On being British

Examining the artistry of director David Lean

by Steve Vineberg

DAVID LEAN: A BIOGRAPHY, by Kevin Brownlow. St. Martin's Press. 810 pages. $40.

"But I tell you why I worshipped him. Quite often at night [on Bora Bora] . . . there is no twilight, and as the light goes you can sometimes see this extraordinary green flash just above the water on the horizon.

"David suddenly said, `Come on, Julie, come and have a look at this.' So I went to the window and I could see this phenomenon . . . and he puts his arms over my shoulders, and made a square of his hands, as directors do, and said, `Just shift your head a little to the right. Now look.' I don't know what he'd done, but it was totally different. It was breathtaking. It made you gasp with beauty and astonishment. . . . You would die for a man like that."

-- Julie Laird (research assistant) on David Lean

During his long tenure as the monarch of British film, David Lean's specialty was making audiences gasp with beauty and astonishment. When you look back on Lean's movies, you tend to think first in terms of what used to be called production values, a vague term that implies the collaboration between the director and his team of visual artists -- the cinematographer, the production and costume designers, and the editor. In an expensive bad movie, "production values" are often asked to substitute for drama, but in a good one -- and Lean made some fabulous ones -- the phrase sums up, however inexpressively, the way a director can transform what could be merely pictorial into something exotic, evocative, magical. Lean does it in the opening sequences of his two Dickens movies, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), where the shadowy graveyard Pip crosses (to meet the escaped convict who inhabits his nightmares) and the storm-whipped countryside Oliver's mother traverses (en route to the poorhouse where she dies in childbirth) have the terrifying and seductive vividness of the landscapes of our most cherished childhood fairy tales. He does it in the opening of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), where a train bearing prisoners of war, rumbling through the jungle, stops dead at the point where other POWs are still laying track. And he does it, most famously, in the moment in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) when he cuts from London to the desert, where the figures of men on camels moving over the sand are like gorgeous butterflies, glimpsed from a distance, in a dizzying expanse of white-hot sky.

Kevin Brownlow's new book, David Lean: A Biography, is a heavyweight item (810 pages) -- appropriate to the man who, influenced by the Griffith and Vidor and Rex Ingram pictures he saw as a teenager, became the most celebrated epic filmmaker of the '50s and '60s. The book, a labor of love by an unabashed fan, is thoroughly reliable in the manner of its author, a film historian and preservationist for whom scholarship is a matter of honor. (Brownlow supervised the reconstruction of Abel Gance's Napoleon and, with David Gill, produced the most dazzling piece of movie scholarship I've ever seen, the documentary Unknown Chaplin.) Brownlow himself emerges hardly at all; repeating the methodology of his highly respected 1968 chronicle of the silent-movie era, The Parade's Gone By, he relies on the words of hundreds of interviewees to summon up the career and personal life of his subject. The result is highly informative and, not surprisingly, highly variable in quality: not everyone he interviews is as witty and insightful as, say, Kay Walsh, Lean's second wife (and the actress who played Nancy in Oliver Twist).

Brownlow himself isn't a very skillful raconteur. (For example, when he alludes to the way Lean and director Gabriel Pascal altered the ending of Pygmalion and hid it from Shaw until the last possible moment, he doesn't remember until five pages later to supply the punch line: that Shaw barely noticed the change.) So your own interest in the details of the shooting and editing of Lean's movies has to sustain you. For me it does, at least in the first part of the book, "A Child of Light," when Brownlow devotes a fairly compact chapter to each film. It was in the second half, "The Poet of the Far Horizon," that the exhaustiveness of the research wore me down: the author seemingly wanted his treatment of the films to reflect the amount of time Lean spent making them. Fond as I am of Lawrence of Arabia, I don't want to read 89 pages on it.

Brownlow, presumably from conviction, refrains from making judgments on Lean, either personally or as a filmmaker (though the mere existence of the book, of course, pays tribute to its subject). His book isn't the kind of perceptive overview that could have been expected from a true biographer. Still, it tells you much of what you might have wanted to know if, like me, you've been fascinated by Lean's career. Here's a director capable of both sensuous -- almost intoxicating -- narrative filmmaking (as in the Dickens films and Lawrence of Arabia) and a suffocating, perfumed dullness (as in Dr. Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter). Here's a man who makes the rituals, the intricacies, and often the ridiculousness of being English the subject of virtually all his movies, and he comments on them, quite brilliantly, in films like Hobson's Choice, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and A Passage to India. But at other times he seems unconscious of how the tradition of British restraint can parody itself, as it does in the Noel Coward pictures that brought him into directing (In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, and especially Brief Encounter).

It helps to know that Lean was raised by a proper Quaker mother, whose taste didn't run to vulgarities like movies, and a father whose emotional availability was erratic at best (his parents finally separated), and that all his life his friends observed an unresolvable duality in him. The producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, for example, tells Brownlow, "I've never seen a man . . . who was in more of a subconscious dilemma between his sensuality and his strict sense of morality." Kay Walsh says, "There was a part of David nobody knows about, the Beckett side of him. When they talk about David looking into the distance, David's not thinking about the scene or the lens. He's looking into his guilty subconscious half the time." Walsh has something to complain about: Lean left her, as he left his other wives, for another woman, and never, apparently, looked back: "When David leaves you, you are rubbed out. It was like an amputation." And Lean's own words confirm her view: on relationships, he is quoted as saying, "You see, you must cut. Anything that's finished is finished. You must just pretend people aren't there." That's why his stepson David Malcolm (the son of the actress Ann Todd, whom he married in 1949) claims, "When he turned his attention on you, you felt the heat. And when he didn't, you didn't." That was equally true of his own son, Peter (by his first wife, Isabel), whom he took up when Peter was a bridegroom -- wining and dining him and his wife June -- and then didn't see again for 30 years. Yet Lean was no fool about his own emotional inconsistencies. Glancing back, years later, on his failed marriage to Walsh, he was able to write, "Wives who are quicker-witted and more intelligent and are leaders of their family do not show their husbands to advantage."

Brownlow doesn't set out to explain the decline in the quality of Lean's movies after Lawrence in critical terms. That's because he's not a critic, and his tiny forays into criticism -- like his reference to Jean-Luc Godard's "enthusiastically crude technique" -- are in fact a little embarrassing. Although he shares Lean's values, he's helpful in identifying the filmmaker's increasing alienation from the movies of the '60s and early '70s -- from a director like Godard, whose work represented for him "a frontal attack on technique." He must have felt the whole cinematic world was going to hell; clearly that's why he wanted to bring back spectacle and romance in Ryan's Daughter. But, as his longtime mistress Barbara Cole reports, he'd stopped going to new movies by then, and so Ryan's Daughter really felt as if it had been made on another planet. For years he was immersed in the plan to shoot a revisionist two-part Mutiny on the Bounty; Brownlow's documentation of this project, which was aborted when the money fell through, intriguingly fills in the gaps in Lean's career between Ryan's Daughter and A Passage to India. (It was Roger Donaldson who finally got to make the film, as a single-parter, under the title The Bounty -- and it was pretty good.) A Passage to India was the ironic high note at the conclusion of that long and extraordinary career: after the world had more or less given up on Lean, he turned out a film that was everything Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter were not -- canny, layered, compelling, dramatic. And it crowned 40 years of exploration of the one thing besides making movies that, as Brownlow's mammoth book shows, Lean knew more about than anyone else: the complexities of being British.