Word: zhivago
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LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is a work of beauty, excitement, and some complexity. For a film of its length, it is impressively mounted and well-knit (by the pre- Zhivago David Lean). However, once we become used to the breathtaking landscapes and come to recognize nuances of plot and characterization, the film fails to achieve the goal which justified its Super-Panavision scale: the creation of a paradigmatic tale recounting the fall of the twentieth-century Westerner before self-sufficient, tribal communities. Though David Lean's and screenwriter Robert Bolt's goal may seem portentously abstract, that goal is not achieved...
...Gogol. The author tells of the commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
...consistently depicts people's experience in a way that makes it hopelessly confusing. Not only on a personal plane, although the characters alternate between vapidity and impossibility, but on the historical plane to which Lean pretends. Lean, that is, declared he would only make pictures (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago) which dealt with revolution. So let's take Bolt-Lean's treatment of the Irish Revolution, which follows the shambles of Ryan's Daughter's first two hours...
Small lives are not the stuff of spectacle. They are not performed on a vast screen to the fife and drum of a Colonel Bogey March. Unfortunately, Director David Lean seems to have become so obsessed with historical immensity (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) that he has lost the capacity to focus on the troubled existence of ordinary people. The loss is plain in his wide-screen nightmare, Ryan's Daughter...
...when Boris Pasternak was ultimately forced to reject the prize and in the later stages was reviled by party-lining writers as, among other things, "a pig who fouled the spot where he ate." The Solzhenitsyn affair, however, is potentially far more serious. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was less a political novel than a lyrically philosophical view of the effects of the Revolution on the lives of people. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn's main works (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle) are explicit descriptions of the day-by-day degradation that some...