DAVID LEAN, PERFECTIONIST OF MADNESS
The director David Lean in 1946
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
Published: September 12, 2008
DAVID LEAN was famous for his perfectionism, and like every director afflicted with that quality he didn't — couldn't — make perfect movies. His films betray the anxiety of their making. He also couldn't make many. He completed just sixteen in his long career, a paltry four in the thirty-plus years that followed the great international success of his wartime epic
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). That movie ends, after nearly three hours of conflict, peril, courage, violent death and decidedly mixed motives, with a single summarizing word, spoken twice: the word is "madness".
And if you were to watch all sixteen of David Lean's pictures, being shown at Film Forum's centennial retrospective (through September 25th), you might find that word echoing in your head even as you're admiring their impeccable craftsmanship: the precise editing, the elegant compositions, the smooth camera movements, the unimpeachable performances. The madness in his method is what gives his work its quivering, almost alarming life.
Maybe the signature shot of Lean's career is the long, long take of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) approaching across the sands in
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), an indistinct, heat-shimmery figure gradually coming into focus in the blinding desert sun. That spectacular shot is, in a way, this filmmaker's career in miniature, progressing slowly, waveringly, from very small to very large, and demanding our attention at every stage. Lean, an Englishman to the marrow of his bones, was from the beginning an artist fascinated by both the small and the large, oscillating between his attraction to the one and his yearning for the other — between the domestic, you might say, and the imperial.
His first film,
In Which We Serve (1942), whose co-director was its writer and star, Noël Coward, is a strange blend of grand-scale naval battle scenes and flashbacks to the mundane lives of the British seamen and their families, both a stirring exercise in patriotic propaganda and an anthology of cozy sentimental vignettes (the blood and sweat are in the battle sequences, the tears all in the kitchens and parlors). It was an enormous success with the beleaguered British public, recognized as a pure form of the message that morale-boosting movies always deliver: Men will do extraordinary things to preserve their ordinary pleasures.
In 1944 and 1945, as the War wound down, Lean made three more films written by (or based on plays by) Coward:
This Happy Breed, a portrait of an English middle-class family between the wars;
Blithe Spirit, a supernatural drawing-room comedy with an explosive performance by Margaret Rutherford as an awfully enthusiastic medium; and that heartbreaking tale of almost-adultery
Brief Encounter, which was, until
River Kwai, probably Lean's most celebrated movie.
Brief Encounter, whose scope is extremely narrow, is perhaps the closest this filmmaker ever came to perfection. The performances by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the repressed would-be lovers are exquisitely modulated; the narrative is tightly constructed (it is, at eighty-six minutes, Lean's shortest picture); the black-and-white cinematography of Robert Krasker is eloquent, its crispness a neat reflection of the painfully sharp perception the lovers share in their fleeting afternoons together.
And then, having made this nearly flawless romantic artifact, Lean walked away from the tidy Englishness of Coward and turned his hand to a rather different, considerably messier, kind of expression of the national spirit: the crowded Victorian melodramas of Charles Dickens. Although Lean's
Great Expectations (1946) and
Oliver Twist (1948) are markedly less rambunctious than the novels, they are not so fastidious that they violate Dickens' distinctive comic-gothic tone either. Lean is as careful as ever, but in these pictures (especially
Oliver Twist) the care pays off in the increased density and vibrancy of the images, and — gratifyingly, a little surprisingly — a heightening of those big, unsubtle Dickensian emotions.
He turned aside from that too. In the decade that passed between the Dickens movies and the international triumph of
River Kwai, Lean made five films that barely resemble one another and remain among his least known. Three of them star his wife at the time — the third of six — Ann Todd:
The Passionate Friends (1949),
Madeleine (1950), and
Sound Barrier (1952). One,
Summertime (1955), finds Katharine Hepburn in Venice, enjoying a bittersweet vacation fling with a married Italian gentleman. The oddest, and most interesting, of these films, is
Hobson’s Choice (1954), a comedy in which Charles Laughton plays an alcoholic Manchester boot-shop proprietor whose tyranny over his three daughters is decisively overthrown. It's a modest picture, graceful and wry and quickened from time to time by nicely choreographed set pieces of physical comedy.
But in the light of Lean's career
Hobson’s Choice has a certain resonance because it is, as
Bridge on the River Kwai would later be, an ambivalent portrayal of a pathologically controlling man. Hobson gets off more easily than Alec Guinness' Colonel Nicholson in
River Kwai, who ends up destroyed, like his most meticulous creation. David Lean, who died in 1991 at eighty-three, was himself a prisoner of the will to perfection. He clearly understood too well the impulse to make something beautiful and then to blow it up. His movies, this series shows, are infinitely richer for the conflict. It's the best kind of madness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/movies/14raff.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=david%20lean&st=cse&oref=slogin
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