DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965)

In spite of awards & commercial success, epic filmmaker David Lean was always quick to point out that ‘DOCTOR ZHIVAGO got the most terrible reviews worldwide,’ but that ‘it made more money than all my other films put together.’ The initial critical reception is surprising. Perhaps the film seemed old-fashioned in a bad way in ‘65, too plush, too well-groomed, even for an advance-ticket RoadShow item about social change & romance amid the Russian Revolution & follow-up Civil War. The film’s still old-fashioned, but now in a mostly good way, with solid, literate story construction (check out the parallel editing of story lines in the first act), handsome, if studied, compositions (if rarely breaking the bounds of tableau vivant), and a roll-call of vivid character actors who know just how to scale up to Lean’s epic-sized vision (naturalism be damned). Note Alec Guinness’s glacial cadences turning a nothing part as Zhivago’s politically connected older half-brother into showy star turn. As the largely passive, too-good-to-be-true doctor, Omar Sharif doesn’t get the credit he deserves, holding the film and his indecisive love life together with little more than moist puppy dog eyes, the indispensable leading man. Grander turns come from Tom Courtenay’s neurotic radical; Rod Steiger’s brutal lover/power player (the only multi-faceted & believably Russian character in here); and Julie Christie, thrillingly beautiful, tempest-tossed love of all three men; object of Zhivago’s most famous poems, wisely left unheard in Robert Bolt’s clipped, clever screenplay. At its best pre-intermission, the plot turns sloppy & repetitive in the last hour. But Lean paces so well, keeping up grand vistas & violent set pieces with thousands between intimacies, you never lose interest. Even when Maurice Jarre’s score gets stuck in auto-repeat mode.

DOUBLE-BILL: Julie Christie had another literary pick of three men (Alan Bates, Terence Stamp, Peter Finch) in John Schlesinger’s undervalued FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD/’67. Superbly shot by Nicolas Roeg who actually started ZHIVAGO only to be replaced after a couple of weeks by Lean fave Freddie Young.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Keep a sharp eye for visual nods at classic Soviet cinema, mostly Sergei Eisenstein (POTEMKIN; NEVSKY) and Aleksandr Dovzhenko (EARTH).