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Historical events surrounding the First World War also provided the social backdrop for Lean's next film, Doctor Zhivago (1965), based on the Boris Pasternak novel. One might more accurately say that Robert Bolt's screenplay was 'inspired' by some events and characters in Pasternak's novel, since the massive, sprawling, episodic tale contains enough dramatic incident to provide the basis for several completely different films. Pasternak's novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Europe during the height of the Cold War, so it benefited from a grossly overvalued critical response which seemed to value more as a protest vehicle than for its literary qualities
The cataclysmic events of world war, revolution, and civil war function in the film primarily as dramatic circumstances which either unite or separate the doctor/poet Zhivago (Omar Sharif) from his wife (Geraldine Chaplin) and family, or an adulterous romance with his poetic muse, Lara (Julic Christie). Zhivago's half brother, Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), whose voice-over narration provides narrative cohesion, is largely Bolt’s creation and seems designed to play the role of Bolshevism with a human face, a secret policeman who nevertheless acts as guardian angel for his recklessly apolitical sibling Lean has accurately, and perhaps somewhat defensively, described the film as "not the story of the revolution, but the story of what happens to a small group of people when the revolution crashes down on them."
MGM/UA's 30th Anniversary Edition laserdisc of Doctor Zhivago features not only a new digital transfer of the film, which significantly improves the color fidelity and visual detail over the previous laserdisc version, but also a state-of-the-art AC-3 multi-channel digital encoding of the sound which yields a soundtrack of improved clarity and dynamic range and a truly impressive surround sound ambience. The disc also features three sides of supplemental material, including an introduction by Omar Sharif, a comprehensive and unusually informative behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film, the theatrical trailer, Maurice Jarre's music score on separate stereo tracks, a selection of scene stills, Geraldine Chaplin's screen test, several contemporaneous short promotional documentaries, and a series of New York press interviews in which Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin and Rita Tushingham are seen gamely enduring the indignities of a barrage of meaningless show-biz inquiries from a series of vacuous journalists who should be thankful they are unidentified. As the most lavish and technically superior laserdisc version of any of Lean's films, Doctor Zhivago is a collector's edition well worth owning.
Ryan's Daughter, based on an original story and screenplay by Robert Bolt, was widely regarded by both critics and moviegoers alike as one of the major miscues in Lean's career, and should thus be considered required viewing only for those on auteurist duty. The story is set in a small Irish village in 1916, shortly after the Easter Rebellion, and features Sarah Miles as Rosy, the
concupiscent young daughter of a local pub owner who eagerly marries Charles Shaughnessy, the village's recently widowed, middle-aged schoolteacher (Robert Mitchum, in a remarkable example of casting against type as her Beethoven-loving, flower-pressing, sexually inadequate husband). The romantically disillusioned but still eager Rosy then begins an affair--seemingly oblivious to the volatile nationalist political atmosphere swirling about her--with Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), the newly arrived commander of the local British Army garrison, with violent consequences for all involved.
While Bolt once justifiably complained about a sort of inverse snobbery on the part of many critics who automatically assume that epic films can't deal with serious issues, Ryan's Daughter conversely demonstrates that Super Panavision epics with a three and quarter hour running time require a protagonist and themes worthy of such an inflated cinematic framework. This belabored tale of a naive, foolish, and romantically intoxicated young woman might achieve a certain poignancy in a small-scale, black- and-white, ninety-minute programmer, but the overblown scale of the entire project, both conceptually and technically, is grossly disproportionate, especially given its glib and disparaging portrayal of the IRA, with the “troubles" used as largely unrelated social backdrop. The critical lambasting of the film traumatized Lean, sending the notoriously thin-skinned and always insecure filmmaker into a creative funk which incapacitated him for over a decade.
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