Word: pasternaks
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...absorbs terrible revelations about the girl he loves, the circle becomes a poetic, crystaline metaphor for his swollen anguish and the inevitable burning away of youth's illusions. Such fully visualized moments are the key to Director David Lean's triumph over the challenge of filming Boris Pasternak's monumental bestseller. With monastic zeal (TIME, Dec. 24), he has translated the book into a movie that is literate, oldfashioned, soul-filling and thoroughly romantic...
...Pasternak's novel, the love story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and his Lara (Julie Christie) was part of a vast canvas of war, revolution and social upheaval. Scenarist Robert Bolt has condensed much of this story through a narrator, Yuri's Bolshevik brother (Alec Guinness). The device seems awkward at times, but the flashbacks spring vividly to life on their own. The couple's first wordless encounter takes place aboard a tramcar in Moscow, and the headlong rush of their interwoven destinies is a subtle, unifying symbol of Zhivago. Trains wail along outside the house where...
...star of Doctor Zhivago is Director Lean himself, who has effectively captured on film the essence of Pasternak's belief that men are priceless as individuals, not as cogs in a superstate. Lean speaks for humanity in a language of unspeakably beautiful images: the desolate ritual of a funeral on a windswept Russian heath; a band of running, white-shirted schoolboys suddenly massacred in a field of golden wheat; or simply the timeless, kaleidoscopic, never-ceasing cycle of the seasons. His sentimental Zhivago is perhaps warm and rewarding entertainment rather than great art; yet it reaches that level...
Lean's feeling was that nothing could defeat him but an inability to match Bolt's script and measure up somehow to the looming background figure of Pasternak. For although Bolt and Lean had simplified the novel to bring the love story into bright focus, Lean still had to cope with the evocation of revolutionary Russia and the land itself. "I don't think this is so much a novel," says Bolt, "as an enormous disguised poem...
Frozen Instant. To evoke Pasternak's poetic imagery, Lean led a camera unit almost to the Arctic Circle, hired Lapland nomads to portray Siberian refugees. To record the long train trip from Moscow to the Urals that is the central odyssey of the novel, Lean went into below-zero temperatures in the northern Finnish lumber town of Joensuu, photographed the "refugees" trekking across Lake Pyhaselka, over which, during the 1940 Russian invasion of Finland, the Soviets had actually laid a winter railway...