hawk at the end of Kwai, the eagle surveying the Marabar rocks, and the waves bursting against the Dingle beaches are eternal symbols not only of turbulence but also of nature’s recurring order. The other two of the five men deserve a few remarks. Barry Foster’s Tim O’Leary is at first seen as a ruthless murderer, even for the sake of the revolution, when he shoots in cold blood the constable who recognized him. But his image improves as his line of action merges with the main events. Later he acts as an organizer and leader of a group that would salvage weapons during a storm for the cause of the revolution. When he is caught, he gives a proud answer to an overly gracious Doryan, who has shot him in the leg (he could have aimed higher) and asks him if there is anything he can do: “Get out of my country!”

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O’Leary’s roars. This is the last time the audience sees O’Leary, who knows nothing about Rosy’s affair and wouldn’t care had he known. And yet his capture inflames the villagers’ hatred against Rosy and his defiant last words have a decisive effect on their actions. It is during that sequence that Rosy approaches her lover, concern painted on her face to see him collapsing on the truck following his shooting of O’Leary; in that action the villagers find definite proof of her “guilt.” It is O’Leary’s mettle and defiance in the eyes of the villagers that doom Rosy, who now cannot escape the vengeful wrath of the crowd. Thus, O’Leary’s presence in the action ties up the strings of the plot—which revolve around a failed marriage, an adulterous love story, a father’s betrayal, and the capture of a national revolutionary figure. It is a complex plot with multiple ironic strands that crisscross, leaving the viewer with contradictory emotions. Last but not least in the story’s plot development is Ryan’s pivotal action when he informs the British of O’Leary’s presence. And at the critical moment, during Rosy’s trial by the mob, when McCardle asks him if he had cut the telephone wire, he says, “I did,” without adding that he had let the guard know first. He, the informer and Rosy’s father, is the man most responsible for her disgrace, having brought her up as a “princess” and not good enough for any of the villagers. McKern gives Ryan unusual emotional complexity, for the man is divided between loyalty to his compatriots’ cause and his need to get money from the British to buy his daughter expensive gifts, like a laced umbrella and the horse—a need fed by his obsession with Rosy’s “superior” status among the community. To best hide his betrayal, he rouses the villagers to action, showing incredible physical bravery (if faked) during the storm, and to compound the ironies in his personality, he is the one congratulated by O’Leary, who looks him in the face after salvaging the weapons and says: “You are a man!” (The viewer, fully catching the irony, knows better.) Ryan is stabbed by his conscience while doing his dirty work. He urges O’Leary to leave, knowing the British guard will be ambushing him soon, wishing to be spared his own inner disgrace for what he has done. He would have it both ways—getting the money from the British and saving the life of O’Leary—for he does not have the stomach to be a traitor without being haunted by shame. But he is no hero. Ironically, Tom Ryan is the axis connecting the two strands of the story because it is his betrayal that brings about Rosy’s downfall—and also her possible regeneration, as well as his own, for she promised “to write.” Shaken by humiliation and tormented by his daughter’s ordeal at the hands of the village mob, he does not possess the courage to admit his guilt and rescue her from the maenads, Maureen Cassidy and Mrs. McCardle, and the frenzied crowd, something done courageously by the priest. One could argue that in the end Ryan redeems himself to some degree by sending off his daughter with a good wish and praise for her husband (“They don’t come any better”), possibly also glad to have escaped the onus of being revealed as a traitor, something that would have cost him his life. Leo McKern describes

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Ryan as a man “with a large exterior but with a very small soul,”40 and that image does not quite fit that of a tragic hero. His cowardly behavior is one of the many ironies in this tale, for it is his silence and retreat that create the tension during the lynching scene. After his daughter’s good-bye, when Rosy’s image has been partly restored by our pity and sympathy for her, Ryan’s grimly looking at his half-emptied glass in his pub, alone with his guilt not to be guessed by anyone and known only to himself, smacks of tragedy, though he would have been truly tragic had he confessed and been punished. A tragic flaw is not enough to make a tragic hero; heroic action is also needed to achieve catharsis. A few words should also be reserved for the village crowd as a collective persona. Some commentators have dismissed Lean and Bolt’s Kirrary villagers as crude, second-rate, inferior types, bent on idleness, engaging in sadistic torments of an innocent weakling—Michael—and, in the end, turning into a vicious, vindictive mob against a defenseless, though guilty in their eyes, woman. But there is also the scene where the crowd cheers its hero Tim O’Leary (Maureen Cassidy is thrilled when he kisses her on the mouth) after they help him and his comrades collect the scattered arms on the slabs. These two actions seem contradictory but one can see them as logically linked. The latter scene reminds of other similar Lean scenes of heroes inspiring crowds: After Nicholson is freed from the oven, the prisoners seeing his triumph over Saito carry him on their shoulders, and hail him as a hero (it turns out he was merely stubborn). In Lawrence, Lawrence receives a similar triumphant reception by his Arab friends whom he led through the Nefud Desert when he brings back Gasim, against their warning, “It was written.” In A Passage to India, one remembers the jubilant crowd that carries Aziz out of the courthouse after he has won the trial. These scenes are carefully orchestrated by Lean and are intended to exult the heroic status of a group leader after he triumphantly completes a nearly superhuman feat. But crowds are subject to conflicting motives and sudden changes of mood. As much as they worship and extol a hero, they turn to raging furies, and the women, in the case of Rosy, surpass the men in malice. Maureen tears Rosy’s clothes and Mrs. McCardle shears off Rosy’s beautiful locks, the two emblems of woman’s beauty expressed in her dress and hair. Rosy’s locks flowed when she walked on the beaches, and for a village woman, she dresses, if not with taste, at least with a pretended elegance. Hatred against her has reached a boiling point, even before it is rumored that she has betrayed O’Leary. “You have been tried and found guilty,” McCardle announces in front of her astonished husband. Rosy is hated for her haughtiness and her beauty, despised for her adultery, but it is the suspicion—and conviction—of the villagers that she has also betrayed their hero that brings on the damning verdict of the manic crowd headed to a paroxysm.

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Charles is held by a crowd while Rosy is stripped and shorn. MGM/Photofest © MGM

Structure and the Landscape Director Hugh Hudson, in his introductory remarks to the DVD commentary, said: “Lean is a cinematic novelist . . . in the way he sets the scene . . . using the elements to denote character . . . and tugs you into the drama like a novelist, like the Brontes.”41 In a Lean epic—as in some of his earlier movies—the landscape, including some cityscapes, serves as a framing device for delineating character and linking him (or her) to the environment or the action. Going back to earlier movies, one can recall scenes, as for instance in The Passionate Friends, where two illicit lovers, placed in real rather than studio setting, sail a boat at Lake Annesy and climb the Swiss Alps; one can also recall the aerial flights over Mediterranean monuments in The Sound Barrier, and the lush visual sights of the city of Venice in Summertime. In almost all the epics, the landscape becomes a dominant factor in molding character to fit specific action. Again, examples abound: the jungles of Ceylon in Kwai or the stunning vistas of the Jordan desert in Lawrence absorb the viewer’s attention, guiding him to interpretation. In every case, the exteriors influence character and Lean believed that character could be shaped if placed in a visually compelling setting, especially the outdoors. The positioning of each

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character or group of characters in a specific frame became a practice that Lean developed along with his skills as an editor. Thinking as an editor also dictated the sequence of shots he needed for a particular scene and that of course influenced his selection of background in which a character was placed for maximum effect and fluent action. In Ryan’s Daughter, this device of framing character against background became a greater necessity than in any of his other previous movies because the entire action was filmed on location without any shots in a studio; and that may have accounted for the static quality of the movie that has irritated some viewers and critics. The geographical confines of this movie, stretching over three hours, prevent movement of character from location to location—as Kwai, hypothetically (for all was photographed in Ceylon), has some of major characters move: the detachment led by Shears to locate the bridge has to struggle through the jungle to reach it. In Lawrence the main character travels from Cairo to an Arab camp in Arabia and back to Cairo, adding the expedition to Damascus. In Doctor Zhivago, the main characters also move from Moscow to the Urals and back to Moscow. The action of Ryan’s Daughter in its entirety takes place in one village—Kirrary—although some scenes had to be shot in Cape Town because of the deteriorating weather in Ireland, though those scenes were deftly dovetailed to fit the atmosphere and locales of Ireland. In a long movie, an audience may tire of the monotony of Kirrary and its environs, rocks, waves, swampy areas, and one street in only one village. Nevertheless, Freddie Young’s photography captures the landscape of the Dingle peninsula in the fullest sense possible, giving it amplitude with its long shots alternating with intimate scenes and close-ups of characters revealing their inner thoughts and emotions. Thus the setting is not only a means to depict action in general—the tempest and the mob scenes are examples—but also provides a mode to develop character within the frame that defines him or her. Ryan’s Daughter owes its symmetry to Freddie Young’s brilliant frames, which relate character to action, and to Lean’s ability to synthesize his shots in fluent sequences with expert editing. Neither the story, with its stretched-out plot, nor the actors playing their parts as well as they do would in themselves be compelling enough to carry this movie to the heights achieved by the three previous Lean epics. Ryan’s Daughter, a story of adultery and betrayal, still does not have the intensity of action of Kwai nor the obsessed heroes—Nicholson and Lawrence—of the first two epics, and Rosy’s romance does not quite match Lara’s doomed affair with Zhivago, himself a victim of divided loyalties and external events beyond his control. Ryan’s Daughter seems tame and too slow paced compared with the three colossi that preceded it. That is why the special attention paid to detail in composition raises this rather ordinary story of adultery to a certain level of excellence that makes it still watchable, enjoyable, and meaningful—perhaps “one of his [Lean’s] best movies,” as Sandra Lean has asserted.42

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Some examples will suffice to show this. As in most exterior sequences, Rosy is first seen in motion, isolated among the crags, holding an umbrella, wind blowing, blue-green waves breaking on the shore. She darts away from the priest shouting his damning (and prophetic) words to her: “Doing nothing is a dangerous occupation!” Later, in a long shot, she is seen approaching Charles, just off the bus, coming from the opposite direction, two barely visible dots on the beach, isolated in the vast stretches of sand and wave. A close-up next shows them walking side by side, talking, the wind blowing away both Charles’s and Rosy’s hats, and both pick up each other’s—perhaps a hint (node) of their upcoming union. A moment later, the viewer is treated to a rather telling image, Rosy’s bare foot being placed on the tracks Charles’s shoe has left in the sand. Like the exchange of hats, this is a prelude of their union, but this one is more like a wish fulfillment, fluently linked to what the priest has said in his verbal dousing of her. Indeed, Rosy is far from doing nothing; she is expecting Charles, her interest roused when he tells her of his “cultural” experiences in Dublin. They part, but she has formed a design, going straight to the schoolhouse to wait for him, while he climbs uphill to pay his respects to his wife’s tomb. The logic of these images is irresistible: his wife was a “pure woman,” as the priest tells Ryan after Charles has left the pub, in contrast to Rosy’s design to ensnare him. These images also prepare the viewer for an interior shot of both in the schoolhouse, he standing, imposing but shy, looking amazed at what he hears though knowing instantly what she will say, self-effacing and cautious, she being asked to sit like a schoolgirl in his classes. He hopes to convince her he is unworthy of one like her, “meant for the wide world.” Hesitant and troubled, Charles hears her confession, and in a moment of weakness lets his real feelings for this enticing young woman thrown at his feet show and holds her in his arms. The viewer sees that Lean was right in casting Mitchum “against type.” A man looking powerful and strong is derailed by his low self-esteem, but Rosy’s vague dreams and subsequent disloyalties slowly awaken the slumbering giant in him. These early interior shots in the classroom, where Charles taught her, are meant to anticipate the changes that are brought about as the action moves forward: she, strong willed and determined, wins her prize, but weakens as a victim of illicit passion and hatred; he, helpless to resist and weak despite his imposing stature, does eventually change into a strong man capable of weathering the blows fate has dealt him. Many interior shots show Rosy’s isolation and gradual estrangement from her husband, as when, after arriving in her new home, she says, “Here I am,” to Charles, who turns around and puts a record of Beethoven on his phonograph. Hers is a look of yearning and reproach, and the beginning of her disillusionment with her husband’s lack of sexual interest in her. In the same scene, the bust of Beethoven is featured on a shelf nearby, completing the frame, signifying the rift already developing between husband and wife.

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Perhaps her most introspecting moment is given at the pub when Doryan first enters. She is sitting, again in isolation, looking in utter surprise at the young handsome officer as he enters her father’s establishment. She serves him his drink and sits back before her book, slowing raising her eyes in a lingering look of longing at the alluring specimen of manhood shown in profile taking his drink, a look that reveals her awakening sexual desire. Rosy’s passionate nature slumbers inside, on occasion showing itself, as in the scene when we see her running and crying on the beach and intercepted by Father Collins, who has more words of reproach for her. Her quiet demeanor during the interior shots contrasts with her nervous, hasty running while on the beach, and these contrasting shots prepare the viewer—perhaps only subliminally—for the explosion to follow. Two subsequent scenes where she is shown with her lover are complete contrasts with those when paired with Charles. Charles treats her as something fragile and ethereal, something to be valued and cherished but not touched. There is only one scene of lovemaking between her and Charles, and that is the wedding night, a very tepid embrace on his part, then a turn to sleep. Doryan at the pub bangs her against the door and fondles her breast, and she returns his kisses like one starved after a long fast. The pub scene is possibly the richest exchange of lovemaking in the history of cinema, although the subsequent assignation in the forest with the bluebells equals it, being more complex, for Rosy now having appeased her wild libido sheds a tear, aware as she fully is of her sinful act. She returns to Charles—her long, luscious hair and shimmering red blouse and her blushing face almost give her away because Charles has never seen his wife look so desirable. To his question, “You are not going to be unfaithful to me, are you?” she responds with an embrace, the frame showing the back of Charles’s head, while the viewer has full view of Rosy’s look of satisfaction and growing guilt. Expert photography has elevated a potentially banal scene to a subtle portrait of a woman’s inner turmoil. Two scenes where she is framed with Charles are worth mentioning: one is after the mob scene. Charles and Rosy are seen sitting inside, separately on opposite sides, the fire blazing between them, a shawl over her head hiding her shorn hair, scratches on his face showing the beating he took from the village toughs. He raises and brings her a drink, which she takes with shaking hand and a few sips, and then offers the same to him. He hesitates, then takes a drink too. This frame signals their reunion. The main issue in their lives is no longer her adultery but their mutual humiliation and defeat by the mob. What restores Rosy to Charles’s eyes—at least partially—is the fact that his wife was accused unjustly and punished for something she did not do. A little later, when they are a bit recovered, he even sounds defiant, after Rosy asks him: “Did these people really believe that I betrayed that man?” Charles’s answer is that the real reason was their envy of her (and “for other reasons,” he adds) and also the fact that he

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too was their target, for standing out as a cultured man in a degraded, bigoted community. He is determined not to let them know they are hurt, and “they will put up a front” until they are out of there. He faces the audience as he says that, for he now has taken a leadership role in the family, while she is looking at the fire, throwing one of her shorn locks into it. With that, she seems to bury the past. But the past intrudes again, right after a shot showing Charles striking a match to light the lamp; moments later the sound of a terrific explosion is heard. Charles explains to a troubled Rosy that it is the soldiers destroying explosives found on the beach, but Michael’s screeching brings Rosy to the door, where a close-up shows her pained expression, for she has guessed the truth. The couple, still divided by that memory, walks the gauntlet through the village street to get to the bus. The camera cuts back and forth, showing faces behind windows peering at the pair of outcasts, as the two are shown in the same frame, his at his (Mitchum’s) best swaggering, his hat worn askance, she, more fragile, hanging onto his arm. This frame signifies Charles’s eventually defeat of the specter of Doryan. Had they stayed in the village, he would have been “like a ghost,” haunting both of them. Their departure frees them from both the village and their remnants of memory of the lover. When they are grouped together again—the priest, Michael, Charles, and Rosy—at the bus stop, a blast of wind blows off Rosy’s hat, and her shorn head is revealed to a stunned Michael. His love for her was love for an outcast like himself. The final frame, showing the priest and Michael walking back side by side, outlines the two of the four outcasts that must return to the small world they inhabit and bear it as best as they can.

Notes 1. The later, A Passage to India, also won two but had eleven nominations. 2. See DVD commentary in “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” in the 2006 special edition of the film. 3. See introduction to this book. 4. Sandra Lean, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001), 52. 5. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 600. 6. For a fuller list of praise given to others, see Michael Tanner’s Troubled Epic: On Location with Ryan’s Daughter (Malta: Collins Press, 2007), 180–81. 7. Worth mentioning at this point (2011) are Gene D. Phillips’s Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2006); and Michael Tanner’s Troubled Epic. 8. See Matthew Kennedy, “David Lean’s Problem Child: Gorgeous but Flawed Ryan’s Daughter on DVD,” Bright Lights Film Journal, December 5, 2006.

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9. These include Lady Sandra Lean (Lean’s sixth and last wife), Sarah Miles, Petrine Day Mitchum, assistant director Michael Stevenson, second unit director Roy Stevens, art director Roy Walker, assistant editor Tony Lawson, location manager Eddie Fowlie, director John Boorman, director Hugh Hudson, biographer of Lean Stephen M. Silverman, and film historian Richard Schickel. Most of the above participate in the running commentary on both discs, and all also appear in “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter” section in the second disc. 10. Both in the commentary and “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” 2006 DVD sections. 11. On the occasion of the reissue of Ryan’s Daughter on the 2006 DVD, where a number of former Lean collaborators and other commentators, named in note 9, paid belated tribute to Lean’s achievements. 12. Schickel, a declared admirer of Lean’s work over the years, claims that he only offered a “summary” of the comments made by others; for his comments of the 2006 DVD sections he uses the term “crap” instead. See commentary sections in discs 1 and 2. 13. Of interest is Hugh Hudson’s opening remarks that “Lean is a cinematic novelist,” which open with a description of dark clouds at dawn, connecting this imagery to the events that follow. John Boorman is the only one who attributes the failure of Ryan’s Daughter to its sprawling structure into which a “small story” was placed. “People sensed that,” he concludes. 14. The negative critical reaction to Ryan’s Daughter, along with a few laudatory comments at the time, is described in great detail in Brownlow’s biography, David Lean, 584–88. 15. The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India. 16. See “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” in disc 2, DVD, 2006. 17. Gene D. Phillips remarks that “Ryan’s Daughter falls below the exact standard set by Lean in his previous epic films,” attributing this failure to Robert Bolt’s script, which fails “to support the weight of a film over three hours in length.” See Beyond the Epic, 392–93. 18. Tanner, A Troubled Epic, 12. 19. The historical sequences in the movie are not exactly accurate, and, at least chronologically, they serve the dramaturgy of the film rather than history. 20. Tanner, A Troubled Epic, 21. 21. This remark was made by Stephen Silverman in his commentary, “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” at the conclusion of disc 1 in the 2006 DVD edition. 22. Brownlow, David Lean, 544. 23. Aside from Brief Encounter (1945), The Passionate Friends (1949), with Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, and Claude Rains, dealt with adultery; as did Madeleine (1950), also with Ann Todd as the protagonist, Madeleine Smith, a real person who was accused of murdering her lover while engaged to another man; and, of course, one of his epics, Doctor Zhivago (1965) broached the subject on a much larger canvas. 24. See “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” 2006 DVD, disc 2. 25. Stephen Silverman, David Lean (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 171. 26. In England the Romantic era was bracketed between 1798, the date of the publication of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, and 1832, the year of the death of Walter Scott.

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In France and the rest of Europe it started during Rousseau’s lifetime and lingered on much longer, well into the nineteenth century. 27. See Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Criticism: The Major Statements, 3rd edition, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 28. Sir John Ridgefield (played by Ralph Richardson) was a pioneer aircraft manufacturer who set out to test jet aircraft that would break the sound barrier in Lean’s pre-epic movie, The Sound Barrier (1952). 29. Alain Silver and James Ursini, David Lean and His Films (Los Angeles: SilmanJames Press, 1991), 30. Also the word “romance,” taken from a poem Laura’s husband in Brief Encounter is quoting to solve a crossword puzzled, is intruding to the viewer’s attention in that film, in a sense defining it. 30. Brownlow, David Lean, 563. 31. Brownlow, David Lean, 563. 32. Brownlow, David Lean, 603–4. 33. Phillips, Beyond the Epic, 392–93. 34 James, “The Art of Fiction,” 396. 35. The viewer might recognize in the photo a young Sandra Hotz, then Lean’s girlfriend and later his fifth wife. Hotz briefly appeared as Fielding’s wife, Stella, in A Passage to India. 36. See commentary of 2006 DVD, disc 1. 37. Though nobody in the movie calls him that, critics have referred to him as “the village idiot,” as Stephen Silverman has, “for lack of a better term,” as he explains in his commentary in disc 2 of the 2006 DVD. 38. John Mills, who played him, explains that he studied cases of mental retardation in order to accurately portray this character. Mills, of course, won an Oscar for his efforts. 39. Hugh Hudson, in commentary, 2006 DVD, disc 2. 40. See 2006 DVD, “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” disc 2. 41. Beginning of commentary, 2006 DVD, disc 1. 42. Commentary, 2006 DVD, disc 1.

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A Passage to India Crew Director: Screenplay: Producers: Photography: Editing: Music Score: Art Direction: Costume Design: Assistant Directors: Property Master: Continuity: Casting:

David Lean David Lean Richard Goodwin and Lord John Brabourne Ernest Day David Lean Maurice Jarre John Box Judy Moorcroft Patrick Cadell, Christopher Figg Eddie Fowlie Maggie Unsworth Priscilla John

Cast Richard Fielding: Adela Quested: Mrs. Moore: Doctor Aziz: Narayan Godbole: Ronny Heaslop: Major Callendar: Mrs. Callendar: McBryde: Mahmoud Ali: Mr. Turton: Mrs. Turton: Vakyl Hamidullah: Das: Stella: Armitrao:

James Fox Judy Davis Peggy Ashcroft Victor Banerjee Alec Guinness Nigel Havers Clive Swift Ann Firbank Michael Culver Art Malik Richard Wilson Antonia Pemberton Saeed Jaffrey Rashid Karapiet Sandra Hotz Roshan Seth

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CHAPTER 5

A Passage to India (1984)

General Background Passage to more than India! Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights, O soul? —Walt Whitman1 Only connect . . . —E. M. Forster2

A Passage to India, Lean’s last film (not his last endeavor),3 may arguably be considered his most accomplished work, one in which his art had reached the peak of maturity on several levels. Aside from directing the movie, Lean wrote his own script, did the editing, and personally sought spectacular locations in India where the exteriors where to be filmed,4 thus taking control of all the major aspects of the film. Lean also surrounded himself with important collaborators who had been with him in many of his previous endeavors: director of photography Ernest Day,5 art director John Box, general factotums Eddie Fowlie and Maggie Unsworth, composer Maurice Jarre, and a splendid ensemble cast of distinguished English and Indian actors from the screen and stage, including Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness, James Fox, Victor Banerjee, and Judy Davis. The film earned eleven Oscar nominations, won the New York Critics Award, and has quietly (compared to some of the previous more spectacular epics) retained its splendor more than a quarter century after its release. Given his absence from the screen for fourteen years after the critical and box office debacle of Ryan’s Daughter, and despite his advancing age and certain rustiness justified under the 119

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circumstances, Lean embarked on this project with energy and enthusiasm, putting into use his accumulated experience of several decades, which had made him a master of the medium in practically all its aspects. The result was a consummate epic work, arguably superior as a finished product to those that preceded it. But this undertaking did not come without setbacks and hurdles that had to be overcome along the way. One of these was the result of Lean’s decision to write his own script. As is well known, E. M. Forster, the author of A Passage to India (1924), had refused to grant the rights to film his work to the various producers and directors who had applied for them for decades, fearing cinema would distort his views on Anglo-Indian relations as expressed in the novel.6 It was only ten years after his death, in 1971, that his executors at King’s College, Cambridge, who held the rights to the novel, granted these rights to producers Lord Brabourne and Richard Goodwin. But that was under the stipulation that the screenplay was to be authored by Santha Rama Rau, whose stage play twenty years earlier had sparked Lean’s interest in filming the story. Rau, who had known Forster personally, had also been one of the executors of the rights of his novel. Lean first agreed to cooperate with her and read the screenplay she submitted to him, and in response he wrote her a long letter, detailing his ideas about plot and characterizations and the difficulties he would encounter in translating the novel into a working script. Though his letter was deferential, it showed that he had already decided to strike an independent course, altering crucial episodes according to his own views of how the plot of the novel could be given in cinematic terms. He also made specific comments on Forster’s main characters, stating how they should be presented. Eventually, he and Rau parted ways, not without some rancor on her part, and the final product turned out to be Lean’s own version of the novel on which his script was based. Rau had assumed—and so had Brabourne and Goodwin—that her own screenplay would become the basis of the film. The opening credits show Lean’s name as the author of the screenplay, based on Forster’s novel and Santha Rama Rau’s stage play.

Adapting Forster’s A Passage to India It took Lean over a year to complete the script. Though his name had not appeared in the credits of any of the four epics that preceded A Passage to India, Lean always had a hand in writing and shaping the final shooting scripts for all of them. He had also tackled literary adaptations since the 1940s, when he had adapted Noël Coward’s plays and Dickens’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. In such cases, his method was to highlight passages in a book that he judged cinematic and proceed to create a shooting script from those notes. Lean wrote

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the script for A Passage to India with the utmost attention to every detail regarding sets, locations, dialogue, and photography, describing every single scene and the shots in it—and he shot the movie exactly as it was in the script.7 Following its completion, Lean and his crew scouted locations in India and selected Bangalore,8 where sets were built by John Box to correspond to his concept of what the fictional city of Chandrapore would look like. Likewise, the selection of actors to play the major parts9—Lady Peggy Ashcroft as Mrs. Moore, James Fox as Richard Fielding, Victor Banerjee as Aziz, Judy Davis as Adela Quested, and Alec Guinness as Narayan Godbole—by and large corresponded to the characters in the novel, though Lean made some significant changes in some, as we shall see. Though the plot of the film drew its main lines from Forster’s literary classic, it also bore the stamp of its director. Lean did not ignore Forster, but he made changes from the original novel at certain critical points, changes he considered essential for the development of his version of the story. Lean often stated that, though respectful of the original “in spirit,” he had to take into account the notion that a cinematic work is a “two-way” medium, different from the written word, and therefore requiring a different approach when it comes to audience expectations. In his aforementioned letter to Rau he outlined his ideas in specific terms, explaining what the difficulties would be in adapting the novel for the screen.10 Forster’s story, filled as it was with “ambiguities, hints, and half-defined characters,”11 would present serious difficulties to a screenwriter, the main difficulty being the handling of the “unsolved riddle of the caves.”12 Lean found that the main weakness of the novel, cinematically speaking, was the obscure adventure of Adela Quested at the Marabar Caves, given the fact that she was the character that sets things in motion in the book. Lean thought Forster did not care much for her and only used her as a plot device. He found Adela’s collapse in the cave unexplained, a “muddle” (a word used by Forster in the novel) rather than a mystery. In the novel, the incident was interpreted in a number of ways—as an attempt at rape by Aziz, an assault by the guide (a highly improbable “red herring”), or a hallucination.13 Lean thought that Adela’s character had not been sufficiently sketched out in the first part of the novel in order to sustain a convincing explanation of her behavior in the caves. He felt that her collapse, as presented in the book, could not convince a modern audience and that a lot more should be known about Adela before that cave incident occurs. The film narrative should start earlier than it did in the Rau play, in London, and then move rapidly, showing the two ladies en route to India, their disembarking at Bombay, and their train tip to Chandrapore, meeting a couple of people going in the same direction. This way the audience would obtain a clear understanding of the purpose of the trip and know the two travelers and some of the other characters quite well. The curiosity of the ladies “to meet Indians, as friends,” expressed

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first by Mrs. Moore, would thus become the key theme of the story that would lead to other developments, such as their acquaintance with Aziz and Fielding, two other major characters whose interactions would, unwittingly, lead to more complications. Lean was intrigued by the numerous interesting and likeable characters in Forster, something he saw as an opportunity to develop individual conflicts among them, casting their interaction against a large canvas suggested by social and political turmoil in India at that time. Thus, his story would gain epic proportions while keeping the Forster plotline at the center. Though he found the plot of the novel rather thin and some of the main characters “half explained,” he would also play to its strengths—the mystery at the caves and the failure of people to “only connect,” an idea in Forster’s earlier works that fully blossoms in A Passage to India, where racial tensions are seen as the result of lack of communication between the main characters and those around them. The key incident would be Adela’s adventure at the caves, which would place everyone under tremendous stress. Themes would develop as their conflicts intensify: the generational gap between mother and son, the failure of the institution of marriage, the disintegration of a close friendship, and the mistrust and hatred shown between races. Lean also stressed that changes in popular tastes and in social mores (sexual liberation, for instance) in the six decades that intervened between the publication of the novel and the making of the film should be taken into account, pointing out that today’s (the 1980s) audiences are “tough and emancipated,” and therefore unwilling to accept the “mystery” of the caves incident as Forster presented it.14 Generally speaking, Lean recognized the difficulty of filming Forster’s work, being fully aware of the obstacles of transforming a complicated novel that contained a great number of characters, a plot that needed to be streamlined to fit a movie’s quicker pace, and an unusual number of philosophical asides and reflections impossible to fully render in cinematic terms. Thus, he felt that such problems were not merely of the formal presentation of the materials in the book, but of an adaptation that would have to take into account the changes in the political status of India, which was quite different in 1984 from what it was during the period of the English Raj, in 1924. Lean was also quite aware that India and its history under the British Raj had been the subject of other filmmakers: Gandhi, Richard Attenborough’s notable biography of India’s great leader, and the popular TV miniseries The Jewel of the Crown being the most prominent examples. Far from overawed, Lean actually stated (and must have believed) that these would be good “trailers” for his own movie.15 In addition, Lean saw that his film, based on Forster’s work that had been perceived as intensely anti-British, would have to deal with an issue that seemed localized and anachronistic and not necessarily a great draw for modern audiences. There would have to be compelling cinematic elements in it, issues that transcend time

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and place, in order for his movie to make good and—more importantly—survive to the next generation. Of course he also knew that Forster’s book, “a beautiful and poetic novel,”16 still had its enduring appeal—and that its followers would demand that this film be loyal to it. Aware of such dilemmas, Lean still insisted that he had the right to make his movie the way he saw it. When his script was in its final stages, Lean, along with Lord Brabourne and his partner Richard Goodwin, who had in the meantime formed G. W. Productions,17 were invited by the Forster executors at King’s College for an interview. “I did tell them,” Lean recalls, “that I was just going to make a movie and whatever I did would not affect the book.”18 His movie, he added modestly, would, “with luck,” last two to three years, whereas the Forster classic novel would be there for all time. If there was any damage done by his adaptation, it would be to himself, not to the novel.19 Given the complexity of these themes, the number of characters involved, the plethora of philosophical reflections in the book, it is understandable that Lean wanted to whittle away whatever was in the way of a quick-paced, lucid, and emotionally engaging plot. As said earlier, his approach to adapting a novel for the screen had always been to go through a novel, mark out those passages that he thought cinematic, and make them the basis for the script, more or less ignoring the rest—a practice he had followed since his early days as director.20 When finished, the script would be followed to the letter, not altered at the request of actors or influenced by other factors, such as interference by producers, something he tried to avoid at all costs. In adapting Forster’s novel, he intended to stay close to its basic structure, but he also felt it necessary to “balance” the elements in it, English versus Indians, eliminating what he thought was strong bias against the English. He also felt that while adapting a great but difficult work of English literature, he wanted to make a movie that could be understood by the man in the street.21 In translating a ruminative novel with basically a “small” storyline22 into an epic, Lean introduced spectacle—pomp and ceremony, casting his story against spectacular locales of India and enhancing the action with crowd scenes, vistas of mountains and rock faces, and sets of the fictional Chandrapore built by John Box, noted both for their realism and glamour. But the major changes were in plot and characterization. Changes in the plot can be seen at the beginning and the end of the film; in Adela’s visit at the ruined temple (an entirely added scene), in the adventure at the caves, and in the trial itself. While the main lines of Forster’s story were followed, additions were made and entire segments of the book were omitted. Aside from a major change in Adela’s character, the identities of the other four main characters, Mrs. Moore, Aziz, Fielding, and Ronny, were preserved in the film and cast in the book’s mold with minor variations; while some of the secondary characters—the Turtons, Major Callendar, McBryde, Hamidullah, Mahmoud Ali, Godbole—were also given, more or less, as per their original sketches. Some of these changes—mainly

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those in plot—were problematic for Lean and became fodder for his critics, especially literary purists who did not like to see a distinguished literary work suffer distortions and omissions in the hands of a filmmaker—especially after Forster’s objections against the filming of his novel. Some complained that Lean used a distinguished book as a basis for making a film that conformed to his own ideas, rather than as a means of paying tribute to a great literary master. Analysis, therefore, must show in specific terms what the differences were, why they were made, and whether the materials, if not the spirit, of the book were distorted. Finally, one must show whether the visions of the author and the filmmaker served the same purposes, where they coincided and where they diverged, and where the final merits of each reside.

Lean’s A Passage to India: An Epic in Five Acts For the sake of convenience, in this discussion the film plot will be presented in five acts, the first and second acts corresponding to the first section of the book, “Mosque”; the third and fourth acts to the second section, “Caves”; and the fifth act to the last section, “Temple.” These divisions23 will be followed as we make comparisons of the main incidents between book and film. These divisions are intended to show the logic of the section-by-section changes made by Lean to the original novel in as close manner as possible. ACT ONE The opening scenes of the film share only one detail with the beginning of book, and that is an image of the Marabar Caves. While Forster starts with a brief mention of the Marabar Caves in his first sentence and then proceeds with several extensive paragraphs describing Chandrapore, the fictional city where the action takes place, Lean’s film begins in London, in the rain, outside of the travel bureau,24 where Adela purchases the tickets for herself and Mrs. Moore. There, as the travel agent at the desk scribbles down her name, Adela’s wandering eye catches pictures on the wall: a ship (presumably the same that will take her overseas), a view of the Taj Mahal, and also a picture of the Marabar Caves. While this scene may work cinematically—for a theme is introduced there—there is no logical reason why an obscure location near the fictional Chandrapore would decorate the walls of a travel bureau whose agent might not even have heard of it.25 Yet the agent knows, and he explains to Adela as she is staring curiously at the enigmatic picture: “These are the Marabar Caves. About twenty miles from

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you at Chandrapore,” he notes and busies himself with stickers, labels, tickets, and so on, abruptly changing the subject. But this image remains engraved in Adela’s mind, for when she sees the mountains after her arrival at Chandrapore, she asks Ronny: “Are these the Marabar Hills? With the caves?” and he casually answers, “I suppose so.” This mere detail—absent in the book, aside from the mention of the caves—seems to call attention from the start to the most important location in the story, one that will play a crucial role in the life and fortunes of Adela and her friends. From the travel office, there is a quick cut to Adela and Mrs. Moore’s arrival at the port in Bombay, amid a great deal of pomp and ceremony, as the viceroy, escorted by his wife, has arrived on the same ship they were on. Here Lean displays his flair for spectacle, which serves to highlight important Indian locales, the port of Bombay and its magnificent arch in a marvelous matte shot and a parade during which the viceroy is greeted by cheering crowds. Adela and Mrs. Moore are seen pressing through a throng, then giving instructions to the cabman to drive them to “Victoria Station,” a simulacrum only alluded to, for we only catch a glimpse of the destination names. With just a few brief touches of exotic novelty, Lean manages to give the impression that the two ladies have never left England, though they are now in a new environment—and continent—but these touches will eventually develop into an important theme. Anglo-India is just a microcosm of England, and that is the main reason they both develop the desire to escape their entrapment at the English club and to see “the real India,” something that leads to unforeseen adversities that change their lives forever. Thus the first ten minutes of the plot are entirely a Lean fabrication,26 for the book, after the first chapter describing Chandrapore, begins with Hamidullah’s dinner party, to which Dr. Aziz is a guest. But these early added scenes in the film do serve a purpose, for they introduce some of the major and even a few of the important secondary characters. Swiftly, through rapid editing, we learn about Adela’s and Mrs. Moore’s purpose in visiting India and that Adela is intended for Ronny but that she already has reservations. Just as quickly we find that the Turtons are passengers on the same train, a fact that seems to defy logic. What are these two characters doing there, and where have they come from? They are first seen amid the crowds in Bombay, then on their carriage, Mrs. Turton holding her nose disdainfully while looking at what seems like a mob around them and obviously headed for the same train station as the two English ladies. Whether they had been on the same boat too seems unclear, but if so, why hadn’t they met Mrs. Moore and Adela earlier? And how do they know the two ladies are on the train? The film never tells you, but we know they are returning home, perhaps from a vacation, after a long absence from Chandrapore, for otherwise they would not have received such an official and ostentatious welcome upon their arrival there. On the train Mrs. Turton knocks on Adela and Mrs. Moore’s

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compartment door and introduces herself as the “Collector’s” wife, assuming that her visitors would know what she is talking about. But Mrs. Moore does not understand this term27 (“conductor” would have been more appropriate to English ears) and responds by saying she had given their tickers to “the Indian gentleman.” She and Adela are invited to join the Turtons later at the diner for drinks, which only the Turtons take. Mrs. Turton impertinently informs Adela that she heard that she and Ronny had met at the Lake District, adding that they have “no secrets at Chandrapore” and that she is “an incurable romantic.” When a moment later Mrs. Moore expresses the wish to meet some Indians on a social level, “as friends,” she gets a cold stare from Turton, who admits they don’t mix with Indians, even if they have “all the virtues,” and Mrs. Turton adds that “East is East; it’s a question of culture.” Just before she goes to sleep, Adela, in shock of what she has heard, says, referring to Mrs. Turton, that she is “a dreadful woman.” Mr. Turton’s remark that they would be proud of Ronny, now a sahib, also shocks Adela, who begins to suspect that something has gone wrong with the man she knew before—or didn’t really know. Though the Turtons’ appearance at the train seems illogical, it is dramatically sound, for Mrs. Moore and Adela have already formed some idea of their character, while the viewer has also been prepared for the cultural clash that will occur shortly between the two women and the clannish and imperial AngloIndians, a point that becomes a major issue both in the book and, to a lesser degree, in the film. When the train stops upon arrival at Chandrapore, the military guard, a band, a group of officials, and some local upper-class Indians have gathered to greet the Turtons, while Ronny, who comes to welcome his mother and future wife, kisses Adela on both her cheeks and then rushes away, for, as he explains, he is “part of the reception committee.” A shot showing a baboon atop the station roof is possibly intended to mock the officious welcome. Meanwhile, Mrs. Moore and Adela have to stand aside and wait for Ronny to come back to them, amazed to see such a show of deference paid to a man they already have contempt for. “I didn’t know he was so important,” Mrs. Moore says to Ronny, who admiringly shakes hands with Turton, as if God himself had descended on the platform. The split between the two groups, the Turtons and the new visitors, but also between mother and son, begins to be discernible at this point, starting to develop two of the multiple thematic strands of the film. Adela is also amazed to see a rigid and stiff official greeting her with no passion or real affection in his voice or gestures, rather than the affable young man she knew in England. Forster later goes into detail about their past relationship and characters, but the film, of necessity briefer, only hints at these discrepancies. But we do know by now that Adela’s shock at the train when she learned that Ronny had turned into a sahib is a justified fear that this is not the man she used to know. To understand Adela’s character as Lean shaped it, one must first understand how she feels toward Ronny and the extra scenes in the film have done just that.

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By adding these extra scenes to the story Lean, through deft editing, has already drawn the main lines of two of his major characters in the story and established rifts within the culture of Anglo-Indians, who in both novel and film are shown to be racists and bigots rather the benevolent conquerors who were there for the “good” of that country. A few moments later, the cars with the officials drive through the crowded streets of Chandrapore, nearly overrunning some of the pedestrians who scurry to get out of their way; Aziz and Mahmoud Ali, riding their bicycles, are knocked over, falling into the side of the street on a pile of dust. They identify the Turtons and McBryde, and Mahmoud Ali comments with some bitterness that McBryde used to be “a good fellow” when he first came. “But they all become exactly alike,” responds Aziz, borrowing a line that is actually used in the book. “I give any Englishman two years,” he says, and, as for the women, “I give them six months,” in response to Ali’s “The women are worse.”

ACT TWO The above brings the first act to its conclusion, thus establishing the main plot strands and themes. It is an entirely made-up section, though Lean borrowed character details and phrases from Forster; the Turtons, for instance, are given along the same lines as in the novel. These connecting points having been made, overtly or through nuance, the second act of the plot now moves closer to the beginning of the book (chapter 2), where Aziz is seen among his friends, having dinner and conversing about a number of subjects, the main one being whether “they can be friends with the English.” In the film Adela and Mrs. Moore are driven through the Chandrapore market (an admirable set built by John Box) and settle at Ronnie’s bungalow in a suburban section of the city—the Civil Station—reserved for the official British. Aziz is seen in the house of a lawyer, Hamidullah, writing out a prescription for the latter’s wife, Begum, who has a fever caused by drinking polluted water from the tap, and this is the only time in the film that he is seen acting as a doctor (except for the very end of the film at Kashmir, where he appears in a local hospital). While he and his friends sit down for dinner, a message arrives from Major Callendar, Aziz’s overbearing boss, ordering him to come to his bungalow “post haste.” But when Aziz arrives there, he is told by a rude servant that the major is gone. Two ladies emerge from the bungalow, Mrs. Callendar and Mrs. Leslie, and, entirely ignoring his presence, hijack the tonga that Aziz had used to get there and order the driver to get to the club. Aziz, puzzled and offended but obliging, calls out to the tonga wallah to go, saying he will pay him “tomorrow,” and the driver goes off, as the two ladies are heard giggling. A cut shows Aziz at the mosque, washing his hands and feet in the tank there, the moon above

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him reflected in the water, its surface barely disturbed by his hand. While Lean cuts, Forster takes time to describe the mosque, its white marble frieze with the ninety-nine names of God engraved on it in black, as Aziz reflects on the nature of love and his connection with Islam, the past glories of which he writes in his poetry (in the book he is also a poet, but this fact is never mentioned in the film). Lean’s camera focuses on the back of his head, as he slowly turns and listens to the rustling leaves that the breeze blows, only to be startled a few moments later by what he thinks is a ghost. He finds out that it is a foreign woman, and in rather rude terms he shouts at her for being an intruder into the mosque, telling her that she has no right to be there, for she has not taken off her shoes. The woman protests that she indeed has, and Aziz responds by apologizing, saying that most English ladies don’t bother to do this, “thinking nobody is there to see them.” Quickly Mrs. Moore—the visitor to the mosque—replies, “God is here,” a line that corresponds almost exactly to that uttered by Mrs. Moore in the book. This wins Aziz over, and during this brief encounter the two take a great liking to each other. This is a key meeting in both book and film, told by Lean with minor variations. Aziz for the first time sees an English lady who does not treat him as an inferior, as the two ladies who had absconded with his tonga just a few minutes earlier did, for instance. He frightens the old lady at first, but as soon as he learns that she has conformed to the custom of his religion, he becomes courteous, impressed and moved by her gentle manner. In the film, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, who as is well known won an Oscar for her portraiture of Mrs. Moore, simply catches the quintessential elderly English lady who, free of bias and well disposed toward the natives, treats Aziz as an individual in whose land she is a mere visitor and perhaps an intruder. There are some differences: in the novel Aziz shows traces of irritability throughout that scene, but the film Aziz, after his initial rude response, behaves as a perfect gentleman. His adoration of the older woman accounts for his eventual transformation after his imprisonment, which had caused his disillusionment with the British. This crucial scene is handled with sensitive touches, expert lighting, and deft editing, but Lean owes a debt to Peggy Ashcroft’s performance, ably seconded by that of Victor Banerjee. From then on, the film maintains the logical progression of the book, as Lean follows lines of the story by and large not far removed from Forster’s. Mrs. Moore’s “adventure” serves as catalyst of things to come and has multiple purposes. She has “seen India” first, before Adela has had a chance to do so, and she tells her so in that many words as soon as she returns to the club. The plot is actually instigated by (a) the above incident, which brings Mrs. Moore face-toface with what she wanted in the first place, to “meet some Indians as friends, socially,” as she had told Turton in the train; and (b) Adela’s expressed desire, soon after the performance of Cousin Kate (which both she and Mrs. Moore didn’t care for), “to see the real India,” as she tells Turton, who is sitting with

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her and Mrs. Callendar in the salon at the club. Turton asks a passing Fielding, “How is one to see the real India?” to which Fielding, without breaking step, casually answers, “Try seeing Indians.” That is a key phrase, for Fielding has used the plural, “Indians,” while the ladies yearn for something abstract: India, not the specific “Indians,” a yearning that shows their ignorance of this important distinction and that leads to disastrous results. Turton, eager to please the ladies (in his way), proposes the “Bridge Party,” not a game, as Mrs. Callendar explains sardonically, but a party to “bridge the gap” between East and West. Next thing we are shown is the Bridge Party itself, which also becomes a catalyst for the rest of the story. Here Mrs. Moore, disgusted with the aloof treatment of Indians by their hosts, berates her son, and here we see their first serious breach—a theme in book and film, for mother and son never connect. Here we also witness Fielding’s invitation to Adela and Mrs. Moore to his place for tea in order to satisfy her wish to see Indians. Fielding, the schoolmaster of the local government college, tells her that there the two ladies can meet an old Hindu philosopher, Professor Godbole. When Adela notes that Mrs. Moore has described Dr. Aziz as “charming,” Fielding readily replies, “We’ll invite him too.” Given the subsequent events, this irony, fully retained in the film, is quite astonishing. Entirely by chance (and how many of such chance events lead to what can be named classic reversals?), Mrs. Moore has met Aziz at the

Adela among the Indian ladies at the Bridge Party. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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temple, tells Adela about it, she tells Fielding, and he does what seems the thing to oblige the ladies, inviting him to his party. Tragic irony, which Forster can handle as a master, is to fully blossom from this incident subsequently. A simple wish to explore a new country, natural and understandable, by the two eager but inexperienced ladies turns into unexpected disasters, not only for one innocent Aziz but also for nearly all the others—including the Anglo-Indians, for they, too, suffer on account of Adela’s collapse at the caves and her accusations of Aziz. To this simple plotline Lean will add motivations to Adela’s behavior, elements to her character absent in the book, as the film events unfold. The plot in both cases—book and film—is astonishingly simple, and yet it already has the contours of a “march of doom,” for the main participants seem to be setting traps for one another and themselves. All the ingredients of tragedy are already assembled, though neither the viewer/reader nor any of the participants have at this point any idea of what the results of these encounters will be—with the possible exception of the sage Godbole (in the film), who, as we shall see, recoils at the mention of visiting the Marabar Caves. The experienced—and heartless—Turton mocks this desire of the two ladies, ascribing it to their naïveté, but he is also the unwitting instigator of the events to follow involving everyone. But even he does not have that slightest idea of the adverse consequences of his action, sincerely meaning to be obliging to the ladies, one of whom is intended for one of his ablest assistants in his work, the city magistrate, Ronny Heaslop. Both in book and film, these plotlines interweave to bring about results no one could have even remotely foreseen. Next, a group of four people—Mrs. Moore, Adela, Godbole, Aziz—assemble at Fielding’s for tea a few days later. Hurt and humiliated by the rest of the AngloIndians, Aziz is highly flattered to receive an invitation from Fielding to attend his party, and as soon as he arrives he and Fielding become instant friends. But the viewer cannot help noticing that Aziz is all too eager to please his new friend, whom he has “seen in the bazaar,” and readily and somewhat obsequiously offers him his collar stud after Fielding has broken his while in the shower. Forster’s Aziz is a more complex individual, bitter and suspicious of the British in general, but he has already been impressed by Mrs. Moore’s courteous treatment of him at the mosque, and his new friend, Fielding, treats him as an equal, telling him to “make himself at home,” a phrase that Aziz had never heard, or expected, from an Englishman. Forster gives a few more touches on Fielding, whose character is already shaped by liberal ideas and who is a declared atheist (a detail Lean scrupulously avoids) as well as free from the “herd mentality” of Chandrapore. He and Aziz are soon joined by the ladies, and as they chat at the table, the two women mention their disappointment at the failure of an Indian couple28 who had invited them to their house to show up that same morning. Godbole, taking sudden interest in their talk, observes that the Indian hosts did not send because “they

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grew ashamed of their house.” That remark seems like a catalyst, for it provokes Aziz to invite the ladies to his house, for he does not want them to be left with the impression that all Indians are impolite; but he quickly retracts when he realizes they have taken him seriously and ask for his address. Rather than show his deplorable shack to such distinguished guests, he proposes a picnic to the Marabar Caves, “a wonder of India.” That prompts a rather ominous stare from Godbole, who is sitting at the little table laid aside for him, peeling bananas, for, as Forster describes him, “he ate and ate and ate.” Godbole is impeccably attired, wearing a turban, waistcoat, dhoti, socks, and clocks, “and his whole appearance,” Forster notes, “suggested harmony—as if he had reconciled the products of East and West.”29 His mystical nature has detected some disturbing sign of danger, and here Alec Guinness’s Godbole conveys that sign perfectly to the discerning eye. It is worth noting that in the book Godbole arrives at the party later, but Lean felt that these warning signs should come at this point. Godbole, both in film and book, apparently has some dread of the Marabars, for he balks at replying to Adela’s inquiry, “Would you tell us something about them?” Pressed by her, since he is the only one in the group who has seen them, he finally responds, “With pleasure,” but his answers are brief and evasive, and Mrs. Moore suspects that Godbole holds back what he really knows. Sensing something ominous in his evasive responses, she asks Fielding to take her on a tour of the college, while

Adela, Aziz, Fielding, and Mrs. Moore at the tea party. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Pictures

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Aziz, Adela, and Godbole repair to the pool, discussing the regenerative cycles of life, their feet dangling in the water to cool from the heat. Their party is rudely interrupted by Ronny, who barges in, ignores the Indian guests, and whisks the two women away, incurring the displeasure of both his mother and Adela, who reacts angrily to his insulting words against Aziz but agrees to go with him to the polo game, while his mother asks to be taken home. It is there during the game that Adela tells Ronny that she has “finally” decided against marrying him. Ronny is visibly shaken, and that is the first time in the film when they connect emotionally, for he takes it rather calmly, though she can see she has hurt him and kisses him on the cheek. Later this evening, during dinner, he apologizes to his mother for his behavior at Fielding’s and tells both women, “See India as you like and when you like,” adding that he has “no earthly right” to tell either of them what to do. His mother accepts his apology graciously but adds a bitter remark about the futility of marriage, literally taken from the book’s pages, that “century upon century of carnal embracement has not brought people any closer understanding of each other.” That phrase is both an explicit and implicit theme in Forster, summing up his opinion of an institution that he considers valueless, and to his credit, Lean puts it in the mouth of a suddenly bitter Mrs. Moore. (In the book this phrase is only a general comment.) The plot has undergone its first important complication at this point, for Aziz’s invitation is accepted, despite the discernibly troubled looks of Godbole. In the ensuing episode, Lean inserts a scene totally absent from the book, though perhaps hinted as an idea. It is the much-criticized incident of Adela’s riding into the country on a bicycle and taking a path among thickly sown elephant grass,30 where she comes across statues in erotic embraces, the remains of ancient sculpture31 on a ruined temple. While this episode is unique and autonomous—and put there deliberately—it is perhaps meant to replace the scene in the novel of the car ride that an Indian nobleman, Nawab Bahadur (entirely absent in the film), offers Ronny and Adela after the polo game. While Bahadur falls asleep, his Eurasian driver runs into an animal; the car is wrecked and they are rescued by a passing lady, Miss Derek (also omitted from the film). In both rides, Ronny and Adela sit in the backseat, and as their hands touch during a jolt on the road, “that thrill, so frequent in the animal kingdom,” makes them realize theirs was a lovers’ quarrel. As soon as they are back at the station, Adela recants, taking back what she said at the Maidan, and they become engaged to be married. In the film scene, a visually breathtaking sequence totally without dialogue, strains of Maurice Jarre’s music act like a voice to a viewer who sees Adela riding her bicycle to the ruined temple, looking at several nude statues in erotic embraces, staring at them for several minutes, and then being chased away by a pack of shrieking monkeys. Lean’s camera captures the stern faces of ancient statues of bare-breasted Hindu goddesses, some seen by Adela, some re-

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vealed to the viewer only, as Adela pedals away in a hurry. She arrives back at the bungalow distraught, falls into Ronny’s arms, tears in her eyes, telling him that she takes back what she had said at the polo and that she has been “such a fool.” Next thing we see is an evening ball, where they dance together at the suggestion of Mrs. Moore, a sign that they are engaged. Adela’s visit to the ruined temple and her viewing the statues has an impact on the viewer’s interpretation of the character of Adela and on the subsequent scene at the caves, where Adela claims that she has been attacked by Aziz. This is a point to which we shall return. The second act of the story (in the book we are still in the “Mosque” part) concludes with a scene where Fielding visits an ailing Aziz, who is in bed with a slight fever, a result of the change in weather. The book mentions that Aziz became sick at the same time as Godbole did, after the tea party, a piece of information given to the reader by an elderly doctor, Panna Lal, who had visited him on orders from Major Callendar. Alarmed, Aziz asks the doctor what the cause of Godbole’s ailment might be, and while his visiting friends think of “diarrhea,” Lal reveals confidentially that the sage suffers from a more mundane ailment, “hemorrhoids.” Later in the novel we learn that Adela too had become “ill” at that point, suffering from a vague mental disorder she calls “half pressure,” a piece of information that comes to the reader after the trial, when she is conversing with Fielding about her mental state before the visit to the Marabars. Lean of course omits all that in the film, where the cause of Adela’s “bothers” is attributed by Mrs. Moore to her visit to India: “India forces one to come face-to-face with oneself,”32 says the wise old woman, leading the viewer to surmise that the cause of Adela’s disturbed state is attributable to her sexual arousal after seeing the statues. If one follows Forster, however, this coincidence of three major characters becoming ill after the same event may suggest that the Marabars had already exerted their evil influence over a group of innocents, an idea only remotely hinted at in the film, where Aziz’s illness is merely a result of “the change in weather,” as Fielding is told by Doctor Lal, as the latter exits from Aziz’s shack. But Fielding’s visit is still a crucial event in the film, showing Fielding’s easy disposition as he mixes with Indians and teases Aziz about “shamming” his illness. Emboldened to hope he has made a true friend among the English, Aziz shows Fielding a photograph of his dead wife, and in the age of the purdah, this amounts to brotherhood, for a married woman could only reveal her face to a close relative. As he leaves Aziz, Fielding asks him if he needs his help to postpone the expedition at the caves, but Aziz replies that “preparations are almost ready.” It has been planned so that the same group—the two women plus Godbole, Aziz, and Fielding—will participate in it. This episode brings to a close the second act of the story, after about forty-five minutes of film, perhaps a bit too lengthy a section, the crucial “setup” for the main incident. But thanks to Lean’s skillful editing, the pace of the movie has never slackened, while the

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major and some of the minor character sketches have been drawn and the plot has advanced its multiple strands.

ACT THREE Part II of the novel opens with a fascinating geological description of the genesis of the caves, empty bubbles inside rocks in the high places of Dravidia that have been there since the beginning of time: “No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless eons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom.”33 A few have been opened through tunnels dug by man but avoided by all as habitations of any kind, even by ascetics. “Some saddhus,” Forster tells, “did once settle in a cave, but they were smoked out, and even Buddha, who must have passed this way down to the Bo Tree of Gya, shunned a renunciation more complete than his own, and has left no legend of struggle or victory in the Marabar.”34 The caves that have been opened have been polished to an extraordinary degree, and a perfect reflection of a lighted match rewards the visitor. There is of course the terrifying echo, described in a subsequent chapter, something that unsettles Mrs. Moore and Adela, both of whom become sick after their visit there. Mrs. Moore is the first to lose her nerve; what she hears is not the usual echo, as in many other places of India, but an indistinct noise, something like a “Boum” in response to whatever sound is made. It is this lack of distinction between ideas or objects that brings an onslaught of doubts about the value of anything in life and that unsettles the elderly lady, who from that point on sinks into despair and apathy. The echo has unnerved her and it is the source of her moodiness, loss of faith, and eventual degeneration and death. Here Forster delves into subjects of life and death, belief and doubt, cosmic indifference, as a result of an echo that demolishes all distinctions, reducing man’s hold on rationality. Forster does not give this as a diatribe, but rather as a dramatic description of what a visitor to the caves might experience. An old lady’s hold on life’s meaning is shattered beyond repair. Mrs. Moore and possibly Adela are both struck by the same malady, both suffering psychic traumas that affect their lives as well as those of others. Lean of necessity only hints at these metaphysical explorations, and it is with a combination of sight, sound, and action that film is capable of compensating for this loss in explication. Still, the film remains loyal to its original source up to the beginning of the trip, cutting through some detailed descriptions but also showing distinctly the differences between two approaches, some of which are worth noting. As said, the expedition had arrived at the caves with Aziz and the two ladies only, for Fielding and Godbole had missed the train because Godbole’s prayers had been too

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lengthy! (A commentator35 opines that Godbole deliberately lengthened his prayer to miss the train, his eyes having expressed some dread at the prospective trip.) Fielding promises a distressed Aziz that they will reach them “somehow.” Thus, the third act of the movie begins on an ominous note, for Godbole states that this is a Tuesday, “extremely inauspicious” for such a journey. Aziz, however, is soothed by Mrs. Moore’s words that “we will now be Moslems together,” a phrase he used to welcome the ladies. The film, by the way, has scrupulously avoided the use of the word “Moslem” up to this point, and the viewer only guesses that Aziz is a Moslem by his visit to the mosque, where he and Mrs. Moore meet. In this scene Aziz is presented as a leader of a rather disorganized group of low-class Indians, a likeable young man whose coarse manner occasionally puzzles and discomfits the ladies. The group first boards the train; then, having mounted a painted elephant and accompanied by a large retinue of servants, the travelers arrive at the first stop, where they temporarily camp, and Aziz gives orders to prepare breakfast. They visit the first cave, where Mrs. Moore suffers from shock and fright as she hears the echo repeated and staggers out of the cave and collapses on her chair. When Adela sees her unsettled and offers her something to drink, Mrs. Moore utters a few words, as she stares at the clearly visible lunar surface just emerging from behind a rock: “I suppose old people think we are mere passing figures in a Godless universe.” She is not aware that Adela has not heard her, but the viewer understands that the old lady has suffered an unsettling experience that shatters her belief in God or immortality—and in this sense we see Lean follows Forster’s line, albeit mainly with visual means, about her change. Mrs. Moore declines going further and in friendly tones advises Aziz not to take as many people in this time, and Aziz, finding Mrs. Moore’s suggestion quite sensible, says, “We will take only the guide.” Because of the misunderstandings that will result from this well-meant but ill-advised decision, it is important to stress the differences between film and novel in this incident, for these are essential in the interpretation of the mystery of Adela’s experience. Up to this point in the film, Adela has behaved quite normally, despite her justified alarm at seeing Aziz hanging on the rail of the train while it rides over a bridge, crying out to her, “Look, I am Douglas Fairbanks!” She and Mrs. Moore think him a bit eccentric perhaps, but certainly not dishonorable. A short while later, during the ride to the caves, as she and Aziz sit on the elephant, he tells her that he is proud to have the two ladies with him (“You don’t know how much you honor me”), saying he feels “like Alamgir” riding an elephant to battle—a reference to the Mogul emperor. Much is made of the “six Mogul emperors” in the book, a lengthy disquisition omitted in the film. As they start up the Kawa Dol alone, their wind-blown figures sketched against the horizon in a long shot, the guide preceding them by twenty feet or so, they stop momentarily to catch their breath and sit on a piece of rock, close together. Adela begs his permission to ask him

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“a personal question,” to which Aziz nods yes. She asks, “Did you love your wife when you married her?” Aziz, a bit puzzled but seemingly willing to satisfy his guest’s curiosity, responds, “I never laid eyes on her before our marriage. I only saw her picture in a photograph. This had all been arranged by our families.” “How about love?” asks Adela, almost in tears. “We were a man and woman,” responds Aziz, “and we were young.” They proceed upward, and again there is a pause, this time by Adela, who leans against a rock, breathing hard from the climb. Aziz extends a helping hand, and when she takes it a close-up shows their two hands, a white one and a brown, interlocked. A medium close-up flashes to his face, as he stands on higher ground, perhaps conscious of her admiration—for a shot, like a word, has connotations. They continue upward, Aziz still holding her hand, and a moment later she asks him, “Did you have more than one wife?” and he answers rather despondently, “No, just one in my case.” A few steps later he releases her hand and excuses himself, leaving her alone for a few minutes. He runs past the guide who is sitting on a ledge beyond, goes to the farthest end of the row of caves, sits before the last one, and is seen smoking a cigarette, looking rather agitated. When he returns, Adela is gone. He asks the guide, who only responds with a vague gesture, and he starts looking into the caves, but with no success. The viewer, meanwhile, has seen Adela entering one of the caves and momentarily catches a glimpse of her inside, having lit a match and blowing it out when she hears Aziz calling for her. When she sees his figure cast in shadow at the entrance of the cave, she is in tears and on the verge of a breakdown. Moments later, a cut shows the viewer the elephant back at the camp entering the water tank, some of the water spilling over and flooding a dry area.36 Another cut shows a piece of rock and then Adela’s topi rolling down the slanting hillside; and a moment later she is seen scrambling down the gully, getting scratched among cactus leaves, running frantically, her hands flailing in the air. After several fruitless attempts to find her in any of the caves, Aziz angrily slaps the guide, who still has no idea where she went—and the latter vanishes—then he notices a car in the distance down the road, and clearly recognizes Adela getting into it. He stumbles in front of one of the caves, and there finds her field glasses with the broken strap and places them in his pocket. He dashes down the rocky surfaces, sliding and scrambling, and when he arrives at the camp he finds that Fielding is there, and both he and the troubled Mrs. Moore ask him where Adela is. He responds that he saw her enter “Mrs. Callendar’s car,” for it was she who had driven Fielding up there, a fact Fielding confirms. This is a cinematically taut sequence and the first truly dramatic episode in the film, an hour into it. What happens at the caves has grave consequences on the fortunes of all the principals, and the tone of the film shifts to tragedy. But it also has a bearing on the interpretation one chooses to give to Adela’s collapse

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Elephant ride with Aziz, Adela, and Mrs. Moore to the caves. Columbia Pictures/ Photofest © Columbia Pictures

in the cave, for the Forster version is punctuated quite differently, and for that reason worth recounting. Forster’s episode is also tautly narrated, in chapter 15 of part II, “Caves,” of the novel. We are told Aziz and Adela continued toward the “summit,” the Kawa Dol, a rock where the big boulder is perched, a bubble (an unopened cave) swaying in the wind. There is a large group of caves before one gets there, many more caves than the “six or seven” alluded to by Godbole at the tea party. In fact Aziz and Adela enter several of them at the urging of the guide and find nothing interesting in them, and Aziz keeps assuring Miss Quested that some of them were bound to have some “old interesting carvings,” revealing his ignorance of what the caves were all about. Aziz did not really care for this entire tour guiding affair, and he was worried about the breakfast when they would return to the camp, having seen signs of disorganization there. Adela, on the other hand, hardly took any interest in him, thinking of her impending marriage to Ronny. She abhorred the way the Anglo-Indians treated the natives, especially the women, and the idea of living in Chandrapore and becoming like them had upset her. Still, she trusted in Ronny’s goodwill and common sense, and in her own, and she thought that they could make it if they lived sensibly. But at that moment, another thought occurred to her: “What about love?” Did she love him? No, and he did not love her. Adela stopped, stunned to have realized that she and Ronny were going to be married soon without loving each

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other. She paused in shock, and Aziz, assuming she was tired, asked if he was taking her up too fast. She recovered quickly and in turn asked him if he was married. Though the reader knows he is a widower (Adela does not know that, though the Adela of the film seems to have known it through Mrs. Moore), he answers yes, “for he found it more artistic to have a wife alive for the moment.” They exchange a few more words, during which he adds he has children, and then Adela asks him what she thinks is an innocent question, “Have you one wife or more than one?” (Which is not the same as the film question: “Did you have more than one wife?”) Aziz is shocked beyond words. He finds it insufferably insulting that “an educated Indian Moslem” would be asked if he was a polygamist. “Appalling, hideous!” is his thought, which he does not externalize, but to hide his confusion he bolts off into a cave to recover his balance. Adela, ignorant that she has offended him, also enters a cave, but when he comes out she has disappeared. He asks the guide who does not know, he hits him (as in the film), but then he is reassured when he sees her down the gully entering Miss Derek’s (this time) car. He believes she has changed her plans and is going back to Chandrapore, so he returns to the camp rather cheerful, thinking the expedition is a success; finds Fielding there, and the somewhat lethargic Mrs. Moore; and invents some stories about the departure of Miss Quested. It is only Fielding who suspects that something has gone wrong. We might pause here to review what the discrepancies in the narration of this episode between the Forster and Lean versions might mean. Forster’s portrait of Adela up to this point has been less flattering than that of Lean, who chose Judy Davis for her physical charisma, a trait that Forster’s Adela (“freckled and with angular body”) lacks. Forster’s Adela is curious, intellectual (“the logical girl”), distressed to see the man she will marry being so callous in his treatment of Indians, for whom he has contempt. Lean’s Adela shows the same curiosity, genuinely desiring to “see India,” but she is also shown as someone who has had a sexual awakening while in India, as her adventure at the ruined temple demonstrates. Lean adds a dreamlike sequence of the embracing statues before she falls asleep, as a storm breaks outside of her window following her “engagement” dance with Ronny. There is also some evidence—judging from the way the scenes of her climb with Aziz were photographed—that she felt some physical attraction for Aziz, after she asks him the question (in the film) about loving his wife. Later, when he extends his hand to her as she is leaning back on a rock, we see in his face an image of the conquering Mogul emperor (he had bragged during the elephant ride that he had imagined being Alamgir) saving a lady in distress. The shot showing their locked hands also suggests that the races—perhaps the bloods—felt the attraction. The question she asks him a moment later, “Did you have more than one wife?” seems rather illogical at

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this point, for he already told her when she asked, “You were married, weren’t you?” that he “had” one (note the past tense). We assume that Adela of the film must have known she was dead, for he had said as much to Mrs. Moore at the mosque—a piece of information that, one imagines, she must have imparted to her friend. The reason for her asking him such a question seems unclear in the film (it is fully explained in the book—Mrs. Turton had told her that Moslems insist on “their full four”), and it could mean one or two of several things: Did he marry again after his first wife died? Or was it a custom for Moslems to marry more than one wife? It is not clear to the viewer who may not have read Forster’s book that that was the reason why Aziz begged to excuse himself—politely—for a few moments in order to have a smoke—something he does not state to her. His removing himself for a few minutes could be interpreted as an entirely casual occasion; he was tired, and for some reason (that remains unexplained) he was somewhat upset and needed a smoke. There is something else, of course, in discussing these discrepancies: the Forster Adela had looked at Aziz when she had asked him if he had a wife with some admiration—physically she found him attractive, for “women of his race,” for, Forster explains, “there was nothing of the vagrant in her blood.” That statement simply eradicates the premise that Lean had labored to create, making Adela not only an attractive young woman in the person of Judy Davis, but one who had undergone a sexual awakening while in India, linking her collapse at the cave to that awakening. Lean also says in an interview37 that Adela had been attracted to Aziz, and that “she wanted him” when she was in the cave. These are two different Adelas, for only Lean’s has had a sexual awakening. The collapse at the cave—which remains a mystery anyway in both film and book—in Lean’s film could be interpreted as a reaction to her attraction to Aziz, a revolt against that attraction, reinforced by her realization that she “did not love” Ronny, a confession she makes later at the trial—and of course also stated in the book. By following the episode as told by Lean, mostly by visual means, for dialogue is sparse during this sequence, we are inclined to interpret it as some form of sexual awakening—theoretically not improbable, given the fact that we have seen several women38 in previous Lean films undergoing Romantic/sexual jolts. But at the same time we, as viewers of this film, are denied the very specific explanations given in the book for both Adela’s and Aziz’s behavior. Forster’s Adela was upset at the prospect of marrying Ronny without love and living in Chandrapore, a place where the natives were treated unfairly; Aziz was affronted when his marital status as an educated Indian had stupidly come into question. Of course, as we have seen, Lean wanted Adela Quested to be more of a sexually attractive woman than the Forster version of her was; and he also wanted her collapse at the cave to be linked to her unfulfilled sexual desires—something that does not preclude her discovery during the adventure that she did not love

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Ronny. The two “epiphanies” may have brought about her breakdown. But Lean did not establish a clear reason for Aziz’s taking leave of her at a most crucial moment in the sequence, and thus the most important dramatic scene in this part of the film story remains somewhat muddled. There are actually two muddles here (the word “muddle” is used in both book and film repeatedly): one is, as said, Aziz’s removing himself from his companion without a sufficient explanation; the other, what really happens to Adela while she is inside the cave. To the film’s credit, Adela is shown in the cave, striking a match and looking at its reflection in the wall, then in tears and near collapse as Aziz’s figure, in half shadow, appears at the entrance of the cave. His crying out, “Miss Quested!” several times is something she hears in an echo, while we are told by Forster that the cave renders any noise from the outside an indistinct sound. Briefly, two conclusions can be reached from these two different versions of the same episode. One is that the viewer in the film is being deliberately left in the dark about Aziz’s motive for leaving Adela alone and going for a smoke, and thus, through his action, he causes a disaster that remains unexplained; the other is that the written medium is capable of rendering thought (mental process) in detail, more accurately than film, which is limited, at least in this occasion, to visual expression. Voice-over could have been awkward, and in any case, that is not a device Lean resorts to frequently (not in all but one of his epics anyway).39 The rhythm of the events as they unfold in the film—Aziz’s being immediately worried about Adela’s departure and the much quicker responses of Fielding and of Mrs. Moore when they learn of Adela’s suddenly leaving the scene—increase the suspense and quicken the viewer’s anxiety about the crisis. In this sense, the film’s ability to engage the viewer is undeniable. Still, we are not told of Aziz’s small prevarications or his inability to accept the fact that his party has failed, and we are not told of Fielding’s increasing doubts that Indians are really competent or reliable people, and that he often feels let down by his trust in them—doubts that, to his mind, reinforce premises used by the AngloIndians in the book. Film can make things faster and more exciting, but we are not told the whole truth—crucial details needed for interpretation—as stated in the verbal medium.

ACT FOUR We are now in the middle of the book/film, and the main crisis at the caves has occurred. Aziz has lost Adela while tour-guiding her in the caves, and the consequences are going to be horrendous to both and to those around them. Events follow in rapid succession when the train arrives back to Chandrapore, beginning with the arrest of Aziz and culminating in his trial, a section that could be considered act four of the film. Aziz is being escorted away by the police

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and clinging to Fielding’s arm when the latter is called by Turton, who wants “to have a word” with him. Against Aziz’s protestations, Fielding has to comply with his superior’s order and joins Turton in an office near the station and there he hears from him that Aziz had attempted to rape Adela in one of the caves. Stunned, Fielding protests that the matter “is resting on some terrible misunderstanding,” and that it could be cleared up in five minutes. Turton smugly dismisses Fielding’s point, adding that his “twenty-five years of experience” in this country have taught him that nothing but trouble arises “when English and Indians attempt to be intimate.” Following that, Fielding has an extensive interview with McBryde, during which the latter is making preparations for the “report” of what has occurred at the caves, and it is there that Fielding learns that Adela has already made her deposition accusing Aziz of assault, as McBryde dangles the field glasses with the broken strap that Aziz has brought back with him. These are to be used as evidence in court, as are some letters found in Aziz’s wallet from a friend who recommends “a brothel.” In revulsion, Fielding replies that he doesn’t want to read his friend’s private letters, and that “you may have a right to throw stones at the young man but I haven’t.” In the book this scene is lengthier and develops the point that Fielding is no longer trusted by the Chandrapore establishment. There McBryde also states categorically that Fielding has no other option but “to toe the line”; otherwise he leaves a “gap” in the line. Forster shows more clearly the dilemma that Fielding faces here: an Englishman has to stick with his people and their tribal interests—“can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” as Turton puts it to him at the club meeting (in the film) later that evening. Forster’s Fielding is conscious of this dilemma and that his siding with the defense has cost him his reputation with his countrymen, a feeling that does not sit well with him, as shown on several subsequent occasions. He is also conscious of that fact that his Indian friends, to whom he has given his full and hearty support, do not always trust him and think him capable of reverting to his tribal instincts. “In the end you English always stick together,” Aziz contemptuously tells him when Fielding is obliged to give shelter to a helpless Adela, shunned by the British after her testimony. Fielding’s position verges on the tragic, as he tries to steer a course that he perceives as the most honest, honorable, and humane, supporting those who are weak and injured regardless of which side they belong to, a point stressed in the novel repeatedly, where we are told that tragedy touches the Anglo-Indian Turton as well. The two points of view are irreparably divided, and yet, as Forster puts it, “it is not possible to regard tragedy from two points of view, and whereas Turton had decided to avenge the girl, he hoped to save the man.”40 Ironies compound, and as the narrative proceeds, Fielding sees his efforts to save his friend eventually backfire when he also tries to save Adela from lynching after the trial. Some of his friends, Aziz in particular and Hamidullah in the book, will turn against him despite his personal sacrifices for them. In fact, Forster understands tragedy both within

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the framework of tribal interests and as a personal condition that might be attributed to fate or mere accident. Adela Quested, he states, was the last person in Chandrapore to accuse an Indian unjustly—and yet that is precisely what has happened. It may have been a delusion, or the result of a personal conflict, but once she makes her charge against Aziz, all hell breaks loose, for the matter is transferred back to the “herd” interests and quickly escalates to the point of collective insanity. However, in both film and book, she is the one capable of restoring order by withdrawing her accusation at the last moment—but even that does not fully mend the permanently injured relationship between Aziz and Fielding. Book and film take a divergent course on this point, as we have seen has happened repeatedly. The progression of pretrial events is momentarily suspended when Fielding, upon his return to the college, has a strange meeting with Godbole, who is visiting him to ask a question and to announce his departure for his native land, where he plans to establish a school along the lines of the Chandrapore Government College. His difficulty is that he is trying to find a “suitable name” for the new school. “A name for the college?” the amazed Fielding asks. To him, Godbole is either dense or indifferent. Isn’t he worried about what happened to Aziz? Godbole retorts that “the result has already been decided,” a phrase Fielding thinks absurd, and he tells Godbole he (Fielding) “must do something.” “You can do what you like,” Lean’s Godbole tells Fielding, “but the result will be exactly the same.” Lean has been criticized for reducing the character of the Hindu sage that Forster created to a comic figure, and Guinness is fully complicit in such interpretation, talking “mumbo-jumbo,” a phrase Lean himself used to describe Guinness’s Godbole, thus allowing the viewer to deduce that the philosopher is occasionally presented as funny and unworthy of serious attention. There is some basis for such criticism. Forster’s Godbole is indeed presented as preoccupied with an irrelevant and seemingly trivial question, given the circumstances, the name for his school. In the novel, Godbole mentions the name of the school subject but subsequently engages Fielding in a philosophical disquisition about the nature of good and evil, entirely omitted (and impossible) in the film. When asked whether Aziz is innocent or guilty, Godbole dodges the question, and when Fielding persists, asking again whether he thinks Aziz is or is not capable of such an action, Godbole, correctly, points out to him that now he is asking a different question, having shifted the argument. Annoyed by what looks like an evasive answer, Fielding persists, and then the sage responds that evil, “according to our philosophy,” cannot be performed in isolation and that “when an evil action is performed, all performed it.” Unable to grasp this fine point of Hindu doctrine, Fielding seems irritated, and then Godbole calmly explains that “good and evil” are “both aspects of my Lord,” and “when one is present it implies the absence of the other.” Godbole adds that evil should be differenti-

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ated from suffering, for that is a matter for the individual and, if a young lady had sunstroke, “that is a matter of no significance to the universe.”41 Ingenious, profound, and perfectly logical—although perhaps a little too abstruse for an average viewer (Lean branded Forster’s Godbole “sententious”42)—Godbole has practically solved the problem—and the mystery—of the caves, and if his logic had been applied to both the Chandrapore authorities and Fielding’s allies, the whole question of who did what and for what reason would have been resolved there with these words. Forster’s Godbole is anything but a “mumbo-jumbo” caricature of the philosopher, and, though enigmatic (if you do not understand him), he is not a comical figure. Nevertheless, the film Godbole remains a mysterious and intriguing figure. The Forster Godbole disappears after that scene and is not seen again until Fielding visits Mau, in the last section of the book, “Temple,” when he presides over the ceremonies of the birth of Krishna, a scene entirely absent from the film. But in the film Godbole stays on until after the trial is over. Certainly Lean needed him to punctuate certain episodes that might have looked incomplete without him. Godbole is used as a foil to Mrs. Moore, for instance, when he stares at her during her departure; he stands upon a platform as she lowers the window to see him, as the train gathers speed, his hands joined above his head in a Hindu salute. “Godbole doesn’t really exist,” Nigel Havers states in an interview; “he just comes out of thin air.”43 Godbole has a most serious look on his face, for in some ways these two figures are both sages—she a “withered priestess,” he someone who can see that we are “all part of a reality we cannot see.” Both possess uncanny telepathic qualities—for Mrs. Moore too, just before she goes, says, referring to the court, that “nothing that I can say or do will make the slightest bit of difference,” repeating almost verbatim Godbole’s prediction that the result of the trial will be the same regardless of anyone’s actions. Also both Fielding and Aziz refer to her as “ghost,” a phrase Godbole of the film has asserted she is, “a soul that has been here before.” Mrs. Moore’s “ghost” of course lives on, for in the final stages of the film, Fielding announces to Aziz that he has married “Mrs. Moore’s daughter,” which to Aziz means that his beloved Mrs. Moore has come back to life, and the begetter of her new incarnation is none other than his friend. Lean’s Godbole has added to that interpretation. Act four concludes with the staging of the trial, where Adela, under the unrelenting questioning of McBryde, who resembles an inquisitor, breaks down and declares that “Dr. Aziz never entered the cave.” The trial follows pretty closely along the lines of the book, which includes Fielding’s giving shelter to Adela after Aziz is released and she wanders about, for none of her former allies and supporters will take her in. As she is escorted away by Fielding, Aziz, driven away on a landau by his friends and decorated with garlands, sees them and cries, “Richard!” (“Cyril” of the book). Fielding, unwilling to leave Adela in the

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middle of a potential riot, answers, “I’ll come back!” He does, after he has taken Adela back to the college, where he also receives a telegram that informs him of Mrs. Moore’s death; but by that time Aziz, dressed in white Indian costume and placing mascara in his eyelashes, has undergone a radical change of mood. He denounces Fielding in harsh words, accusing that “in the end you British stick together.” This marks their rift, and is the final complication of the story. Of necessity, this is a rapidly told sequence. As Lean stated, he wanted to “wrap things up quickly after the trial,” and he treated this important late complication as economically as possible, and he centered the action on the visit of Fielding to Kashmir, the location chosen to shoot the last encounter of the two friends. Two years have passed (the exact time of the film action is not indicated), and Fielding is frigidly received by his ex-friend, who hardly shakes his hand without a word but who relents as soon as he learns that Fielding has married “Mrs. Moore’s daughter.” Aziz is then seen writing a letter to Adela, who is in London, in alternating cuts between his writing and her reading his letter sitting at a desk. Upon finishing, and hearing in Aziz’s voice that Fielding’s trip ends, she walks to the window lashed by rain, looks outside, and withdraws with a telling look. The movie ends there.

ACT FIVE The reconciliation between Aziz and Fielding might be considered act five. This complication, however, and its resolution, is much more extensively treated in the book, and the reader has a chance to be informed about what happened between Fielding and Aziz as well as between Fielding and Adela, in a series of discussions that throw some light onto her behavior at the caves, and also Aziz’s new alienation from the British—as a whole this time, because the rift in the friendship between him and Fielding was never quite repaired, as the film, hastily concluded, shows. Pauline Kael, in her laudatory response to A Passage to India (remember her virulent attack of Ryan’s Daughter) claims that Lean’s staging of the trial is triumphantly superior as drama to Forster’s original rendition of it.44 Her point may be well taken, for the staging of the trial is a cinematic event in itself: a brilliant performance by Michael Culver as the bigoted McBryde, and even a better one by Judy Davis, who, among the jeers of the gallery Indian crowd, recants and frees Aziz, while a deluge (not in the book) provides a “catharsis” of emotions as the delirious crowds carry a triumphant (and puzzled) Aziz on their shoulders. Lean has thrown into this trial everything and the kitchen sink, and it works, both emotionally and aesthetically. But one needs to make some qualifications, as comparisons go. The trial in the film is the climax in the action, as Kael herself admits that from that point on the film

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meanders and closes rather weakly. In the Forster novel, the trial occurs about the middle of it, while the climactic scenes arrive later in part III, “Temples.” Forster elaborates in the remaining several chapters of “Caves,” particularly chapters 27 to 32, how Fielding provides hospitality to a forlorn Adela, while his relations with Aziz deteriorate. To underscore two different viewpoints—the novelist’s and the filmmaker’s—some mention must be made of the details in these chapters. Fielding has several talks with Adela while she stays at the college, two of which, the first and the last, are recorded minutely. Part of this dialogue has to do with an attempt by Fielding to understand what happened at the caves, but Adela fails to give an adequate explanation, only saying that she had felt “ill” since Fielding’s tea party, not a real illness she explains, but living “at half pressure,” while an echo rang at her ears until the trial was over. During those talks Adela gains Fielding’s respect, for she is humble, repentant, full of common sense, and genuinely wanting to apologize to those she injured. But her efforts are in vain, for Hamidullah, present on one of those occasions, is justifiably enraged, for she is the person who has ruined his best friend. She was unable to connect with Indians, and her sacrifice, as Forster puts it, “was rightly rejected, because, though it came from her heart, it did not include her heart.”45 Though Adela is not redeemed by the Indians, she remains grateful to Fielding until Ronny, who breaks his engagement with her, is able to secure her passage to England. This section also shows the deterioration of the relationship between Fielding and Aziz, who now begins to suspect that Fielding is returning to England to marry Adela for her money. Unfounded rumors had it that, while at the college, Fielding visited her at night, and that the two had become lovers. Fielding indignantly rejects this notion, and even calls Aziz a “little rotter,” an insult that Aziz magnanimously forgives but that seems to have left a permanent scar between them—a scar that never entirely heals. The film shows this rift in a brief but powerful scene right after the trial, as Aziz explodes when Fielding pleads with him to let her off paying, saying, “Let her keep the money to buy herself a husband.” Fielding, in the film, refuses to follow Aziz on the landau to the party and stands in the rain, an overlapping shot connecting this scene directly to flowing waters at Kashmir, picking up the trip toward Srinagar. Still, the novel shows this “tragic coolness” between Aziz and his English friend in broader connotations, for Aziz is now convinced that Fielding is marrying Adela for her money and he feels betrayed and foolish, for he let the money slip away from him. Feeling suspicious, and certain of Fielding’s “treachery,” he rejects a letter of reconciliation that Fielding sent him before departing: “Cyril would marry Miss Quested—he grew certain of it.”46 Such was “the natural conclusion of the horrible senseless picnic,” Forster concludes his chapter (31), attributing the catastrophe to the caves and their echo that had first disoriented Mrs. Moore and then frightened Adela and led to her collapse.

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The novel treats in greater length and depth the causes of disruption of the lives of several people, a disruption that, despite efforts, is never mended. The film skips this analysis of cause and effect, for its basis is the logic of action and the consequences of action, promoting the idea that Adela had a “hallucination” while at the cave caused by her sexual awakening—an idea briefly mentioned by Fielding as he takes Adela to the college in a closed landau. As we have seen, at the trial she realizes that Aziz never entered the cave (something the viewer knows) and recants at the last moment, saving Aziz. Thus, the fifth act begins with the rift between Aziz and Fielding—and on this simple framework the film follows the book—and that is the complication that is resolved in the final section of the film—as Fielding, accompanied by Stella,47 who is shown, though without speaking a word, at the side of her husband, visits Aziz at Kashmir. This fifth act may be said to serve as the equivalent of the book’s third section, “Temple,” which describes the ceremony at Mau, with Godbole as the head of the rituals of the birth of Krishna, given in great detail by Forster but reduced to moments of fireworks when Godbole lights the sacred flames in the Lean film. As stated, Lean filmed his last section at Srinagar, Kashmir,48 while Mau is in central India, one of the Hindu states, where Godbole’s birthplace was. Lean chose Kashmir to contrast with the heat of the plains and also to add to the epic sweep of the film, providing some stunning shots of the snows of the Himalayas, the mountainous city of Srinagar, and the serene, dazzling waters of the Lake Dal, where a houseboat serves as Aziz’s quarters. But he still omitted the bulk of ceremony that Godbole alludes to; only the very end is shown, “the Festival of Lights,” during which Godbole is seen briefly lighting the holy candles, as fireworks go on. One could argue that the entire Krishna birth ceremony could have been an addition to the film’s spectacle, but it would also have distracted from the main line of action, being too elaborate and somewhat irrelevant to the theme of reconciliation of the two friends, as the plot is progressing to its end. It would also have added to its length, already two hours and forty five minutes. In the Forster version, Aziz has established a new practice there, with the help of Godbole, in a state that is entirely Hindu, with hardly any Moslem or English population in it. When Fielding arrives, he is in the company not only of Stella (who is only referred to in the book) but of Ralph, a youth, the other son of Mrs. Moore (she has three children in the book as does Aziz). After an attack of bees on the visitors, Aziz meets them very coldly, and it is not until he learns who Ralph is (he thinks he is the brother of Adela and calls him “Mr. Quested”) that he relents and is friendly to them. He and Fielding reconcile, but during a ride in the countryside, Aziz gives a much quoted answer to Fielding, who asks if they can be friends now, that they cannot, as long as the English occupy their country.

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The film condenses this section of the book, altering the ending, thus giving cause to some critics to brand it a betrayal of Forster’s novel. Lean quickly cuts from the scene after the trial, when Fielding is standing in the rain alone while Aziz is being driven away by his friends to celebrate, to a stream in a mountain ravine covered with snow, a sign showing “Srinagar,” where Fielding and his wife are headed in a car. They stop momentarily to admire the Himalayan peaks, with some marvelous visual shots by Ernest Day and inspiring musical strains by Maurice Jarre (who garnered the second Oscar of the film), and soon we are shown Godbole riding on his bike to the hospital, where Aziz has established his new practice, to announce the arrival of his guests. Aziz dismisses the idea angrily, berating Godbole for not having told him they were coming, and he greets Fielding coldly when they meet, only changing mood when Fielding announces he has married “Stella, Mrs. Moore’s daughter.” Aziz mutters, “What a blunder,” then he shouts out, his arms extended, “Mrs. Moore!” and then a cut shows Godbole lighting the holy candles during the ceremony. Aziz is seen writing a moving letter to Miss Quested, praising her “courage” at the trial, which has enabled him to be “happy up here with [his] children, instead of in prison.”

Mrs. Moore enters the cave, where she is frightened by the echo. Columbia Pictures/Photofest © Columbia Picture

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There is a cut to Adela, reading his letter in deep astonishment. Another cut shows Aziz and Fielding seen embracing and parting as friends, before Fielding and Stella get into their car, Aziz standing alone on the roadside watching as they drive away. “I don’t think I will ever see them again,” we hear his voice as Adela is reading his letter. We see Adela looking outside, as rain lashes her window, then quickly turning away, as if to hide her emotion.

Conclusions: Lean versus Forster Lean’s ending, and generally many of his changes throughout the film, have been regarded by some49 as a betrayal of Forster’s novel, but on the whole Lean claims to have adhered to the main events of the novel, departing only at certain crucial points. Following the above close comparisons, one might sum up these points and make a final assessment of the pros and cons of the changes within the context of the entire film as it stands in comparison to the novel or as an entity in itself. These changes have already been described in detail, but it would be useful to recap the main points. As the Lean script generally follows the larger plotline established by Forster in the novel, the main departures from Forster may be said to be three: (a) Adela’s visit to the temple and seeing the erotic statues; (b) the differences in narrative and approach regarding what happens at the caves; (c) the ending of the story, including the posttrial events in the novel. The added scene of Adela’s visit to the temple was vehemently dismissed by Santha Rama Rau, who found the statues sequence “a vulgarity so remote from Forster’s oblique, equivocal approach to Adela’s sexual malaise that I’m sure that I would have argued furiously against it if I’d been given the opportunity.”50 As the writer of a script which Lean ignored, she found Lean’s approach “to Forster’s very dramatic, visually arresting novel,” to be “heavy handed,” a means of winning over mass audiences that, according to her, did not need such extra emphasis on Adela’s sexual awakening to get the point.51 As pointed out, Lean altered Adela’s character significantly. Forster’s Adela, aside from her physical plainness, is intellectual, curious about the new culture, and unsure about her feelings for Ronny, who is infuriated with her constant questions about his unfair treatment of the Indians. Lean’s Adela is interested in discovering the “real India,” to be sure, but also a young woman who gets her first sexual jolt while visiting the ancient ruins and seeing the erotic statues. That is the crucial incident, the preamble that connects her to the adventure at the caves, which is, as we have seen, an entirely sexual incident, of course entirely absent from Forster’s narrative. In his letter to Rau, alluded to earlier, Lean points out that this is a repressed English girl, perhaps brought up in a “vicarage,” and her exposure to scenes of explicit sexual acts (“This is the mid-

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twenties, remember,” he says)52 and the effect of her exposure to Indian mystic sexual rites may have disturbed her to the point that she is susceptible to sexual fantasies—and worse. (Lean explains that such encounters of erotic statues in the countryside are not unusual.)53 The monkeys, in this sense, can be seen as the awakened furies—or agents of the offended deities—that run after her. The film scene is an absorbing cinematic sequence, a montage of reaction shots, familiar in Lean, showing Adela staring at the statues with cuts to statues of goddesses sternly surveying human action, while a frightened girl, who has ignored her human side, one assumes, is pedaling away from explicit erotic embraces and chased by monkeys. Adela has provoked ancient deities, unrelenting guardians of the sacred rituals of human reproduction.54 These may be the furies chasing her and taking their revenge when she enters the cave later, to escape her attraction to Aziz, her hysteric fit and accusation of Aziz being part of her “punishment” by those deities. Adela’s collapse at the caves, then, is linked to her earlier jolt, and in both cases she drops into the arms of a man: to Ronny’s after the monkeys’ chase, to Aziz’s—only in fantasy—while in the cave. Her superego there rebels, and causes her to strike against the phantom figure that attacked her, and she breaks the straps of the glasses, a fact that is brought as evidence against Aziz later. It is not Forster’s Adela, but Fielding in his posttrial discussions with Adela that tells her she herself broke the strap in the cave. In Forster, the reason of her action remains unexplained. Lean wants the viewer to think it was all a result of her exposure to sexual arousal. Adela confesses at the trial that she does not love Ronny, but, according to Lean’s version of her story, she feels an attraction for Aziz in the caves scene. She runs away to be “rescued” from Aziz’s attack, imagining that she has been attacked by him. Both scenes have certain similarities—but also distinct differences: one is about a prospective marriage without love, possibly doomed from the start; the other is about love also, for she realizes, as she tells at the trial, that she does not love Ronny. But it is also a sexual episode, for added to the former realization she discovers (though this is never said explicitly) that she is attracted to Aziz. What happens in the cave, as she blows out the match, not responding to Aziz who is shouting her name, is a combination of both causes, one must assume: shocked that she does not love one man—the one she plans to marry—she is also overwhelmed by desire for another. Still, this does not explain why she accuses Aziz, for Adela, when all is said and done, is not a malicious person; hence, one must assume that she believed that Aziz attacked her. Her hysteria is real, as we see her being brought back, disheveled and bleeding from cactus scratches, stumbling into a bed, helped by Mrs. Callendar, the person who had driven Fielding to the caves, and given a shot to sedate her by Callendar himself. Whatever happened in the cave was part of a traumatic experience that both book and film leave—at least in part—unexplained. However, this

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refocusing has significant implications for the interpretation of the story. According to Peter Jones, fellow and librarian at King’s College, Cambridge, Forster said repeatedly that what happened at the caves did not really matter; this episode was a catalyst to show the reaction of the two parties—Indians, Anglo-Indians—and the huge gap that separated them. The readers of the novel easily see that Forster was actually heavily critical of the way the English treated the conquered race, though he does not entirely spare the Indians, whom he described as disorganized, erratic, and unable to appreciate what some sympathetic Englishmen, like Fielding, did for them. But the weight of his novel lies in his massive attack on the British imperial behavior, their autocracy and browbeating of Indians—a point that Lean does not miss entirely. The relationship between Fielding and Aziz is Forster’s main point, the loss of a valuable friendship and its tragic results. Lean thought this was a thin plot to draw the attention of modern audiences, and enlarges the character of Adela, adding dimension with her sexual adventure, thus providing dramatic clout to the trial scene and making her eventual reconciliation with Aziz (albeit in the form of a letter) a meaningful event. Combined with the reconciliation between Aziz and Fielding, the end then becomes a modernized version of the story, upbeat and hopeful—but lacking the poignant sadness of Forster’s novel. These are two different approaches to the same story, both well handled by novelist and director, divergent but each following its own logic. Lean, an independent thinker when it came to adaptations, at least as far as the epics were concerned, took a risk. Perhaps this would have been a different movie had Forster’s ending been retained, showing Aziz and Fielding riding off in separate directions in the jungles of Mau, after one of two people of different races had declared that a conquered could not be friends with his conqueror. When Lean was reminded that he had changed the ending and that Rau was furious, he angrily replied that Forster’s ending was “hogwash,”55 meaning not sufficiently cinematic. At this point any argument to the contrary would be moot, for we cannot know what another director—Satyajit Ray, who had an interest in making the film, for instance—would have done. It would have been a different film altogether, possibly. What we can surmise from what we have is that Lean thought the ending he offered was good enough. In fact, it retains the logic of his narrative so far. Fielding had come all that way—all the distance to Srinagar, a remote region— to be reconciled with his former friend. There was a great deal of goodwill there, and Fox plays the part admirably, and so does Banerjee. The logic also follows the information he gives Aziz, that his wife is not Ms. Quested but Stella, Mrs. Moore’s daughter, and that Stella is pregnant. Aziz sees the connection: the “ghost” of Mrs. Moore—something that Godbole had attested she was—has come back, for his beloved Mrs. Moore (this fixation of his is well established in Forster) is coming back to life in the unborn child of his best friend, Fielding; that’s why he bursts into the enthusiastic cry, “Mrs. Moore!” as soon as he hears

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the news. Given the emotional impact of this scene, it would have been disappointing to an audience to see these two friends part as enemies because one is the conqueror—or represents the conqueror—and the other the conquered. Aside from the fact that this is now anachronistic, such an ending would have harmed their newly established emotional bond. Nor is Adela left out. The letter she reads is actually from Forster’s words, for Aziz does write it, though we are not told if he sends it. But Lean brings Adela back in, reading while sitting at a table in her room in London, and as Aziz’s voice-over speaks the words, she goes to the window and looks at the rain, almost in tears. Meanwhile, Aziz has also been seen looking at the departing Fielding and Stella, their car driving away in the distance. “I don’t think I will see them again,” his voice drones on, as Lean cuts back to Adela. This indeed is a separation, and one can see it as such, for they part—the three of them—for time and distance, and circumstance, will not allow them to see each other again. It is a bittersweet ending, somewhat similar to that in Ryan’s Daughter, where Father Hugh Collins and Michael see the bus carrying Charles and Rosy away. Neither end is tragic, but both are sad. Yet both are satisfying, emotionally speaking, for Father Collins expresses a wish, his “doubt” that Charles and Rosy will not part in the end, while we feel that Adela has realized that the evil she had caused and the pain she had inflicted on an innocent man have been healed. Aziz also remains alone, but with the knowledge that his real friend, Mrs. Moore, has visited him again, and now he is free to enjoy his new life and bring up his children in honor instead of the disgrace due to a man in prison. Not a bad ending.

Notes 1. “Passage to India,” lines 224–26. 2. Epigraph on Forster’s Howards End. 3. Nostromo, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, a project Lean was about to begin filming when he died in 1991. 4. Some of the scouting was first done by his general factotum, Eddie Fowlie, who preceded him in finding and suggesting the multiple locations for the numerous exterior shots. 5. Day was subbing for Freddie Young, who was too old to undertake the new venture, but had worked under him in three previous works as a cinematographer. 6. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 644. 7. According to the comments made by Nigel Havers, who played Ronny, Lean had a reading of his script with all the major actors involved before shooting started, “and he didn’t change a thing.” Disc 2, DVD “Collector’s Edition,” 2008. 8. Forster’s Chandrapore would have been near Patna, on the Ganges in northern India near Calcutta, while Bangalore is a large city in southern India, where technical

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means of filming were more readily available. It was on the grounds of the palace of a local maharaja that John Box built the city to simulate the fictional Chandrapore. Lean’s action is supposed to be taking place in this city, its vicinity to Calcutta being made reference to. 9. Casting was done by Priscilla John, who assisted Lean in selecting English actors from the stage who had never worked for Lean before. 10. Brownlow, David Lean, 646–51. 11. Brownlow, David Lean, 646. 12. Brownlow, David Lean, 647. 13. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1984), 239. 14. Brownlow, David Lean, 647. 15. Brownlow, David Lean, 649. 16. Martin Seymour-Smith, Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976), 121. 17. Brownlow, David Lean, 645. 18. Quoted in Linda Dawson’s “A Englishman Abroad,” Photoplay, April 1985, 16. 19. Lean interview, A Passage to India, special features, DVD, disc 2, 2008. 20. Lean had written the Dickens adaptation in collaboration with Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan. His method was to highlight the main events in the action, condensing the five-hundred page Great Expectations to a manageable screenplay, a practice he more or less followed in A Passage. See Stephen Silverman, David Lean (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 68–69. 21. Sandra Lean: David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001), 22. 22. Christopher Figg in special features, disc 2, 2008 DVD. 23. Equivalent to an Elizabethan play, which generally was divided into five acts. 24. The Bolting Exchange, where Lean filmed this scene, was destroyed by the IRA in 1992. See commentary by Richard Goodwin, disc 1, 2008 DVD. 25. The “Barabar” Caves, which Forster changed to Marabar Caves, do exist, at Patna, a stand-in for Chandrapore, which is located in northeast India near Calcutta. Lean changed the location of filming to Bangalore, a large city in south-central India, and his Marabar Caves are located a Savandurga, about a hundred miles south of Bangalore. 26. Rau’s play starts with the visit to Fielding’s for the tea party. 27. “Collector” is an official who collects taxes in India, but the term here means “chief administrator.” 28. In Forster’s novel, Mr. and Mrs. Bhattacharya, a Hindu couple not mentioned in the film by name. 29. Forster, A Passage to India, 72. 30. Patrick Cadell, assistant director, explains the process of creating a “grown set,” planting elephant grass in an empty field four to five months before shooting. Disc 2, 2008 DVD. 31. Another commentator, Richard Goodwin, coproducer of the film, explains that these were copies of actual statues erected in temples by priests in order to encourage sterile couples to find new techniques of lovemaking. Disc 1, 2008 DVD.

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32. A phrase that Pauline Kael, in her New Yorker article, “A Passage to India,” thinks is the worst line in the film. For Keeps: Thirty Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1996), 1045. On the whole, Kael’s article is laudatory and she commends Lean for having created a film superior to Forster’s original novel. 33. Forster, A Passage to India, 123. 34. Forster, A Passage to India, 124. 35. Richard Goodwin in his commentary to the Sony edition of A Passage to India, disc 1, 2008 DVD. 36. A critic, Howard Maxford, offers the interpretation that this was Adela’s “first orgasm,” and that the spilling of water is an image carrying that connotation. Maxford, David Lean (London: B. T. Batsford, 2000), 152. 37. Shown in the special features, disc 2, of the Sony 2008 DVD. 38. Laura Jesson, Mary Justin, Jane Hudson, Lara Antipova, Rosy Ryan, Adela Quested. 39. In Doctor Zhivago, the story is told in flashback by Yevgrav Zhivago, Yuri’s half brother, whose voice-over takes over the narrative at crucial points in the film. 40. Forster, A Passage to India, 165. 41. Forster, A Passage to India. 177–78. 42. Brownlow, David Lean, letter. 43. Special features, disc 2, 2008 DVD. 44. See Kael, For Keeps, 1045. 45. Forster, A Passage to India, 245. 46. Forster, A Passage to India, 281. 47. Played by Sandy Hotz, then Lean’s fifth wife. 48. Lean had access to Kashmir in the 1980s, now an inaccessible region. 49. One of them is Peter Jones, fellow and librarian at King’s College, who opines that Forster might “have been unhappy with the ending,” though he might find the film in general worthwhile. Disc 2, 2008 DVD, special features. Santha Rama Rau vehemently dismissed the ending, as have numerous critics and viewers. 50. Brownlow, David Lean. 655. 51. Brownlow, David Lean, 655. 52. Special features, disc 2, 2008 DVD. 53. Brownlow, David Lean, 655. 54. Richard Goodwin explains in his commentary that the statues in the film were copied from actual erotic statues existing in temples in central India, built by priests to encourage different positions of sexual acts for infertile couples. 55. Brownlow, David Lean, 655.

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Epilogue: Nostromo— The Epic Continues . . .

A Passage to India was Lean’s last completed work, but not his last epic venture. His restless nature was soon energized when Maggie Unsworth, who had been with Lean since In Which We Serve, urged him to read Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo, published in 1904, after she and John Box agreed that this novel would make a good subject for Lean’s next epic film. Lean read the novel, at first without much enthusiasm, but eventually was aroused by the possibility that here was an epic adventure that would allow him to make another film about a “flawed” hero. At that time Lean also toyed with the idea of filming J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun, but he let it go, for he felt the story lacked an “arc” and its plot seemed episodic. Spielberg, a Lean admirer, picked up the project, and his film by the same title was released in 1987 to critical applause and several Oscar nominations. Lean undertook the Nostromo project with much enthusiasm, despite the fact that it would require substantial financial backing, a script that would demand much time and sympathetic collaborators, and suitable locations for filming. But with John Box already on board, he undertook, at an advancing age, the arduous task of one more—perhaps more than one—lengthy, deeply personal, and ambitious epic. The odds against undertaking, let alone finishing, this difficult task were enormous. Conrad’s work, he was warned by some, had never been an easy material for filmmaking because of Conrad’s dense and atmospheric style. Yet efforts to turn his stories and novels into film abounded. Virtually since his own time (he died in 1924), filmmakers turned to his works, despite the fact the he, even more than E. M. Forster, distrusted cinema, thinking it incapable of turning literary material into art.1 Victory was filmed in 1919, Lord Jim in 1925 and again in 1965 (directed by Richards Brooks, with Peter O’Toole as Lord Jim); Hitchcock made Sabotage in 1936, a film based on The Secret Agent—a novel that was filmed again in 1996. Carol Reed had made Outcast of the Islands 155

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in 1951, a film that enjoyed only moderate success, despite an excellent cast that included Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, and Wendy Hiller. But The Duelists (1977), based on Conrad’s story “The Duel” (or “Point of Honor”), which was made on a low budget by Ridley Scott, proved an excellent period piece of two French officers carrying on a lifelong feud during the Napoleonic wars. But perhaps the biggest attempt to make a major work, The Heart of Darkness, into an epic movie was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a story of an American secret agent sailing up the Mekong Delta at the height of the Vietnam War to find and assassinate a renegade American officer named Kurtz, after Conrad’s antihero, played by Marlon Brando. In post-Lean years, Nostromo was made into a BBC miniseries in 1996, directed by Alastair Reid and starring Claudio Amendola as Nostromo, Colin Firth as Charles Gould, Serena Scott Thomas as Emily Gould, Albert Finney as Dr. Monygham, and a generally competent cast. Filmed in Colombia at the cost of twenty million, the film ran more than five hours, but it was cut to four when released in the United States in 1997. It stays pretty close to the Conrad original, but regrettably this worthy series has not been released on DVD and is only available from online sellers in VHS, in the BBC Series original format.2 In the 2000s, interest in adapting Conrad has continued with two French films, Gabrielle (2006), based on Conrad’s short story, “The Return,” and Almayer’s Folly (La Folie Almayer), which is scheduled for release in 2011. Nostromo is considered by some as Conrad’s greatest novel. Martin SeymourSmith, in his introduction to the Penguin Classic of Nostromo, quotes Walter Allen, who states that Nostromo is “the greatest novel in English in this century.”3 Such a judgment is accompanied by Seymour-Smith’s own that Conrad’s work is also one of the most pessimistic ever written. Comparing Conrad to Hardy, Seymour-Smith notes: “Hardy is taken to be a pessimistic writer; but Conrad . . . was an infinitely more pessimistic one. The only optimistic feature of Nostromo is the fact that there is a writer trying, by means of his imagination, to tell the whole truth about the corruption or defeat of every one of his characters. Surely, no bleaker story was ever told.”4 This is the aspect of the novel that perhaps weighed in on Lean’s decision to film the book, though there certainly were other factors. The “flawed” heroes in Conrad’s work may have been another strong consideration, but Lean often spoke about the “greed” of the studio moguls that produced films in his day and who were possessed by their intense desire to make money at the expense of any artistic value. Lean hated producers just as much as Conrad despised petty dictators and other autocrats that corrupted an entire society—the fictional Costaguana5 of his work. In his “Author’s Note,” Conrad explains that the idea for the novel came to him when, very young and traveling as a sailor in the West Indies, around 1875 or 1876, he heard a story about a man who had stolen a barge full of silver some-

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where near the Tierra Firme during a revolution. Though Conrad discarded this story at the time as of no particular interest, years later he read a similar story in a “shabby volume” he picked up in a secondhand bookstore, detailing the adventures of an American sailor who had written his autobiography with the help of an assisting journalist. In it there was an account, not exceeding a few pages, that the man had stolen a boatful of silver during a revolution, captained a schooner, and boasted openly that he made his money not by trade but by once in a while lifting a bar of silver from his hidden treasure trove and lived richly when he desired. When challenged by one of his men on the schooner, “the cynical ruffian,” says Conrad, laughed and replied that no one could catch him, for no one could find where the treasure was. “And suppose I lied, eh?” he added. Conrad, marveling at coincidence, still did not think this tale weighty enough for a novel, mainly because he did not want to write about a rascal. But the idea had taken root; it kept him busy and it finally dawned on him that the “purloiner of the treasure” did not have to be a scoundrel, but “a man of character, an actor, and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution.”6 Nostromo (from the Italian nostro uomo, our man), thus became the hero of the capital of Costaguana, a fictitious state in Latin America, and the most trusted man in Sulaco, its most prominent harbor. Nostromo’s original name was Gian’ Battista Fidanza, John the Baptist, the Loyal (or the Trusted One).7 Nostromo was also known as the Capatz de Cargadores, the foreman of the docks, where he worked for Captain Mitchell, in charge of shipping at Sulaco. Nostromo had a reputation for his sterling integrity, good judgment, honesty, and work ethic, and was, as Conrad puts it, “a man absolutely above reproach [who] became the terror of all the thieves in town.”8 Nostromo had close ties with the family of an old hotel keeper in town, Giorgio Viola, called “the Garibaldino,” because he had fought with Garibaldi in Sicily. Old Giorgio lived with his wife, Teresa, also an Italian, and two young daughters, Linda and Giselle. Teresa did not take well to the climate of Sulaco and became sick and died, but not before entrusting the welfare of her daughters to Nostromo. Sulaco had a safe harbor, lying in the deeper part of the semicircular Golfo Placido (the Tranquil Bay), named so because its calm waters afforded protection from the ocean gales. Two promontories, the Punta Mala (Bad Point) and Azuera, a steep rock extending into the sea, protected Sulaco from pirate attacks. Behind the city rose the Cordillera, a rugged mountain range considered impassable. Despite its natural protection, Sulaco was vulnerable to raids by bands of outlaws because of its rich silver mine of San Tomé, owned by an Englishman, Ernest Gould. When the latter was killed during a revolution intended to oust all foreigners, his son, the strong-willed Charles Gould, was expected to return from England to claim his inheritance of the mine. When, years after his father’s death, he arrives with his wife, Emily, he is determined to take over the abandoned mine

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and exploit its treasures, providing employment to city workers and becoming the most prominent citizen in Sulaco. An American capitalist, Holroyd, arrives at the same time, and provides the necessary capital to start operations. Gould’s scheme works, and the rich veins of silver soon yield loads of silver ingots, which he exports to Europe. But when Costaguana’s president Riviera is assassinated by General Montero, civil war erupts, forcing Gould to take measures to protect his mine. When he learns that Pedro Montero, the renegade general’s brother, has found a passage and has crossed the Cordillera, he entrusts Nostromo with a boatful of silver to keep in safety until the bandits are defeated. Nostromo takes the silver to an offshore island (the Great Isabel), hides it there in a ravine, and tells a story that the boat sank during the night when it collided with the ship of the renegade Colonel Sotillo, who abandoned his post guarding at one of the promontories and returns to Sulaco to take over the city, which is now threatened by two rebellious forces. Nostromo comes to the rescue when dispatched to bring in the still loyal General Barrios, who was guarding the other promontory, and who arrives, kills the treacherous Sotillo as he was about to execute Charles Gould, and saves Sulaco. Nostromo is now hailed as the liberator of the city and treated as a hero. But like the old schooner captain in Conrad’s “Note,” Nostromo intends to get rich slowly by allaying suspicions and recovering small portions of the treasure at a time. He becomes engaged to Linda, the older daughter of the lighthouse keeper Giorgio Viola, but falls secretly in love with the younger and more beautiful and passionate Giselle, to whom he reveals his secret that he has stolen the silver, without telling her where it is. He asks her to wait for him to get rich so he can build a palace for her and have her live like a queen. But when Nostromo attempts to recover it, the old man shoots him mortally, mistaking him for Ramirez, an undesirable suitor of Giselle and a scoundrel in his eyes. Carried to Sulaco, the still alive Nostromo confesses to Mrs. Gould that he had stolen the silver and wants to tell her where it is, but she refuses to have any knowledge of this, convinced that the silver has been a curse to all associated with it. The story is full of many other colorful characters, including Decoud, a despairing journalist, who is left by Nostromo at the island when they take the silver there and commits suicide. He had come from Paris to court his beloved Antonia Avellanos, the “beautiful Antonia, the Aristocrat,” daughter of Don Jose Avellanos, who had invited Gould to come and recover his mine. Antonia, Conrad reveals in his “Note,” had been based on his actual first love, many years before.9 Among the most important characters is Dr. Monygham, who survives slavery and torture, becomes the town doctor, and treats the ill and dying Jose Avellanos and even attempts to save the mortally wounded Nostromo. When, as he lies dying, Nostromo calls for Emily Gould, Monygham guesses that Nostromo has confessed his secret to her, but he respects her wish to leave Nostromo’s reputation unblemished.

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Nostromo, rich in action, fascinating characters, and suggestive themes and ironies, suited Lean’s concept of a grand epic in an exotic land torn apart by internal conflicts and threatened with extinction by invaders and corrupt colonizers. He also found the main character’s persona intriguing—a man fighting on the side of the people but himself beset by the demons inside him. Nostromo, or Giovanni Batista as he is known to locals, is handsome, strong, loyal, brave, and trusted, though he cannot resist the temptation of illicit gain, resentful of being the tool and savior of ruthless bandits and greedy aristocrats. He, too, becomes corrupted by the silver, which becomes the main symbol running through the story. In his film, Lean would add Nostromo to a string of heroes who were men of ambition, outstanding leaders, but riddled with insecurities—men like Nicholson and Lawrence in the first two epics. Lean had problems finding heroes of similar stature (as Bolt kept reminding him that those were the true tragic heroes) in his three epics following the completion of Lawrence. Zhivago was a good man, but cast as a mirror image of the horrible events around him, a moral force but not a leader in action. Charles Shaughnessy was a self-effacing, mild-mannered schoolteacher, who only rises in the viewer’s estimation at the end of the story. As for Major Doryan, he was a decorated hero—though flashbacks reveal him a shell-shocked coward in battle. And neither Aziz nor Fielding is a commanding figure in A Passage to India. In undertaking to film Nostromo, Lean would have returned to his old glories of placing worthy men in turbulent settings where moral and physical tenacity is tested—men challenged by great temptations, such as self-adulation, or, as in this case, dreams of wealth and glory. Such men achieve, are capable of leadership, but are still unable, despite their heroic acts, to make peace with their conscience. Interestingly, Lord Jim in Lord Jim is in some ways a similar man: Unable to conquer his fear when the ship Patna, on which he is in charge of a load of helpless passengers, seems to be in danger, he jumps to safety, only to learn later that the Patna survived. Haunted by guilt, he tries to be heroic in leading a native tribe to victory against an assortment of ruffians, but he never truly redeems himself. In a way, Nostromo is the reverse of Lord Jim, who first falls from grace and then spends years trying to redeem himself by conquering fear. Nostromo is a commanding, respected, and trusted figure in his adopted country, but greed and his own sense of grandeur corrupt him. Both worthy men, they are unable to control destructive impulses and commit acts that blemish them forever. Thus, at the turn of the century, Conrad ushered in the image of the fallen archetypal idol—which became a prototype in modernist fiction, and consequently in the most daring projection of him in cinema. Lean’s heroes, on the whole, follow that path. All except one are selected from fiction, and all are heroes of the modernist era, which lasted through the first part of the twentieth century. Forster, Pasternak, Conrad, Boulle, and Lawrence (the writer) become fodder for the Lean epics.

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Lean had dipped into the nineteenth century with Dickens and the story of Madeleine Smith. Whether Lean adopted the pessimism of some of the authors he adapted remains a question. The truth is that, if and when his epics are recognized as large statements of the human condition at a critical point in human history, it could be rightly assumed that Lean entertained hopes that humanity could learn lessons from what his stories offer—people could “only connect.” When Lean felt certain of his project, he elicited the help of Spielberg, who offered to produce Nostromo for Lean, with financial backing by Warner Brothers. In writing the script, Lean found himself in need of help. Three of his first four epics were written, with his collaboration to be sure, by Robert Bolt, and A Passage to India by Lean himself. But with A Passage Lean was on familiar grounds; first, he knew the novel and had been to India many times, and he had seen Santha Rama Rau’s play in 1962 and had also considered her script before he decided to write it himself. It contained large borrowings from Forster’s own dialogue and from passages in the novel turned to dialogue. With Nostromo he felt he needed help, and when Maggie Unsworth recommended Christopher Hampton, a playwright and scenarist whom Lean had already met, they undertook the task. But after a year’s work, tensions arose between the two, though their collaboration continued. Hampton worked hard, inspired by the story, which he thought suited Lean’s temperament in portraying worthy individuals defeated by adversity or innate weaknesses. But he could not understand or adjust to Lean’s manner of describing every single detail in a scene: shooting angles, position and movement of actors, and so forth. Hampton, a playwright, was used to writing mostly dialogue. Eventually he tired of Lean’s constant revision of scenes, but that was not the reason the project fell apart. When the script was shown to Spielberg, the latter, though a great admirer of Lean, made some suggestions for revision. One of these was that the story should have not only a hero—Nostromo—but a villain. When asked who the villain of the story was, Lean answered, “Money.”10 Spielberg decided that this answer was not to his liking. Epics, conventional wisdom had it, needed villains to spur interest in a conflict where combatants clash. Spielberg’s own first attempt, Duel, made for TV, featured an evil truck, with an invisible driver in it, to plague an innocent travel agent on the road. Jaws had a twenty-five-foot shark, a beach Moby Dick, terrifying swimmers; the Indiana Jones trilogy an assortment of villains; and Schindler’s List the evil Nazis and the monstrous Goeth. In the Lean epics there are no real villains (at least not in the major roles), save several highly interesting characters that did evil things, even against their own nature or intention. Nicholson demonstrates folly and conceit, but not out of hatred of anyone, not even Saito, who is proven heroic on his own terms at the end. And who (outside the Turkish Bey, a minor figure) is the evil person in Lawrence? Allenby? Dryden? Both manipulate Lawrence in backroom deals—but they also admire and use

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him. Komarovsky comes close to a classic villain figure in Doctor Zhivago, but he is not really Zhivago’s antagonist; he suffers his own defeats, unable to gain Lara’s affection. Lean was not truly interested in the hero-villain clash in the typical epic thriving during his time. He liked ambiguity in his main characters practically from the beginning of his career, and that is one reason his heroes and heroines often approach tragic dimensions but through their own flaws, or fighting against fate or circumstance. Another difference with Spielberg, one notes, is their method in designing visuals. Spielberg’s technique in scripting was storyboarding, so the scenes were given to the actors visually, rather than in detailed written description. Lean rarely used storyboarding, preferring to write out every detail, which he practically memorized and called upon the actors to do the same. He detested actors improvising or coming unprepared once shooting started. That is one reason for the friction between Lean and some of his actors. “The script,” Rod Steiger once noted, “was Lean’s (and Bolt’s) Bible.”11 The lengthy delays in script writing cost Lean valuable time, and in this case, crucial time, for Lean was approaching eighty when the Hampton-Lean collaboration ended. While Lean and Hampton still collaborated, they had discussed possibilities of casting the main characters. For Nostromo, Lean thought of a newcomer, as in Lawrence, where two young actors were introduced—Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif—both of whom had gained the status of stars after his epic. Here, a French-born Greek actor, George Correface, was given a test that left Lean convinced that the young actor had the tone of voice, talent, and physical presence required for this role. Isabella Rossellini would play the incorruptible Mrs. Gould, while Paul Scofield would play Dr. Monygham. For the role of the villain Montero, Lean asked Marlon Brando, a prize actor he had coveted for many of his epic projects, and one that always eluded him, either by chance or choice. In a letter dated April 10, 1989, Brando wrote that he was “impressed” with the script and that he was “unreservedly enthusiastic,” adding familiarly, “You are the last of a breed, David. I don’t want to sound maudlin in my praise, but I was simply delighted with the story.” But then he added “grizzly matters” obliged him to decline, because of several other obligations, for one of which the payment of one million had already been advanced to him.12 After the collapse of the project with Spielberg, the relations between Bolt and Lean were mended, ironically through the recommendation of Hampton.13 Bolt liked the work Lean and Hampton had done in following loyally the main thread of the plot of Conrad’s complex work, but he would like to strengthen the heroic status of Nostromo, buried as it seemed in the plethora of other strong characters and events. Bolt reminded Lean that he had recommended Nostromo as a project as far back as 1962, when they were still working on Lawrence.14 Thence, one can also see the similarities of the two heroes and in the method

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of approaching each epic. The historical Lawrence is also submerged, relatively speaking, in the lengthy descriptions of battles, the Arabs’ internal tribal conflicts, the various reflections and philosophical asides and the vast canvas built into The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Bolt, in a script that had to be highly selective out of necessity, would have raised the persona of Lawrence above everyone else and made him the dominant figure, who controls the tone of the narrative, pulls the strings of the action, becoming the force that drives it forward. Nostromo would have been the same kind of dominant figure as Lawrence. Bolt and Lean connected immediately, and despite Bolt’s speech disability since he had suffered a stroke, they made quick progress on the project. But eventual disagreements crept in, and the Bolt-Lean collaboration dissolved. Lean decided to go on and write the script himself. Meanwhile, a new figure had come onto the horizon, the Polish-born Frenchman Serge Silberman, who, among other things, had helped produce Akira Kurosawa’s Ran a few years before. But soon tension arose between the two, for Lean hated interference both in the design of the movie and in the terms under which his contract would be written. He detested the clause stipulating that a massive amount of insurance was required for any director over seventyfive, and that a stand-in should be appointed in case he died during production.15 With all this, Lean remained adamant on finishing Nostromo, despite the fact that his health had been deteriorating since 1989. First it was a case of the shingles that left him immobilized for months; then cancer of the throat was diagnosed, which required large amounts of cortisone shots that left him weak, and when pneumonia set in, he died at his home in London on April 16, 1991. Memorial services were held at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the same location where the funeral of T. E. Lawrence was photographed decades earlier. Speakers included Omar Sharif, John Box, Tom Courtenay, and Peter O’Toole. Maurice Jarre conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing tunes from the David Lean films, and outside, on the steps of St. Paul’s, the band of the Blues and Royals played the Colonel Bogey march, the refrain heard many years before on the soundtrack of Lean’s first epic, after the bridge had been blown up, as the wooden fragments of it floated down the River Kwai. Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Lean never thought of himself either as a poet or a legislator of any kind. Despite all the awards he had garnered, he was too humble a man to claim any such grandiose title. Yet his epic films had taken the viewer to nearly every continent, from the jungles of Ceylon, to the deserts of Jordan, to Spain, Morocco, the snows of Finland, the remote west coast of Ireland, Cape Town, and to the holy mountains of India. He himself had traveled the world over and could legitimately be called a citizen of the world. His films spanned the globe, embraced cultures, employed players from all latitudes, and gave a new breadth

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to the noblest notion of a united world. He gave, and continues to give, pleasure to millions by having created cinema art that would have left even some of the greatest poets jealous. As one of his contemporaries called him, he was indeed “the poet of the far horizon,”16 a title he certainly deserved.

Notes 1. Gene D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 437. 2. The three discs contain the entire 309-minute footage of the original and are available through various online sellers. 3. See Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, introduction by Martin Seymour-Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 7. 4. Conrad, Nostromo, 7. 5. A composite of Costa (as in Costa Rica) and Guano (manure). See above, 13. 6. Conrad, Nostromo, 29–31. Seymour-Smith doubts that this was the sole source of the origin of the story, since he consulted a great many other sources in preparation for his novel. Conrad, Nostromo, 12. 7. In a note, Seymour-Smith explains that “the Italians, like the Spanish, endow their children with holy names.” Conrad, Nostromo, 467. 8. Conrad, Nostromo, 46. 9. “Author’s Note,” Conrad, Nostromo, 34. 10. Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (New York: A Wyatt Book for St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 718. 11. “Commentary” in “Special Features,” disc 2, in Doctor Zhivago DVD issue, 2008. 12. Sandra Lean, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001), 222. 13. Brownlow, David Lean, 718. 14. Brownlow, David Lean, 719. 15. Brownlow, David Lean, 724. 16. Steven Spielberg used the phrase, as cited by Gregory Peck, during the ceremony of the American Film Institute, on March 8, 1990, when Lean received the Life Achievement Award.

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APPENDIX A

The Early Films of David Lean

In Which We Serve (1942) Directors: Noël Coward and David Lean Screenplay: Noël Coward Producer: Noël Coward Associate Producer: Anthony Havelock-Allan Cinematographer: Ronald Neame Editors: David Lean and Thelma Myers Music: Noël Coward Art Director: David Rownsley Art Supervisor: G. E. Calthrop Sound: C. C. Stevens Cast: Noël Coward (Captain “D” Kinross); Celia Johnson (Alix Kinross); Bernard Miles (Walter Hardy, Chief Petty Officer); John Mills (Shorty Blake); Kay Walsh (Freda Lewis); Joyce Carey (Mrs. Hardy); Kathleen Harrison (Mrs. Blake); George Carney (Mr. Blake); Derek Elphinstone (“Number One”); Robert Sansom (“Guns”); Philip Friend (“Torps”); Michael Wilding (“Flags”); Hubert Gregg (Pilot); James Donald (Doctor); Richard Attenborough (Young Sailor); Daniel Massey (Bobby). The first directorial effort of David Lean, codirected with Noël Coward, who also authored the screenplay, chronicles the sinking of HMS Kelly, a British destroyer lost in the Battle of Crete, in May 1941, and the heroic efforts of a group of survivors to reach safety. While on a raft, each of them reminisces of a previous happy life before the war (peace), while the camera also cuts to the present (war) during moments of tension, thus developing parallel lines of action as the movie progresses. Thus exciting war sequences interchange with London 165

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bombings and their often tragic consequences. Though made a “propaganda” movie to arouse patriotic sentiment during the WWII crisis, the first Lean film is still worth watching as a tense war thriller today, and even foreshadows some of the themes found in the epics later.

This Happy Breed (1944) Director: David Lean Screenplay: Noël Coward Producer: Noël Coward Associate Producer: Anthony Havelock-Allan Cinematography: Ronald Neame Editor: Jack Harris Music Director: Muir Matheson Art Supervisor: G. E. Calthrop Art Direction: C. P. Norman Costumes: Hilda Collins Assistant Director: George Pollock Cast: Robert Newton (Frank Gibbons); Celia Johnson (Ethel Gibbons); Amy Veness (Mrs. Flint); Alison Leggatt (Aunt Sylvia); Stanley Holloway (Bob Mitchell); John Mills (Billy Mitchell); Kay Walsh (Queenie Gibbons); Eileen Erskine (Vi Gibbons); John Blythe (Reg Gibbons); Guy Verney (Sam Leadbitter); Betty Fleetwood (Phyllis Blake); Merle Tottenham (Edie). Lean’s first solo directorial effort, This Happy Breed was adapted from Noël Coward’s stage play that premiered in London in April 1943. Coward wrote the screenplay, and Lean reproduced it almost verbatim, with few changes in the script, aside from some exterior shots that sporadically provide historical background. This is the story of a lower middle class family, the Gibbons, who settle in a London neighborhood, Clapham Common, and live there for twenty years (1919–1939), between the two great wars. This is a story of an ordinary family clan and their neighbors, living through a period that saw the social convulsions between two wars. Textual references are made to the stock market crash of 1929, Hitler’s rise, the advent of the talkies, the death of King George V, and Chamberlain’s visit to Munich. Two single strands of the story are worth mentioning: one is the quiet leadership of Ethel Gibbons (Celia Johnson), who has to accept a role of leader that her weak, drinking husband cannot, steering through the ups and downs of a contentious breed (This Happy Breed, the title comes from Shakespeare’s Richard II), and the elopement of her rebellious daughter Queenie (Kay Walsh) with a married man, who abandons her in a foreign country. Eventually, Queenie returns to the family fold and settles down as

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the wife of Billy Mitchell (John Mills), her adoring neighbor. Also worth noting are Lean’s introduction of crowd scenes, which became staples in the epics—the parade march of returning soldiers during Armistice Day is one example, reminiscent of similar marches in Lawrence and Zhivago.

Blithe Spirit (1945) Director: David Lean Screenplay: Noël Coward Adaptation: David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan Producer: Noël Coward Associate Producer: Anthony Havelock-Allan Cinematography: Ronald Neame Editor: Jack Harris Music Score: Richard Addinshell Art Supervisor: G. E. Calthrop Art Director: C. P. Norman Costumes: Rahvis (Raemonde) Special Effects: Tom Howard Cast: Rex Harrison (Charles Condomine); Constance Cummings (Ruth Condomine); Kay Hammond (Elvira Condomine); Margaret Rutherford (Madame Arcati); Joyce Carey (Mrs. Bradman); Hugh Wakefield (Doctor Bradman); Jacqueline Clarke (Edith). Adapted from Noël Coward’s popular play at the time, Blithe Spirit becomes as outrageous a farce in the hands of Lean as it is in Coward’s play. Charles Condomine, a bored novelist, and Ruth, his well-bred but irritable wife, invite their friends, the Bradmans, to share experiences as Madame Arcati, a local medium, performs a séance for them. As Arcati goes through her hocus-pocus rituals, the ghost of Charles Condomine’s first wife, coarse-mannered Elvira, appears as a green specter visible to him only and causes confusion and disorder between the couple. Ruth is outraged, thinking her husband is playing games on her, and resorts to Arcati, who seems unable to get rid of the ghost. When Ruth is also killed in an auto accident, another séance produces a second ghost, and now Charles has two ex-wives haunting him. Arcati advises Charles to flee the house. As Charles drives away, the ghosts, now in collusion, cause an accident, and he joins them in their ghostly existence forever. Blithe Spirit is a not-so-disguised assault on conjugal disharmony in the British upper crust, a theme often tackled by Coward, and here handled with ease by Lean. The film is shot indoors for the most part, with transitional exterior scenes, when the parties move from one location to another. Lean uses trick shots for the séance sequences, changing points of view when the

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ghost is seen only by one party, and even mimics a famous Citizen Kane (a film Lean admired) scene, when husband and wife sit wide apart at the breakfast table. Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati almost steals the show with her madcap tricks of her trade, fodder for the idle rich, but a delight to the viewer.

Brief Encounter (1945) Director: David Lean Screenplay: David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Ronald Neame, based on the play Still Life by Noël Coward Producer: Noël Coward Associate Producers: Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame Cinematography: Robert Krasker Editor: Jack Harris Art Director: L. P. Williams Art Supervisor: G. E. Calthrop Sound: Stanley Lambourne and Desmond Drew Assistant Director: George Pollock Cast: Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson); Trevor Howard (Dr. Alec Harvey); Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson); Stanley Holloway (Albert Colby); Joyce Carey (Myrtle Baggot); Margaret Barton (Beryl Waters); Valentine Dyall (Stephen Lynn); Everley Gregg (Dolly Messiter); Marjory Mars (Mary Norton); Jack May (Boatman). Brief Encounter is possibly Lean’s most admired film of his pre-epic days. BFI (British Film Institute) ranks it only second to Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) in the Best 100 Films of British cinema. The film earned Lean his first nomination for an Academy Award for director and won Best Picture honors in the Cannes Film Festival. Its story was adapted from Coward’s one-act play Still Life, confined to one episode in a refreshments bar in a fictitious railway station, Milford Junction, where a passing steam train picks up and deposits passengers. The Lean film expands the confined space to several locations in London, restaurants, parks, shops, and a lake in which the two lovers take a boat ride. Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a doctor, accidentally meet at the refreshment bar, when Laura has a speck of dust removed from her eye by the obliging doctor, and slowly a liaison develops over the next few weeks as they again meet at the same place. When they finally admit they have fallen in love, they feel guilt ridden, for both are decent people and married to loyal spouses and have children. As their idyll cannot last, they decide to part, but not before heartrending scenes. For the first time (and only a few times subsequently) Lean uses commentary (voice-over) narration, as Laura

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recalls the affair from the very start to the end. The device has a hypnotic effect, as if the affair had occurred in a dream, from which Laura awakes nudged by her husband while lying back on an armchair. The narrative—as the strains from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 are heard in the soundtrack—thus gains unusual power, for the viewer enters the mind of the protagonist and shares her brief happiness and agony. Admired for its economy, Brief Encounter stands up well today, and Laura’s repressed passion is frequently cited as a prelude to that of several subsequent female leads in both the pre-epic and epic periods.

Great Expectations (1946) Director: David Lean Screenplay: David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Cecil McGivern, Ronald Neame, Kay Walsh, based on the novel by Charles Dickens Producer: Ronald Neame Executive Producer: Anthony Havelock-Allan Cinematography: Guy Green Editor: Jack Harris Music Score: Walter Goehr Production Design: John Bryan Art Direction: Wilfred Shingleton Costumes: Sophia Harris and Margaret Furse Sound: Stanley Lambourne and Gordon McCullum Sound Editor: Winston Ryder Assistant Director: George Pollock Cast: John Mills (Pip, Grown Up); Valerie Hobson (Estella, Grown Up); Anthony Wager (Pip, as a Boy); Jean Simmons (Estella, as a Girl); Bernard Miles (Joe Gargery); Finlay Currie (Magwitch); Francis L. Sullivan (Jaggers); Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham); Alec Guinness (Herbert Pocket); Ivor Barnard (Wemmick); Freda Jackson (Mrs. Gargery); Torin Thatcher (Bentley Drummle); Eileen Erskine (Biddy); Hay Petrie (Uncle Pumblechook); George Hays (Compayson, the Other Convict); Richard George (The Sergeant); Everley Gregg (Sarah Pocket); O. B. Clarence (The Aged Parent); John Burch (Mr. Wopsle). Lean’s fifth film is generally regarded as one of the greatest adaptations of a famous literary work into film. The massive Dickens novel, with its large canvas, could have become an epic had it been made in the epic film period in Lean’s career, but, as it is, with nearly two hours of running time and its vivid action during the drowning of Magwitch, it might qualify as a small-scale epic. For that reason alone, it is remarkable for its economy and its fidelity to the Dickens novel. The story of Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, with its double plot—his helping an

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escaped convict, who later becomes his benefactor, and his developing passion for a young seductress, Estella—moves to an inevitable complication, when the convict reappears in his adult life and Pip, now transformed into a gentleman, discovers and continues his liaison with Estella, who turns out to be Magwitch’s daughter. Photography, pace, dialogue, and music score contribute to a compelling tale of loyalty, family bonds, self-discovery, and moral choice, all Dickens staples marvelously transferred to the screen by Lean. Great Expectations also marks Lean’s break with Coward, whose plays and screenplays he had adapted up to this point. Great Expectations went on to earn six Oscar nominations, with three wins (cinematography, art direction, set decoration), while Lean earned his second nomination for Best Director. The film still continues to win plaudits as the best (or one of the best) adaptation of fiction into film ever.

Oliver Twist (1948) Director: David Lean Screenplay: David Lean, Stanley Haynes, based on the novel by Charles Dickens Producer: Ronald Neame Assistant Director: George Pollock Cinematography: Guy Green Editor: Jack Harris Art Direction: John Bryan Costumes: Margaret Furse Makeup: Stuart Freebourne Music Score: Sir Arnold Bax Sound: Stanley Lambourne Special Effects: Joan Suttie, Stephen Grant Cast: John Howard Davies (Oliver Twist); Robert Newton (Bill Sikes); Alec Guinness (Fagin); Kay Walsh (Nancy); Francis M. Sullivan (Mr. Bumble); Henry Stephenson (Mr. Brownlow); Mary Clare (Mrs. Corney); Josephine Stuart (Oliver’s Mother); Henry Edwards (Police Official); Ralph Truman (Monks); Anthony Newly (The Artful Dodger); Kenneth Downy (Workhouse Master); Gibb McLaughlin (Mr. Sowerberry); Kathleen Harrison (Mrs. Sowerberry); Amy Veness (Mrs. Bedwin); W. G. Fay (Bookseller); Maurice Denham (Chief of Police); Frederick Lloyd (Mr. Grimwig); Ivor Barnard (Chairman of the Board); Deidre Doyle (Mrs. Thingummy); Diana Dors (Charlotte); Michael Dear (Noah Claypole); Peter Bull (Landlord of “The Three Cripples”). The second Dickens adaptation by Lean is just as good a work, and in its economy and incident selection, even superior. Lean skipped entire chapters from the Dickens novel, streamlining the story to keep the tension mounting.

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The result is an engrossing action film, smartly photographed and conveying a strong social message—the inhuman treatment of orphans in crassly exploitative workhouses and in the streets of London filled with gangs of thieves. Oliver Twist uses montages—as the unforgettable opening scene where a woman about to give birth to her child runs through a storm to reach shelter—rapid camera movement where breathless chases give the plot its quick pulse, and a crowd scene at the end reminiscent of some of the crowd scenes in the Lean epics. The Dickens plot is thus compacted but it is generally followed, complete with its deus ex machina solution, as its young protagonist is found and nourished to health by his elderly grandfather, Mr. Brownlow, while the despicable Bill Sikes, one of the most cold-blooded villains in the Dickens canon, gets his due. Lean uses some of the same veteran actors of his previous effort—Alec Guinness as Fagin, Robert Newton as Bill Sikes, Francis L. Sullivan as Mr. Bumble, and Kay Walsh as Nancy—and elicits first-rate performance from young John Howard Davies as Oliver. Though an impeccable film in every possible way, Oliver Twist failed to win critical approval (had no Oscar nominations and only one from BAFTA), and, though it did well enough in England, its reception across the ocean was only lukewarm, due mainly to the fact that it was perceived as antiSemitic at a time when memories of the Holocaust were still raw. In later decades it has received its due and Lean’s two adaptations of Dickens stand out as two of the finest adaptations of all time.

The Passionate Friends (1949) One Woman’s Story (U.S. title) Director: David Lean Screenplay: Eric Ambler, based on a 1913 novel by H. G. Wells Adaptation: David Lean and Stanley Haynes Producer: Ronald Neame Associate Producer: Norman Spencer Cinematography: Guy Green Editor: Geoffrey Foot Music Score: Richard Addinshell Art Direction: John Bryan Set Decorator: Claude Manusey Costumes: Margaret Furse Sound: Winston Ryder Assistant Director: George Pollock

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Cast: Ann Todd (Mary Justin); Claude Rains (Howard Justin); Trevor Howard (Steven Stratton); Isabel Dean (Pat); Betty Ann Davies (Miss Layton); Arthur Howard (Servant); Guido Lorraine (Hotel Manager); Natasha Sikolova (Chambermaid); Helen Burls (Flower Woman). In this, his seventh directorial effort, Lean seems to have reached his peak, and thereafter, a series of films of only average success was produced. Not only did Oliver Twist fail to win any major awards, but some thought “his decline” had already begun with that effort. History has proven otherwise. The two Dickens adaptations are now regarded as two masterpieces of literature into film, and in the company of Brief Encounter, they have all become part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, which has issued five (the other two being Hobson’s Choice and Summertime) DVD editions of these movies, in restored versions with special features for all of them. The Passionate Friends may not be as distinguished a movie as some mentioned above, but it is still a well-made tale of a love triangle with a near-tragic end, well worth the viewing. It also introduces two new members of the cast in the Lean repertory, Ann Todd, by now an established international star, and Claude Rains, who had achieved stardom in Hollywood with such megahits as Casablanca and Hitchcock’s Notorious. The Passionate Friends also marks the return of Trevor Howard, who had in the meantime starred in two movies as a leading man since Brief Encounter and now played, again, a frustrated lover. The story begins at the end, at a resort hotel in Switzerland, where two ex-lovers, Mary Justin and Steven Stratton, a biologist, are reunited by chance. Mary’s husband, Howard Justin, a wealthy banker, finds out that the two have gone on a boat ride and files for a divorce. This is the end of the story, but through flashbacks, voice-over reminiscences by Mary, and other incidents from the past pieced together by Lean, the viewer knows that the two had been lovers many years before, that a decision had been made by Mary to stay with her husband, when the latter had found out about her liaison with Stratton and demanded his departure from the scene. Howard is an older man, who offers Mary security and, she claims, “independence.” Another flashback shows how Mary and Steven had started an affair on New Year’s Eve (1938–1939), a time when he also met his future wife, with whom he eventually had children as he informs Mary during their chance meeting at the Swiss hotel. This seems like an overly complicated plot, but Lean achieves lucidity of narrative and makes the end—Mary’s attempted suicide—a high-impact emotional moment. Ann Todd is excellent as the blonde with the cool exterior and inner flame, and Claude Rains, a master of understatement, punctuates his performance with fine-tuned moments of outrage. It all works out in the end. Though Trevor Howard does not achieve the same intensity of passion he displayed in Brief Encounter, he does provide emotional counterpoint to the embattled heroine. This is the story of a woman plagued by inner turmoil, a stifled obsession for an amorous adven-

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ture and the security provided by an older man. Some called it a second Brief Encounter, and it certainly is part of Lean’s repertory to delve into an embattled woman’s psyche. The adventure of the lovers in the Alps also displays Lean’s flair for landscapes, and the snowcapped peaks bear resemblance to the splendid views of the Himalayas in the much later A Passage to India.

Madeleine (1950) Director: David Lean Screenplay: Stanley Haynes, Nicholas Phipps Producer: Stanley Haynes Cinematography: Guy Green Editor: Geoffrey Foot Music Score: William Alwyn Art Director: John Bryan Costumes: Margaret Furse Assistant Director: George Pollock Cast: Ann Todd (Madeleine Smith); Ivan Desny (Emile L’Angelier); Norman Wooland (Mr. Minnoch); Leslie Banks (Mr. Smith); Susan Stranks (Janet Smith); Patricia Raine (Bessie Smith); Elizabeth Sellars (Christina); Edward Chapman (Dr. Thomson); Jean Cadell (Mrs. Jenkins); Eugene Deckers (Monsieur Thuau); Ivor Bernard (Mr. Murdoch); Barry Jones (Lord Advocate); David Horne (Lord Justice); Andre Morell (Dean of Faculty); Amy Veness (Miss Aiken); John Laurie (Scots Divine); James McKechnie (Narrator). The second movie Lean made with Ann Todd, by then his third wife, was upon her request to do the project. He decided to undertake it, somewhat reluctantly. By now his collaboration with Ronald Neame and Anthony HavelockAllan had ended. The Cineguild as a team had produced several masterpieces together. Lean still worked under the umbrella of the Rank Organization, for the last time. The story evolved from a real-life incident, a notorious trial of an aristocratic woman, Madeleine Smith, who was accused of murdering her French lover, Emile L’Angelier, in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1857. Her guilt was not established, and the verdict was “not proven,” a trial outcome peculiar to Scotland. After a brief voice-over introduction by a contemporary narrator, the story unfolds chronologically: The Smiths are shown moving into a luxurious apartment fit for their class in Glasgow, and Madeleine chooses to stay in the spacious basement, sharing her bedroom with her youngest sister. This is the spot for the assignations with her lover, who comes at late hours and taps the rails with his cane, and she hands him a key to enter the outside door. A chambermaid is complicit to all this; Emile is a frequent night visitor, and the two lovers are sometimes seen outside on the

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grounds. Eventually, Emile presses Madeleine to bring his case to her father, and when she refuses he threatens to reveal their liaison by making public her letters to him—thus making it clear to Madeleine that he was after her money and position. Meanwhile, Madeleine has been receiving the attentions of a wealthy, courteous gentleman, Mr. Minnoch, who offers her a ring of engagement. Apprised of this, the persistent L’Angelier presses on with his threats, and when he soon dies of arsenic poisoning, Madeleine is brought to trial. The verdict, not proven, was interpreted by critics and audience as an ambiguous ending, and mostly for that reason, Madeleine failed to win wide approval and was considered Lean’s least successful of the eleven movies preceding the epics. Some critics (Michael A. Anderegg, Gene D. Phillips) think that the film has been undervalued, especially since in more modern times ambiguity has become more prevalent in films than it was then. Aside from its captivating narrative tension, the film itself offers many clues that point to Madeleine’s guilt: arsenic was bought twice by Madeleine as a cosmetic, L’Angelier becomes ill twice after assignations with her, and the last shot of the film shows her driving away, the vague smile on her face suggesting that she had gotten away with murder. In any case, both the Ann Todd films present a woman dissatisfied with wealth and status and yearning for exotic adventure, while a certain ambiguity in both of Todd’s performances establishes a complex woman’s persona. The excited and hostile crowds swarming the streets as Madeleine is driven to court remind of a much later scene, in A Passage to India, when Adela Quested is taken to trial in Chandrapore. If nothing else such scenes (and one triumphant crowd reaction when Madeleine is released) suggest that Lean had already developed certain predilections for the epic form.

The Sound Barrier (1950) Breaking the Sound Barrier (U.S. title) Director: David Lean Screenplay: Terence Rattigan Producer: David Lean Associate Producer: Norman Spencer Cinematography: Jack Hildyard Aerial Unit Cinematography: John Wilcox, Jo Jago, Peter Newbrook Editor: Geoffrey Foot Music: Malcolm Arnold Aerial Unit Director: Anthony Squire Cast: Ralph Richardson (Sir John Ridgefield); Nigel Patrick (Tony Carthwaite); Ann Todd (Susan Ridgefield Carthwaite); John Justin (Philip Peel); Dinah

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Sheridan (Jess Peel); Joseph Tomelty (Will Sparks); Denholm Elliott (Chris Ridgefield); Jack Allen (Windy Williams); Ralph Michael (Fletcher). The Sound Barrier marked a great many changes for David Lean. For one thing, this was his break with Cineguild and the Arthur Rank Organization; also, this film ended his collaboration with several staff members who had been with him for most of his previous endeavors. For his next two pictures, he joined British Lion Films, produced under the umbrella of Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré who had been a force in the renaissance of British cinema for the last two decades, having been director, producer, or associate producer of numerous hits, among which were The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Rembrandt, The Thief of Baghdad, and The Third Man. With his new picture, Lean also shifted from the last two women-themed movies to the male leads, as this movie and the next were dominated by strong male figures. Thus, with this film he inched closer to the epic form and to a single dominant male figure (and figurehead) obsessed with succeeding in an effort against great odds, an idea resurrected in his first two epics. The Sound Barrier is the story of a British aircraft manufacturer, Sir John Ridgefield, who right after the war had been obsessed with the idea of producing jet-propelled supersonic jets, thus staying ahead of U.S. competition. This drove him to excesses, including placing into danger two close members of his family, his son, Chris, and his son-in-law, Tony Garthwaite. The first, a reluctant flier, died in a crash in his first effort; the second crashed testing a supposedly perfect machine, Prometheus, the pioneering and myth-named jet that would place Ridgefield ahead of his competitors. The third to try was Tony’s friend Philip Peel, who broke the sound barrier by using a trick he learned when flying Spitfires during the war. Ridgefield’s goal was accomplished, but not before he lost a son and a son-in-law. Bitterly, his daughter, Susan, confronts her father; she accuses him of ruthlessness and threatens to move to London, taking her young son, John, away from him, so the boy will not follow in his father’s (and grandfather’s) footsteps. But at the last moment she relents, when she finds her father looking through a telescope, an image of the lunar surface lying by his side. When she observes that it looks “terribly unfriendly,” he replies, “We live in an unfriendly universe.” But man, he says, possesses imagination (“vision,” she corrects him), and thus is better equipped to win the battle against the blind forces of nature. She decides to stay with him, recognizing his greatness and nobility of purpose. In this pre-epic (or really a small epic), Lean presents a character believing in human ability to win against great odds. Lawrence, too, was told by Ali that “the Nefud cannot be crossed.” It is the sun’s anvil—beyond man’s capacity. Lawrence replies, “I will cross it if you will.” The hero—or Lean’s concept of him—is pitted against impossible odds. Who would believe that Nicholson and a ragtag collection of POWS would build a bridge, admired for its beauty, elegance, and sturdy construction? Yet he drives this group to do the impossible. Arguably, both Nicholson and

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Lawrence are delusional. Ridgefield is not. He is rigid—as his name perhaps implies—but not bereft of feeling or compassion, though accused of lacking both. And yet he knows those great purposes—or man’s goals on earth—demand will, stamina, intelligence, and imagination. His chief engineer, Will Sparks, tells him that Tony, his son-in-law, a good test pilot, did not really have the superior intelligence required for his task. But Philip Peel did. He knew that propulsion requires increasing rather than decreasing speed during the crucial moment of reaching Mach 1, the breaking point of the sound barrier, and pushes the lever forward, thus escaping death at the last moment. The fault is not in the machine, Ridgefield had said earlier. It is in man’s handling it. The movie is admired, even today, for its breathtaking aerial sequences, sound effects, and building tension, which make this one of the most watchable pre-epic Lean movies.

Hobson’s Choice (1954) Director: David Lean Screenplay: David Lean, Norman Spencer, Wynyard Browne Producer: David Lean Associate Producer: Norman Spencer Cinematography: Jack Hildyard Editor: Peter Taylor Music Score: Malcolm Arnold Art Director: Wilfred Shingleton Costumes: John Armstrong, Julia Squire Sound: John Cox Assistant Director: Adrian Pryce-Jones Cast: Charles Laughton (Henry Hobson); John Mills (William Mossop); Brenda de Banzie (Maggie Hobson); Daphne Anderson (Alice Hobson); Prunella Scales (Vicky Hobson); Richard Wattis (Albert Prosser); Derek Bloomfield (Freddy Beenstock); Helen Haye (Mrs. Hepworth); Joseph Tomelty (Jim Heeler); Julian Mitchell (Sam Minns); Gibb McLaughlin (Tudsbury); John Laurie (Dr. MacFarlane). This is the only bona fide cinematic comedy made by Lean in his entire career, and, as such, it is a triumph. Blithe Spirit, which preceded it, was of course also comedic, but evidently limited by its format—a stage play transferred to the screen. Besides, then (1945), Lean was directing under the guiding hand of Noël Coward, but with Hobson’s Choice, he was free to exercise his talent unrestricted by a producer’s supervision, since he produced the film himself. So his talent for comedic art burst through in its full maturity, rich in both content and cinematic technique. Since none of the epics is a comedy—even

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remotely—this might be considered an aberration in Lean’s career, being as remote from what was to follow soon as one could imagine. Yet, even Hobson’s Choice, based on a 1915 play by Harold Brighouse, contains themes not unrelated to what preceded it and what followed. Here again we find a paternalistic figure—in every sense—dominating the scene, for Hobson, it seems at first, is an oppressive, blustering shoemaker forcing his two employees to work in the cellar under deplorable conditions, and an unbending father dominating his three daughters, who slave for him running his shoe factory-shop while he goes on his wild drunken binges. But the movie also treads the grounds of female rebellion by his eldest daughter, Maggie, who stands up against his bluster, marries his most talented worker, and sets an example for her two younger sisters, Alice and Vicky, who are also emboldened to pick up husbands of their own. Hobson’s bullying and male tyranny evaporate as soon as he is threatened with a lawsuit for trespassing, and he is forced to accept his former employee, the seemingly half-witted but talented Will Mossop, as his son-in-law and partner in his business. Though this is a talented group of actors, the dominating figure is of course Charles Laughton, an established superstar in Hollywood who had already played Nero, Henry VII, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Inspector Javert, and a string of other characters, mostly heavies. When Lean recruited him to play Hobson, he was wise enough to let him loose to exercise his plethoric mannerisms, but on the whole, the film’s other performances were understated. Brenda de Banzie, as Maggie, not only withstands her father’s verbal barrage but is capable of delivering some of her own, displaying a business acumen he lacked. The surprise is John Mills as Will Mossop. With his mop of tousled hair, ill-fitting clothes, and awkward movements, he looks a prelude to the dimwitted Michael he was to play some fifteen years later in Ryan’s Daughter. His metamorphosis into a husband and astute businessman forms the pivotal event of the plot, in some ways a reversal of Pygmalion, which Lean had edited almost two decades earlier. Here a strong female instructs a timid male, helping him to climb up the social ladder, marrying him in the process. While a gelatinous Hobson drops on his bed, gasping from several ailments, his doctor telling him he has only six months to live, Mossop gains the upper hand in a final confrontation with his former boss, demanding that if they are to go into partnership, the sign outside Hobson’s establishment must read “Mossop & Hobson.” At this point, Hobson has no other choice. Lean used his cinematic tricks to make this a visually arresting experience, the best example being Hobson’s exit from the tavern, staggering to step into a fleeing moon image in the puddles around him, eventually falling into an open trap door and on a pile of grain sacks, from where he is chased next morning. Jack Hildyard’s photography catches the quintessential Lean imagery, while sparkling dialogue and a musical score by Malcolm Arnold add to this movie’s many delights.

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Summertime (or Summer Madness) (1955) Director: David Lean Screenplay: H. E. Bates and David Lean, from the play The Time of the Cuckoo, by Arthur Laurents Producer: Ilya Lopert Associate Producer: Norman Spencer Cinematography: Jack Hildyard Editor: Peter Taylor Music Score: Alessandro Cicognini, Rossini’s Overture from “La Gaza Ladra” Art Directors: Bill Hutchinson and Ferdinane Bellan Production Design: Vincent Korda Sound: Peter Hanford, John Cox Assistant Directors: Adrian Pryce-Jones and Alberto Cardone Cast: Katharine Hepburn (Jane Hudson); Rossano Brazzi (Renato De Rossi); Isa Miranda (Signora Fiorini); Darren McGavin (Eddie Jaeger); Mari Aldon (Phyllis Jaeger); Jane Rose (Mrs. Edith McIlhenny); McDonald Parke (Lloyd McIlhenny); Gaetano Autiero (Mauro); Andre Morell (Englishman in the Train); Jeremy Spenser (Vito); Virginia Simeon (Giovanna). Summertime is arguably the most romantic of Lean’s movies, though this term here needs qualifications. Many times Lean stated that he was not a romantic, and many commentators and critics found that this disclaimer did not square with reality. Lean had also tried to avoid sentimentality, which once he called “generalized feeling,” as Omar Sharif recollects in one of his commentaries on Doctor Zhivago. Romanticism, in the case of Lean, can be described as a pantheistic love of nature, as Silver and Ursini have done in their pioneering work, David Lean and His Films, a theme they find particularly relevant to Brief Encounter (when they quote part of Keats’s sonnet, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” the word “romance” from this sonnet being displayed in a crossword puzzle Laura’s husband is trying to solve). Laura’s passion is more like a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” to use Wordsworth’s well-known phrase, a feeling she does not know she possesses until it bursts forth unexpectedly when she meets Alec. But in The Passionate Friends, Mary Justin makes a deliberate decision to stay with a husband she does not love, though her passion for Steven is rekindled, and in Madeleine, the same Ann Todd (Madeleine Smith) discards her French lover, L’Angelier, and suspicion is that she tries to poison him when he proves a nuisance. Jane Hudson, however, is none of the above types. It is true that suppressed feelings come to the surface when she meets the passionate Italian Renato, who also loves her and tries desperately to hold on to her, but Jane’s problem is not merely one of romantic love—that is undisputed. The problem arises when she finds out that Renato has concealed from her the

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fact that he has a family, and in the process he has told her several fibs, not wanting to lose her. She displays a puritan disposition—and one entirely American—and a righteous one for total integrity in a person that she loves. She is not one to gamble her future on a perilous liaison with a man of whom she knows little. In that sense, she is not unlike some of Henry James’s heroines who land in Europe and suffer emotional jolts that shred their preconceived ideas of “proper” love. Jane has good sense, fine intelligence, but she is also graced with nobility of feeling, manifested even in her affection for a street urchin and superbly rendered by Katharine Hepburn. Jane is sensitive to emotion—and is actually enchanted by it in the seductive environment of Venice—but she also possesses the judgment and willpower to know that she might have saved herself from an emotional precipice. “I always stayed too long at a party,” she tells Renato, who is unable to understand either her culture or her, really. Both titles, Summertime or Summer Madness, fit, though the second may be more appropriate. Venice is full of color—splendidly photographed by Jack Hildyard—sound, art from the centuries, but also polluted waters in the canal where lovers slide around in gondolas at night to the tunes of Italian melodies, equally seductive. The beauty and enchantment of Venice, where the movie was filmed in its entirety, are fully captured by Lean and his collaborators, but also Venice’s insipient danger, all merging in one simple and brilliant narrative. Like the viewer, plain Jane is enraptured by the carnival atmosphere, lushly living in the land of the lotus-eaters for a brief while, escaping in time.

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APPENDIX B:

DVD and Blu-ray Editions

The Early Films of David Lean 1. Box Set: David Lean Collection (2006, 2010), by Kino Films. Import from South Korea, in English with subtitles in Korean and English. This set contains nine early Lean films: This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, The Passionate Friends, Madeleine, The Sound Barrier, and Hobson’s Choice. Section of “Special Features,” “A Profile of Oliver Twist,” a still gallery for that movie, trailers for Oliver Twist, Blithe Spirit, and Brief Encounter. Average quality of image and sound. Can be bought from buyers at Amazon.com. Plays in Region 1 encoding (U.S.A., Canada). 2. Box Set: The David Lean Centenary Collection (2010). Import from UK, Carlton Studio. This set, which contains ten of the early Lean films (all but Summertime), is PAL Region 2 encoding and will not play on standard U.S. DVD players. It offers “Special Features,” with a photo gallery, interactive menus, and a remastered version of all films included. 3. In Which We Serve, Westlake Entertainment, Inc. This 2004 DVD contains a “Special Features Section,” with biographies, filmographies, a photo gallery, interactive menus, and Dolby sound. 4. This Happy Breed. An import from Korea (2004) is contained in the abovementioned box set. English, in color, with subtitles in Korean and English. 5. Blithe Spirit. Contained in the abovementioned box set by Kino Films. English, color, with subtitles in Korean and English. Also in the David Lean Centenary Collection. 6. Brief Encounter. Restored DVD version in the Criterion Collection, 2000. 181

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7. Oliver Twist. Criterion Collection restored DVD version, 1999. 8. The Passionate Friends, Madeleine, The Sound Barrier. All three of these movies were issued in older DVD versions, currently unavailable. All three, however, can be obtained via Kino Films and the David Lean Centenary Collection box sets mentioned above. 9. Hobson Choice (2009). The Criterion Collection has issued a newly restored transfer by the BFI National Archive, funded by the David Lean Foundation. This is the only Criterion Collection issue of a Lean movie that has a full-length running commentary by Alain Silver and James Ursini. 10. Summertime (or Summer Madness). A Criterion Collection DVD edition of this movie was issued in 1998. The transfer is very good, but the disc contains no extras.

The Epic Films of David Lean 1. The Bridge on the River Kwai (2000). One-disc DVD edition, Columbia, widescreen, with digitally mastered audio and anamorphic video, subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai, interactive and animated menus, scene selections, theatrical trailers, and talent files. 2. The Bridge on the River Kwai (2000). Two-disc DVD edition, Columbia, which contains a booklet with details of the production. Disc 2 contains an exclusive documentary with details about the adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel and details about casting, the history of production, musical score, and the process of restoring the original. It also has an original featurette, “The Rise and Fall of Jungle Giant,” along with a short film introduced by William Holden, an appreciation by John Milius, a photo gallery, talent files, interactive and animated menus. 3. The Bridge on the River Kwai (2008). A two-disc collector’s edition, remastered in high definition, issued by Sony Pictures, with a section of “Special Features” on disc 2 containing identical materials described in the previous disc. 4. The Bridge on the River Kwai (2010). A Blu-ray box set edition, issued by Sony Pictures, containing a richly illustrated section, in addition to the original souvenir booklet produced in 1957. The illustrated section contains selected filmographies of William Holden, Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakaya, and David Lean. This set contains both a Blu-ray and a DVD version. The “Special Features” section is identical with the materials in both previous DVDs above. 5. The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai. A DVD produced and aired in 1999–2000 by the History Channel, this disc disputes the veracity of the

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6.

7.

8.

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events unfolding in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, and it contains interviews with POW survivors of the building of the infamous 250-mile railway connecting Bangkok with Rangoon during the Second World War. Many of the survivors claim that the torments they endured from the Japanese, who ignored the Geneva Convention during those years, were far worse than those shown in the film. This useful historical background should be of help to those who wish to analyze the film from a historical perspective. Lawrence of Arabia (2002). Single-disc edition, which preserves the original wide screen version of the film and offers a “Special Features” section but no commentaries with historical perspectives. This disc is also part of a box set containing The Bridge on the River Kwai and A Passage to India, issued the same date. Lawrence of Arabia (2003). Two-disc exclusive collector’s edition, which, aside from the digitally mastered audio and anamorphic video, contains a “Special Features” section on both discs. The first disc contains several DVD-ROM features: Archives from Arabia: Historic Photographs; Take You behind the Scenes (Part 1); Journey with Lawrence: Interactive Map of the Middle East. The second disc “Special Features” contains an exclusive documentary: “The Making of Lawrence of Arabia”; a conversation with Steven Spielberg; and four original featurettes: “Maan, Jordan: The Camels Are Cast”; “In Search of Lawrence”; “Romance of Arabia”; “Wind, Sand and Star: The Making of a Classic”; also original newsreel footage of the New York premiere. DVDROM features: Archives of Arabia: Historic Photographs; Take You behind the Scenes (Part 2); advertising campaigns; theatrical trailers; talent files. Collectible insert: reproduction of the original souvenir booklet. Lawrence of Arabia (2008). Box set collector’s edition by Columbia Classics. This two-disc set is practically identical to the previous one described above, but remastered in high definition. A Blu-ray edition of Lawrence of Arabia is expected in 2012, on the fiftieth anniversary of the classic film. Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World (2003). This PBS DVD Gold production contains a film detailing the life and struggles of the historical Lawrence, written, produced, and directed by James Hawes, narrated by Nadim Sawalha. Unlike Lean’s film, it contains the entire life of Lawrence, from his birth to his death, and two bonus DVD features. “The Making of Lawrence of Arabia” includes opinions about Lawrence by British biographers and Arab scholars and tribe historians, who offer an illuminating portrait of the actual Lawrence. The disc also contains an interview with director and producer James Hawes. This disc is a valuable companion to the student of comparative studies of the historical Lawrence and the hero of Lean’s film.

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10. Doctor Zhivago (2001). Two-disc box set, with “Special Features” on both discs. Disc 1 contains a feature-length commentary with Omar Sharif, Sandra Lean, and Rod Steiger on the thirtieth anniversary of the film, providing reminiscences by two principal actors in the film, with additional observations by Lean’s sixth wife. Disc 2 contains a “Making of a Russian Epic” feature with an introduction by Omar Sharif, who narrates, and also features Geraldine Chaplin, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger, David Lean, a section on Pasternak and his times, a sketch of the real Lara, Robert Bolt, Maurice Jarre, and the premiere at the Oscars. The disc also features several documentaries, among them “Moscow in Madrid,” “Pasternak,” “Geraldine Chaplin Screen Test,” and other useful materials. 11. Doctor Zhivago (2010). Forty-fifth anniversary edition. Disc 1 contains, in addition to the entire movie, a commentary by Sandra Lean, Omar Sharif, and Rod Steiger, identical to the one in the 2001 edition. Disc 1 also offers a new commemorative two-part forty-fifth-anniversary retrospective: “Doctor Zhivago: A Celebration,” which offers views, mostly laudatory, by a number of modern producers and directors, Nicholas Myers, director/writer of Star Trek III and IV; Gary Ross, director and writer of Big, Seabiscuit; Mikael Solomon, director and producer of The Abyss; Martin Campbell, director of Golden Eye and Casino Royale; Taylor Hackford, director and producer of Ray and Dolores Claiborne; and Kathleen Kennedy, producer of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Seabiscuit. Disc 2 offers an hour-long commentary by Omar Sharif, identical to that contained in the 2001 edition. 12. Doctor Zhivago (2010). Box set of Blu-ray edition, with a booklet richly illustrated and containing sections on Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Sir Alec Guinness, Sir David Lean, and a brief essay on Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak. All the other materials and commentaries are identical to those in the forty-fifth-anniversary edition mentioned above. 13. Ryan’s Daughter (2006). Two-disc special edition, containing a full-length commentary on part 1 (disc 1) and part 2 (disc 2) by a number of surviving cast members, collaborators of Lean in the filming of Ryan’s Daughter, and a number of filmmakers and critics who offer updated (thirty-five years after it was released) information on the making of the film and a variety of critical comments. These include Lady Sandra Lean, Sarah Miles, Petrine Day Mitchum, assistant director Michael Stevenson, second unit director Roy Stevens, art director Roy Walker, assistant editor Tony Lawson, location manager Eddie Fowlie, director John Boorman, director Hugh Judson, biographer of Lean Stephen M. Silverman, and film historian Richard Schickel. The second disc also contains a “Special Features” section, containing “The Making of Ryan’s Daughter,” a three-part documentary (“Storm Rising,” “Storm Chaser,” and “The Eye of the Storm”), in which

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APPEN DIX B

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

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most of the individuals mentioned above appear to offer comments; and two vintage documentaries: “We’re the Last of the Traveling Circuses” and “Ryan’s Daughter: A Story of Love,” narrated by Jose Ferrer. Ryan’s Daughter (2011). A Blu-ray edition to be issued (not yet available as of this writing). A Passage to India (2001). One-disc DVD edition, containing a digitally mastered audio and anamorphic video, with a “Special Features” section with bonus trailers, talent files, interactive menus, production notes, and reflections of David Lean. A Passage to India (2008). A two-disc DVD set collector’s edition from Columbia Classics. Disc 1 contains a running commentary by Richard Goodwin, producer of the film. Disc 2 contains a “Special Features” section with several features: “E. M. Forster: Profile of an Author,” narrated by Peter Jones, fellow and librarian at King’s College, Cambridge; “An Epic Takes Shape”; “An Indian Affair”; “Only Connect: A Vision of India”; “Casting a Classic”; “David Lean: Shooting with the Master”; “Reflections of David Lean.” Narrators include several collaborators and surviving cast members: Richard Goodwin, producer; Patrick Cadell and Christopher Figg, assistant directors; Priscilla John, casting director; Nigel Havers, Ann Firbank, Art Malik, Richard Wilson, and Saeed Jaffrey. A Passage to India (2008). One-disc Blu-ray edition, with 1080 high definition, TrueHD Audio 5.1. “Special Features” section includes a Blu-ray exclusive: “Beyond the Passage Picture in Graphics Track,” and all the special features sections in disc 2 of the previous edition above. Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean (2007). A two-disc special edition, containing a DVD of the 1992 concert of Maurice Jarre compositions of the four suites he scored for four epics: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, and A Passage to India, plus two suites dedicated to David Lean. This concert was performed live at the Barbican Centre in London with Jarre conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The second disc is a CD with the same music.

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Bibliography

Alpert, Hollis. “The David Lean Recipe.” New York Times, May 23, 1965, SM23. Anderegg, Michael A. David Lean. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Asher, Michael. Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1995. Bolt, Robert. Doctor Zhivago: The Screenplay. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1965. Boulle, Pierre. The Bridge over the River Kwai. New York: Presidio Press, 2007. ———. The Source of the River Kwai. London: Secker and Warburg, 1967. Brownlow, Kevin. David Lean: A Biography. New York: A Wyatt Book for St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Carnes, Mark C., ed. Past Imperfect: History according to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. Castelli, Louis P. David Lean. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Christie, Ian. The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design. London: Wallflower Press, 2009. Cocks, Jay. “Adventures in the Dream Department.” Time, December 31, 1984, 58–62. Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Edited with an introduction and notes by Martin Seymour-Smith. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Crowther, Bosley. The Great Films. New York: Putnam, 1967. Day, Ernest. “A Passage to India.” American Cinematographer, February 1985, 56–62. Dewson, Lisa. “An Englishman Abroad.” Photoplay, April 1985, 14–18. Ehrsenstein, David. “David Lean: AFI Life Achievement Award.” American Film, March 15, 1990. Elley, Derek. The Epic Film: Myth and History. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Ed. Paul De Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1984. Freedland, Michael. Peter O’Toole. London: W. H. Allen, 1983. Hirsch, Foster. The Hollywood Epic. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1978. IMDb. Awards for David Lean, 1–9. www.imdb.com/name/nm0000180/awards. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction,” In Criticism: The Major Statements, 3rd edition, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 187

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Kael, Pauline. “Bolt and Lean.” The New Yorker, November 21, 1970, 116–18. ———. “A Passage to India.” In For Keeps: Thirty Years at the Movies. New York: Plume, 1996. Kennedy, Matthew. “David Lean’s Problem Child: Gorgeous but Flawed Ryan’s Daughter on DVD.” Bright Lights Film Journal, December 2006. www.brightlightsfilm .com/52/ryans.htm. Knightley, Philip, and Colin Simpson. The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia. London: Nelson and Sons, 1969. Lawrence, T. E. Revolt in the Desert. New York: Garden, 1926. ———. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. New York: Anchor Books, 1991. Lean, Sandra. David Lean: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Universe Publishing, 2001. Leon, Christopher, ed. International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers. New York: Putnam, 1984. Lowell, Thomas. With Lawrence in Arabia. London: Hutchinson, 1925. Maxford, Howard. David Lean. London: B. T. Batsford, 2000. Moraitis, Catherine. The Art of David Lean: A Textual Analysis of Audio-Visual Structure. Canterbury: University of Kent, 2001. Morris, L. Robert, and Lawrence Raskin, Lawrence of Arabia: The 30th Anniversary Pictorial History. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Organ, Steven, ed. David Lean Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2009. Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. Phillips, Gene D. Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. Pickard, Ron. “David Lean: Supreme Craftsman.” Films in Review, May 1974, 256–84. Pratley, Gerald. The Cinema of David Lean. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974. Sackett, Susan. Box Office Hits. New York: Billboard Books, 1990. Santas, Constantine. The Epic in Film: From Myth to Blockbuster. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Sarris, Andrew, ed. The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia. New York: Visible Ink, 1998. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: McGraw Hill, 1976. Siegel, Scott, and Barbara Siegel. The Encyclopedia of Hollywood. New York: Facts on File, 1990. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. David Lean and His Films. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1991. Silverman, Stephen. David Lean. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Sterrit, David. “David Lean: Master of the Great Epic.” The Christian Science Monitor, April 30, 1991. Stewart, Jon. To the River Kwai. London: Bloomsberry, 1988. Tanner, Michael. Troubled Epic: On Location with Ryan’s Daughter. Malta: Collins Press, 2007. Thomson, David. A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd edition. New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Turner, Adrian. The Making of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. London: Dragon’s World, 1994.

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Index

The 49th Parallel, xv 2001: A Space Odyssey, xxvii Academy Awards, xv, 168. See also Oscar nominations The African Queen, xvi, xxxixn9, 1 All Quiet on the Western Front, xviii Allied POWs, xxxiv, 9, 11, 24n24, 175, 183 “all-star six million dollar bore” headline, xix American Film Institute, xx, 81, 163n16 Anderegg, Michael A., xxi, 174 Anderson, Lindsay, xviii Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), xxiii Aristotle, xxii, xxiii, xxxvi, xxxvii, xlin60, 13, 24, 25n32, 102 The Art of David Lean (Moraitis), xxi, 52n34 auterists, xix, xxvii BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), xvi, 171 Ballard, J. G., 155 Barry Lyndon, xxvii “Be happy in your work!” motto, 5, 12, 24n18 Ben-Hur, xxii, xxvii, xxxvii, 2, 73 Ben-Hur, Judah, xxxvi, 73

Beyond the Epic: David Lean’s Life and Works (Phillips), xxi, xxxixn16, 51n13, 51n15, 51n19, 52n32 Blithe Spirit, xv, xxviii 167–68, 176, 181 Blithe Spirit (Coward), 167 Blu-ray editions, of epic films, 182–85 Bolt, Robert, xxx, xxxiii, 27, 51n19, 57, 78, 90, 91; David Lean collaboration with, xvi, xxix, 29, 91, 161–62; notes of, 58–68; as romantic, 92, 96; as screenwriter, xxxi, xxxii, 28, 56 Bond, James, xxxiii Boulle, Pierre, xxiv, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, 1, 3, 4, 9, 10 Bovarism, 93, 95 Box, John, 87, 119, 155, 162; Chandrapore city set, 121, 123, 127, 151n8; David Lean collaboration with, xix, 56 Brando, Marlon, xxxixn9, 28, 156, 161 Breaking the Sound Barrier. See The Sound Barrier Brief Encounter, xv, xix, xx, xxxii, 72, 73, 91, 92, 117n29, 168–69, 172, 181; musical theme of, 62; romanticism in, 178 The Bridge on the River Kwai: adaptation of The Bridge over the River Kwai (Boulle), xxx, 1–3; analysis of, 1–23; 189

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190

INDEX

cast, xlii; and change of identity, 6–7; character growth in, 16–18, 20; and critical response, 9–11; DVD and Blu-ray editions, 182; historical and literary perspectives, 3–11; and History Channel documentary, 10–11, 24n24; locales, 13; motives and mottos, 5, 12, 16, 22, 24n18; storyline, 4; structure, 12–15, 100; themes, 20–23, 81 The Bridge on the River Kwai, clash of personalities, 13–16, 20–23; Joyce vs. himself, 23; Saito vs. Nicholson, 21; Shears vs. Nicholson, 21–22; Shears vs. Warden, 22 The Bridge over the River Kwai (Boulle), xxx, 3, 11, 24n12, 24n31; and characters, 7, 8; and historical truth, 4, 10; parts of, 4–5 Brighouse, Harold, 177 British Academy of Film and Television Arts, xvi Brownlow, Kevin, xxi, xxxixn14, xxxixn18, xln29, 51n19, 53n45, 116n14 Burton, Richard, xxiv Bushido, xxxv, 15 Caesar and Cleopatra, xxiii Canby, Vincent, xx Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian (Hough), 87 Castelli, Louis, xxi Chaplin, Geraldine, 184; as Tonya, 65 Christie, Julie, 55, 184; as Lara, 65 Churchill, Winston, 29 Cineguild, xv, xxix, 173, 175 CinemaScope, xxv, xxvi, 2 Cleopatra, xxiii, xxiv, xxxiii, 23n7 A Clockwork Orange, xxvii Cocks, Jay, xix Colonel Bogey March, 22, 25n34, 62, 162 Conrad, Joseph, xviii, 151n3, 155–58, 159, 161

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Courtenay, Tom, 162; as Pasha Antipov/ Strelnikov, 65 Coward, Noël, xv, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, 120, 168, 176; David Lean collaboration with, xv, xxx, 170; as screenwriter, 165, 166, 167 Crist, Judith, xix, 55 Criterion Collection, xx, xxxixn6, xln36, 172, 181, 182 “Critical Survey of the Oeuvre” (Castelli), xxi Crowther, Bosley, xix David Lean (Anderegg), xxi David Lean (Silverman), xxi David Lean: A Biography (Brownlow), xxi, xxxixn3, xxxixn14, xxxixn18, xln29, 51n19, 53n45, 116n14 David Lean: A Guide to References and Resources (Castelli), xxi David Lean: An Intimate Portrait (Lean), xxi, xxxixn3, 84n9 David Lean and His Films (Ursini), xxi, 178 David Lean Centenary Collection, 181, 182 David Lean Collection, 181 David Lean Interviews (Organ), xxi De Laurentiis, Dino, xix Dean, James, xxxi DeMille, Cecil B., xxvi, xxvii, xxxvi, xxxvii, 3 Dickens, Charles, xv, xvii, xxiv, xxviii, 3, 120, 152n20, 160, 169, 170, 172 Doctor Zhivago: adaptation of (Pasternak), xxx, 57–68; analysis of, 55–83; cast, 54, 65; characterization in, 72–77; criticism of, 55, 71, 79, 81; DVD and Blu-ray editions, 184; filming location, 56; historical and political perspectives, 78–83; structure, 68–75, 100; themes, 71, 75–78, 76, 79, 81–82 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), xxx, 57, 69–70, 81

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IN DEX Douglas, Kirk, xxiv Dr. Strangelove, xxvii The Duel (Conrad), 156 The Duelists, 156 DVD editions: of early films, 181–82; of epic films, 182–85 Ehrenstein, David, xiii, xx Eisenstein, Sergei, xxxvii El Cid, xxvii Empire of the Sun (Ballard), 155 epic films: and adaptations from literary works, xxviii–xxxi; Aristotle’s observations of, xxiii; and critical response, xvii–xxi; DVD and Bluray editions, 182–85; and historical accuracy, xxix; and length, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxx; and political elements, xxxiv–xxxviii; and structure, xxii–xxviii; and tragic elements, xxxi– xxxiv; transition to, 1–3 Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr., xxiv, xxxiii, 135 The Fall of the Roman Empire, xxvii Ferber, Edna, xxxi Ferrer, José, 40 film techniques of David Lean: active heroes, 73; editing, xxxvii, 66, 81, 112, 119, 127, 128, 13; flawed heroes, xiv, xxxii, xxxiii, 32, 61, 64, 73, 77, 96, 155, 156; framing devices, 46, 58, 70, 90, 111, 112; lighting and color grading, 46, 67, 128; mise-en-scène, xxv, 38; modus operandi, xxiii, 45, 90; montages, 66, 70, 149, 171; passive heroes, 21, 60, 69, 72–73,75, 78, 83; reaction shots, 59, 69, 82, 149; sound devices, 46, 60, 126, 134, 176; trains as transitions, 71, 82; visual nodes, 59, 104; voice-over narrative, xxiv, xxix, 60, 69, 70, 72, 140, 151, 153n39, 168, 172, 173 The Flags of our Fathers, xxix Flaubert, Gustave, xxx, 23n8, 90, 92–93, 94, 95, 96

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191

Flynn, Errol, xxxiii Ford, John, xxvii, 81 Foreman, Carl, 1, 2 Forster, E. M., xviii, xxiv, xxx, xxxiii, xxxv, 50, 120, 122, 145, 147, 160; and Chandrapore city, 151n8; vs. David Lean, 138, 139, 148–51; theme in, 132 From Here to Eternity, 47 Gangs of New York, xxix Giant, xxvii, xxxi The Godfather, xviii, xxii, xxxiv, 102 Golden Glove Award, xvi Gone with the Wind, xviii, xxii, 81, 102 Goodfellas, xxxiv Goodwin, Richard, 46, 120, 123, 152n31, 153n54, 185 Granger, Stewart, xxxiii The Great Escape, 47 Great Expectations, xv, xx, xxi, xxviii, 73, 120, 152n20, 169–70; DVD edition, 181 The Greatest Story Ever Told, xxvii, xlin59 Griffith, D. W., xxxvii Guinness, Alec, xxxiii, xxxixn18, 11, 65, 71, 119, 182, 184; as Fagin, 171; as Feisal, 37, 52n24; as Godbole, 121, 131, 142; as Col. Nicholson, 11; as Yevgrav, 58, 65, 72 The Guns of Navarone, 47 Hampton, Christopher, 160, 161 Harrison, Rex, xxiv, 167 Havelock-Allan, Anthony, xv, 152n20, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173 Hawkins, Jack, xxxiii; as General Allenby, 26; as Major Warden, 14 Hawks, Howard, xxvii, 3 Hepburn, Katharine, xiii, xv, 1, 178, 179 Heston, Charlton, xxiv High Noon, 2 History Channel documentary, 10–11, 24n24, 182

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INDEX

Hitchcock, Alfred, xiv, xv, xvi, xxvi, 2, 3, 155, 172 HMS Kelly, xv, xxxii, 165 Hobson’s Choice, 176–77; DVD editions, 181, 182 Hough, Richard, 87 Howard, Trevor, 116n23, 156, 168, 172; as Father Collins, 86 Iliad (Homer), xxii In Harm’s Way, 47 In Which We Serve, xv, xvii, xxi, xxxii, 73, 155, 165–66; DVD edition, 181 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 89 James, Henry, xxxviii, 92, 102, 179 Jarre, Maurice, 43, 60, 64, 119, 133, 184, 185; and “Lara’s Theme,” 62; David Lean collaboration with, 162; as Oscar winner, 147 Jones, Christopher, 105, 106; as Major Doryan, 103, 104 Jordanian desert: aesthetic effects, 42–44; effects on characters, 41–46 Kael, Pauline, xix, xx, 55, 88, 144, 153n32 Kinski, Klaus, 82, 85n48 Korda, Alexander, 28, 175 Kubrick, Stanley, xxvii, 81 Kurosawa, Akira, xx, xxiii, xxvi, 162 “Lara’s Theme,” 62 Laurents, Arthur, 178 Lawrence: fictional, 35, 50; historical, 30, 31, 37, 40, 42, 43, 47, 48, 51n14, 52n35, 162, 183 Lawrence, Arnold W., 28 Lawrence, T. E., xxx, xxxi, xlin58, 27, 28, 51n11, 162. See also Ross, John; Shaw, T. E. Lawrence of Arabia: adaptation of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), xxix, 29–32; analysis of, 29–50; biographical background, 27–29; cast,

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26; characters, 32–41, 48, 52n30, 73, 75; clash of cultures, 48; DVD and Blu-ray editions, 183; filming locations, 33, 41; historical aspects, 29–32; political aspects, 47–50; structure, 32–34, 100; themes, 33–34, 48, 49, 50, 81 Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World, 51n9, 183 Lean, David: Robert Bolt collaboration with, 29, 161–62; John Box collaboration with, xix, 56, 155; Noël Coward collaboration with, xv, xxx, 170; death of, 162; early films of, xv–xvii, 165–79, 181–82; epic films of, 1, 27, 55, 87, 119, 155, 182–185; vs. E. M. Forster, 138, 139, 148–51; Christopher Hampton collaboration with, 160, 161; Michael Jarre collaboration with, 162; reputation of, xv, xvi, xx, xxv, xxx, xxxvi, 46, 79, 81, 111; as romantic, 92, 96; screenplays of, xxviii, xxix, 120, 160, 168, 169, 170, 176, 178; Steven Spielberg collaboration with, 160–61 Lean, Sandra, xxi, xxxii, xxxixn3, 62, 85n48, 88, 112, 116n9, 184 Laughton, Charles, xv, 11, 176, 177 Life Achievement award, xx, 163n16 literary adaptations: Blithe Spirit, 167; The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1; Brief Encounter, 168; Doctor Zhivago, 55; The Duelists, 156; Great Expectations, 169; The Heart of Darkness, 156; Hobson’s Choice, 177; Lawrence of Arabia, 27; Lord Jim, 155; Nostromo, 155; Oliver Twist, 170; Outcast of the Islands, 156; A Passage to India, 119; The Passionate Friends, 171; Ryan’s Daughter, 87; Sabotage, 155; The Secret Agent, 155; Summertime, 178; This Happy Breed, 166; Victory, 155 Lolita, xxvii Lopert Films, xv

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IN DEX The Lord of the Rings, xxii Lucia du Lamermoor, 93 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), xxx, 23n8, 90, 91, 94, 98 Madeleine, 173–74; DVD edition, 181, 182 “a magnificent form,” xxxviii Major Barbara, xxx A Man for All Seasons, xxx, xxxii, 28 Mann, Anthony, xxvii Maurice Jarre: A Tribute to David Lean, 185 MGM, xvi, 55, 56, 65, 79 Michael’s Day, 107 Miles, Sarah, 87, 88, 91, 106, 116n9, 184; as Rosy, 103 Milestone, Lewis, xviii, xxxi Milius, John, xx, 81, 182 Mills, John, 87, 165, 166, 167, 169, 176, 177; as Michael, 94, 107, 117n40 The Mint (Lawrence), 48 Mitchum, Robert, xxxiii; as Charles, 103, 113, 115 Moraitis, Catherine, xxi, 52n34 The Mutiny on the Bounty, xix, 87, 88 National Board Review, xvi National Society of Film Critics, xix National Society of New York Critics, 87 Navarro, Ramon, xxiv Neame, Ronald, xv, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173 New Wave, xx, xxvii New York Film Critics Award, xvi, xx, 119 Nostromo, 156–58; analysis of, 155–63; as BBC Series, 156; casting, 161; characters, 159, 161; hero-villain clash in, 160, 161; themes of, 159 Odyssey (Homer), xxii, 29, 191 “An Old Master’s New Triumph” (Schickel), xix

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193

Oliver Twist, xxviii, 120, 170–71; DVD editions, 181, 182 On the Waterfront, xvi, xxxixn9, 1 One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, xv One Woman’s Story. See The Passionate Friends “only connect” motto, xviii, 122, 160 Organ, Steven, xxi Oscar nominations, xiii, xv, xvi, xxvi, xxx, 1, 2, 3, 41, 55, 68, 115, 119, 155, 170, 171 O’Toole, Peter, xxxiii, xlin58, 155, 161, 162; as Lawrence, 28, 31, 38, 41, 47 A Passage to India: adaptation of (Forster), xxx, 120–24; analysis of, 119–51; cast, 118, 119, 121; characterization, 138– 40, 144–46, 148–51; clash of cultures, 126, 127; criticism, 124, 132, 135, 142, 144, 147, 148; DVD and Bluray editions, 185; filming locations, 119, 121, 151n8, 152n25; historical and political perspectives, 122; plot structure, 100, 123–48; themes, 81, 122, 124, 126, 129, 132, 146 The Passionate Friends, xv, xxxii, 111, 116n23, 171–73, 178; DVD editions, 181, 182 The Passionate Friends: A Novel (Wells), 171 Pasternak, Boris, xxx, 55, 57, 58, 72, 159; and politics, 65, 79, 80 Patton, xxix Peck, Gregory, xx Phillips, Gene D., xxi, xxxixn16, 51n13, 51n15, 51n19, 52n32, 81, 100, 174 Picot-Sykes agreement, 30, 40, 41, 49, 51 “pity and fear” phrase, 12, 99 Poetics (Aristotle), xxii, xlin52, 25n32 Pollack, Sydney, xx Ponte de la riviere Kwai (Boulle), 1 Ponti, Carlo, xvi, 56, 57 Powell, Michael, xv Pressburger, Emeric, xv Pygmalion, xx, xxx, 177

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INDEX

Quayle, Anthony, 30 Quinn, Anthony, 31 Quo Vadis, 2 Rains, Claude, 26, 116n23, 172 Rank, J. Arthur, xv Rank Organization, xv, 173, 175 Red River, xxvii Reed, Carol, xv, xvi, 1, 155, 168 Remarque, Erich Maria, xxxi Revolt in the Desert (Lawrence), 30, 48, 51 Richard II (Shakespeare), 166 Richardson, Ralph, 117n28, 156, 174; as Gromeko, 65, 72 Rio Bravo, xxvii The Robe, 2 Romantic movement, 92–93 Ross, John, 29 Ryan’s Daughter: adaptation of Madame Bovary (Flaubert), xxx, 90–96; analysis of, 87–115; background, 87–89; cast, 86; character growth, 102–110; criticism, 87, 88, 91, 92, 100, 103, 110, 116; filming location, 89, 90, 112; landscape, 111–15; structure, 100–102; synopsis, 89–90; themes, 81, 88, 96–99 Ryan’s Daughter, contrast of characters in, 94, 98; Charles vs. Charles, 94, 98; Emma vs. Rosy, 94, 98 Ryan’s Daughter: A Troubled Epic (Tanner), xxi Samson and Delilah, 2 Sarris, Andrew, xviii, xix, xxvii “saving face” attitude, 5 Schickel, Richard, xix, 55, 88, 116n12, 184 Schindler’s List, xxix, xxxiv, 160 Scorsese, Martin, xx, xxxiv, 81 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), xxiv, xxx, xxxi, 28, 29, 57, 162 Seven Samurai, xxiii

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Shakespeare, William, xi, xxiii, 57, 80, 166 Sharif, Omar, xxviii, xxxvi, 46, 51, 68, 73, 82, 85n30, 85n48, 162, 184; as Sherif Ali, xxxv, 31; as Yuri Zhivago, 59, 65, 77 Shaw, G. B., xxiii, xxx Shaw, T. E., 29 Sight and Sound, xviii Silver, Alain, xiv, xviii, xxi, 182 Silverman, Stephen M., 62, 67, 88, 116n9, 117n39, 152n20 The Sound Barrier, xv, xvii, 23n8, 73, 111, 117n28, 174–76; DVD editions, 181, 182 Spartacus, xxvii, xxix, 73 Spiegel, Sam, xvi, xxvi, xxx, 1, 2, 11, 28, 44, 51n19, 55 Spielberg, Steven, xx, xxix, xxxiv, 53n40, 81, 155, 163n16, 183; David Lean collaboration with, 160–61 Star Wars, xxii Steiger, Rod, 65, 74, 77, 83, 161, 184 Stevens, George, xxvii, xxxi Still Life (Coward), 168 Summer Madness. See Summertime Summertime, 111, 178–79; DVD edition, 182 “survival” motto, 22 symbols in David Lean’s films: bicycle, 127, 132; echo, xxxviii, 44, 134, 135, 140, 145; hawk, vii, 18, 20, 23, 108; silver, 156, 157, 158, 159; swagger stick, 21; train, 71, 82; umbrella, 109, 113 Tanner, Michael, xxi Taylor, Elizabeth, xxiv The Ten Commandments, xxii, xxxvii, 2 “there’s always the unexpected” motif, 16 This Happy Breed, 166–67; DVD edition, 181 Thomas, Lowell, 28, 29, 51n20 Thomson, David, xx

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IN DEX The Time of the Cuckoo (Laurents), 178 Todd, Ann, xv, xxvii, 1, 116n23, 172, 173, 174, 178 Tora! Tora! Tora!, xxix The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai, 24n24, 182 Truffaut, François, xviii, xxvii Two Cities Films, xv

195

Wayne, John, xxvii, xxxiii Wells, H. G., 171 Western mindset, xxxv Wilder, Billy, xx Willingham, Calder, 1 Wilson, Michael, 1, 2, 28, 29, 30, 32 Wyler, William, xx, xxvii, 1, 3, 81 Young, Freddie, 41

Ursini, James, xiv, xviii, xxi, xxvii, 117n29, 178,182

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Zinnermann, Fred, 81

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About the Author

Constantine Santas was born in Greece and came to the United States as a student at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, where he earned a degree in English literature. Subsequently, he was awarded a fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he earned his B.A. in English, and earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He taught at Milwaukee Downer College (1962–1964) and University of Illinois at Chicago (1964–1971), and served as chairman of the English Department at Flagler College from 1971 to 2002, when he retired as professor emeritus. His publications include a critical biography, Aristotelis Valaoritis (1976), now published in a new translation (2011). His first book on film, Responding to Film (2002), translated under the title, How I Watch a Film, has been published in Greek (2007), and his second film book, The Epic in Film (Rowman & Littlefield) appeared in 2007. Santas has published literary and film articles both in English and in Greek, and has authored translations of three ancient Greek plays, all performed at the Flagler College Auditorium in St. Augustine, Florida. He was a recipient of numerous awards in writing, scholarships, and fellowships, including a Danforth Foundation Teacher Grant and inclusion in Choice as an Outstanding National Teacher, in American Hellenic Who’s Who (1990), and in Who’s Who among American Teachers (2002). Currently, he is working on Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales and on a translation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

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