How many David Lean films have you seen?

Originally Published at The Solute

Towards the end of the century, the American Film Institute and the British Film Institute released lists of the top 100 films of the 20th Century. He’s the most honored director on the British Film Institute list with Brief Encounter at #2, Lawrence of Arabia at #3, Great Expectations at #5, Bridge on the River Kwai at #11, Doctor Zhivago at #27, Oliver Twist at #46, and In Which We Serve at #92. Additionally, he has three films on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 epics list with Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai. 

It’s not surprising that astute British cinemaphiles might have missed some of Lean’s earlier films because to many Americans and casual movie goers, Lean is known for the glorious epics that he made over the latter half of his career. None of the six films he made from 1957 to 1984 clocks in at less than two hours and forty minutes. 

In a way, Lean is one of the most avant-garde directors I have watched because of the sheer length of his films. Although Lean appears to be a traditionalist in terms of narrative, there is something uncompromising about going to a studio and declaring “I’m going to make a film about a relatively obscure World War I general, it will have no women, and it will be three and a half hours long!” I watched Lawrence of Arabia as a high school freshman for a history assignment on Lawrence. I remember thinking “hmmm, shouldn’t this movie have ended by now?” but I certainly thought it was interesting. Perhaps, it was the novelty of seeing a different kind of film that was clearly a product of its period. The next year, our European History teacher decided to show the film in class over several periods and our reaction was, “yes it’s a pretty movie, but seriously, it’s this long?!”

A couple weeks ago, I was visiting my father at his swimming pool when he was conversing with some friends. I was reading a book review on the Russian Revolution from the Sunday newspaper and asked him what the Russian revolution was and his friends started telling me I should watch Doctor Zhivago. I mentioned that although I liked some of David Lean’s films, some of them like Lawrence of Arabia are excruciatingly long and one of them said “yes, but there’s not a wasted minute in it.”

This past week, I watched the first half of Doctor Zhivago (I plan on watching the second) and I have to agree with his assessment. The film isn’t bloated but narratively ambitious in a way that few are. Like his other epics, it’s a film that’s uninterested in telling a simple three-act narrative to get one to a happy ending: Lean is somewhat Altmanesque in weaving a tapestry but in a more linear fashion towards an end goal. It’s a film that meanders but it builds up story and character as it veers away from the main arc. The imagery in David Lean’s films are often striking and not simply in terms of cinematography. Watching Doctor Zhivago, I’m struck by the way Pasha (Tom Courtenay) is framed with his scarred face or of the scene in which Yevgraf (Alec Guiness ) trails the titular character through dark alleyways or the military march in which Pasha loses his gun or the image of Yuri being bombarded by peasants who have cordoned off his own home or…well, you get the point.
Additionally, Lean directed a whole slew of praised films before his epic phase that were largely adaptations of beloved literary works. His first three films he directed solo were adaptations of Noel Coward plays. He followed this by two Charles Dickens novels—Great Expectations and Oliver Twist—that are considered two of the best and most faithful cinematic adaptations of Dickens’ work.  Ironically, some critics would take issue with his later deviation from the source material in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

Brief Biography:
Lean was born in Croydon, England in 1930. He was raised in a Quaker household where he was not allowed to see movies due to his religious upbringing. At Quaker School, Lean was a mediocre student but he displayed a passion for photography though his parents discouraged him from making a career out of it. After working for his father’s accounting firm, he was convinced by a friend to follow his passion to be a cinematographer and worked from Gaumont British Studios in 1927.  He eventually worked his way up a series of jobs to editor before Noel Coward himself invited him to co-direct and eventually direct solo his productions. He was known for being autocratic (closed off to outside input) on sets but not overly difficult on actors. Another Oscar-winning director. Kevin Costner, was inspired by his films in thinking that an epic was ideal.

In addition to directing, he was also the founder of the production company CineGuild with Roland Neame. In addition to 28 Academy Awards being awarded to his films, he was knighted in 1984 and received an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award a year before his death in 1991 at the age of 83. Another interesting distinction: In 1970, he was Hollywood’s all-time top directorial grosser (adding the money made from all his films; a title Spielberg holds today). He did plan an eventual retirement in Tuscany but he was working until the day he died on the unfinished film Nostromo. He asked for his ashes to be buried in the three places he loved most: Tahiti, Tuscany, and India.

Films I’ve Seen:
I’m making my way through my 5th. I’ve seen Summertime, Lawrence of Arabia, Passage to India, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago.

Favorite:
Bridge on the River Kwai – My favorite war film. It’s lush, it’s rich in story, and conveys the senseless tragedy of war with just one scene that has remained etched in my mind. It also has a quartet of indelible characters: William Holden pulls on the charisma as a soldier roped in for one last mission, Geoffrey Horne plays a green-eyed private with a palpable sense of fear and naiveté about killing another person; Alec Guinness is a morally complex man with an ironclad sense of integrity that leads him astray ever so gradually, and Sessue Hayakawa is a worthy sparring partner.

Underrated:
Passage to India – A story about the grandeur of India (circa 1928) and the racial prejudice, conflicts in national loyalty and sexual repression that lurks underneath. For a film that starts out centering around one character—a stuffy British magistrate played by Nigel Havers– almost entirely irrelevant by the end of the story, this is a film that’s extremely fluid and doesn’t feel draining time-wise.

Overrated:
I am ok with leaving this section blank if I don’t think anything’s overrated. I thought Summertime was uneventful and lackluster but I was assuming that film was panned. TCM.com classified  it as a hit, though, so yes, Summertime. It’s basically Katharine Hepburn having a Connecticut socialite’s version of a spring break experience in Venice with a hot local. The film has its moments and there’s something slightly interesting about just how unapologetic the film is at hewing so closely to the Latin lover archetype with the male lead.

Blind spots:
If Brief Encounter is the #2 all-time film according to the BFI, who am I to doubt them? One of David O Russell’s favorite films (or at least in in 2016) is Hobson’s Choice. Ryan’s Daughter is another epic but one that even the critics felt didn’t justify its long running time, so maybe?

Filmography as Director (17 films)

A Passage to India (1984)

Ryan’s Daughter (1970)

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Summertime (1955)

Hobson’s Choice (1954)

The Sound Barrier (1952)

Madeleine (1950)

The Passionate Friends (1949)

Oliver Twist (1948)

Great Expectations (1946)

Blithe Spirit (1945)

Brief Encounter (1945)

This Happy Breed (1944)

In Which We Serve (1942)

Major Barbara (1941)

The Increasingly Vague Distinction between Hollywood and Foreign films

It's funny that no one is even noticing that if the Oscars follow the Golden Globes, Slumdog Millionaire will be the closest we've come to a foreign film winning the best picture Oscar.

Slumdog Millionaire was filmed entirely in India, directed by a British director (and co-directed by an Indian director), and is half-English, half-Urdu. It also utilized an entirely foreign crew and its subjects are foreign. The only non-foreign element at play is that it was produced by an American company, Fox Searchlight.

We've traditionally had easier defined boundaries between a foreign film and a non-foreign film, but in this globalized era, ownership of a movie by a single country is a little harder to define. The best directors in the world such as Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (City of God), Chinese director Ang Lee, and Mexicans Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu Mama Tambien), Rob Rodriguez (El Mariachi), and Alejandro Inarritu Gonzalu (Amores Perros) have eventually used their money to come to Hollywood and made English-language films with American actors. When Alejandro Inarritu Gonzalu won the Golden Globe for best picture with Babel, he suggested in his acceptance speech that his film was a true global picture that belonged to the people and crews among three different continents.

Experimentation works both ways however. In 2006 (2007 was technically when the ceremony was held), two of the five directors nominated for best foreign-language film, Mel Gibson for Apocolypto and Clint Eastwood for Letters of Iwo Jima, were American. Woody Allen who has had a decades-long love affair with New York, packed up shop and moved to London recently for the filming of Match Point.

The spread of filmmakers and film making ideas across borders, however, has been going on forever. And the American film industry would never have eclipsed the emerging film industries in France, Italy, and Russia if it weren't for the contributions of foreigners. In other words, this has been going on forever. Most of the great American directors from our Hollywood Golden age have come from other countries, Billy Wilder came from Austria, Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch came from Germany, and Frank Capra came from Italy. This was all the more ironic considering that Frank Capra's film exemplified the ideals of Americana better than any other filmmaker to this day. He made the quintessential film about how good triumphs over evil if our constitution is enforced in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." With the exception of Frank Capra, however, these directors were Jews who were persecuted in Nazi Europe so were exiled to America. Directors who weren't forced out of their homeland tended to stay in their own countries and made films in their own languages. Even our two biggest directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchkock were influenced by the German film industry. Alfred Hitchkock interned (yeah, like college internship) with the German film industry before working in the British film industry, and Orson Welles used a German cinematographer, Greg Tolland (Tolland worked with another of other American directors as well).

More recently, Czech director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The People vs Larry Flint, Man on the Moon) one two Oscars and because he had made some films in Czech, he technically was the first non-English language director to win an Oscar. At the same time, most of his filmography (or at least the films he's famous for are American) is American. In 1987, "The Last Emperor" won best picture and might be considered the first foreign film. The film, about the exiled Emperor of China, utilized Japanese and Mandarin in its dialogue in addition to English and was filmed in China. It was was directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, an Italian director who had made his name in Italian-language films and earned him a best director nomination. The film was bankrolled by a British studio.

It's important to clarify here that British films aren't really considered foreign films. It's not just because of the similar language but because the flow of actors between both countries are pretty interchangeable. British directors David Lean and Oliver Reed have won Oscars for their entirely British films and many found it somewhat curious that the American film institute listed Lawrence of Arabia as the 5th best American film ever made when virtually no part of the production had anything to do with America. David Lean is, after all, is a British institution. Even more curious, the British film institute's list of 100 Greatest British films of all-time has entries which are decidedly Un-British. There is a such thing as a British film industry and certain films like the Bond series, the works of David Lean, Oliver Reed, and Richard Lester, The Red Shoes, Room with a View, etc. are considered quintessentially British films. The British Film Institute's list, however, included films such as Shakespeare in Love or Braveheart, whose only qualifications are that the films are set in Britain and revolve around British history. If we take this definition of where films are set and to what degree they revolve around the country's history and culture, then surely Slumdog Millionaire is foreign because it is a landmark film in presenting images of Indian modern-day life to audiences in the UK and US who knew very little about it.

My vote is that Last Emperor is foreign, Bernardo Bertolucci was the first foreign director to win an Oscar, and that Slumdog Millionaire will be #2. What's yours?