For David Lean the camera was as vital a part of the storytelling process as the screenplay itself. Peter O’Toole’s haunting performance in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), despite its androgynous ambiguity, does not magnify or diminish the relentless momentum of Lean’s story but remains absorbed within the visual context. The cast is often reduced to specs on a Petri dish lost in sand.
Lean’s early work in cinema gave only slight indication of the spacious energy that would distinguish his later work and earmark his true style. Beginning as a film editor for Gaumont productions, he graduated to full scale directing with This Happy Breed (1945). He would soon distinguish himself with some of the finest Dickens adaptations ever put on screen, especially his sophisticated, dramatically well-paced adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) cited by Leonard Maltin as one of the greatest films ever made. Who can forget the haunted shadows of Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed room, or Lean’s equally unique, poignantly idiomatic adaptation of Oliver Twist (1948) with Alec Guinness, who became a reliable standby in Lean’s more-celebrated films.
Perhaps Lean’s greatest British film was the memorable, excruciatingly poignant Brief Encounter (1946) in which two married individuals fall accidently in love. Their habitual meetings inadvertently develop into a romance with an intensity that threatens their cautious sense of security. Lean creates a dramatic scenario of rushing trains surrounded by billows of smoke and newspapers casually blowing across the pavement as the lovers depart. The disingenuous beauty of the film has inspired some to claim it as Lean’s greatest achievement, which from an emotional standpoint, it may very well be.
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His more renowned films had generous budgets financed by American producer Sam Spiegel and were filmed in beautifully produced color. Lean’s signature style had developed gradually by the time he filmed The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) in the steamy jungles of Ceylon. The story concerned a clash between a Japanese POW commander and a captive British officer played by the redoubtable Guinness and became a classic of moral ambiguity. Obsessed with the superiority of British engineering as he constructs a bridge for the Japanese, Guinness forgets the initial plan is to destroy the structure. Under Lean’s subtle manipulation, what might have been construed as a conflict between patriotism and pride becomes the ironic fulcrum of a test between pride, duty and belated realization of the facts. It’s the most telling example of how subtly Lean developed character within a tightly hewn adventure framework. The camera focuses on the bridge with the two protagonists as unwitting pawns in the hands of fate. Dialogue is minimal. The dauntless images of the bridge tell all.
Lawrence of Arabia is less ambiguous but even more beguiling. The eloquence of Lean’s direction is that one becomes engrossed in the narrative without knowing what it’s all about. Lean’s structure compels us along whichever route he chooses to take. His films at this juncture resemble views through a transparent gauze without any loss of detail. Are we really following the story or are we simply caught in the majesty of the desert?
The most financially successful, and perhaps, the most beloved of Lean’s films is Dr. Zhivago (1965). The director had the difficult task of pulling together Boris Pasternak’s rather rambling novel with flashbacks and a wide assortment of characters interacting inconsistently. But by now Lean’s developmental sense of cinematic storytelling had reached its peak. Long stretches of hardships under the Russian Revolution, clashes between the Red and White armies and characters floating intermittently between conflicting forces are captured brilliantly by alternating track shots with brief stretches of dialogue. Who can forget stunning shots of snow-covered dwellings resembling the icing on wedding cakes, or the transition to the blooms of springtime? Once again Lean’s cinematic narrative provides its own raison d’être.
Lean’s influence on other filmmakers may not have been as profound as Alfred Hitchcock’s or Steven Spielberg’s. But his determination to tell stories in cinematic terms, allowing the camera to show the story without a surplus of dialogue, was marked with unusual elegance and grace. Considered the ninth greatest director of all time by Sight & Sound magazine, one might ask how the other eight could have been greater than Lean.
