Directors in focus: David Lean

George Roy Hill – the director of The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – once remarked that the only way to make a great film was to keep it under an hour and a half – and if you couldn’t do that, he said, you’d better be David Lean. In many ways, that remark sums up Lean’s now-legendary approach to the making of film and his significance for the history of our cinema. His films were characterised not only by their length, but by their epic scope and historical scholarship, and at the same time found a kind of moral power and emotional intensity which often bordered on the visceral in charting the trajectory of individual lives. For Lean, no landscape – whether the deserts of Arabia or the tundra of Siberia – could be brought fully to life if there wasn’t at its centre a human being.

Lean was born in 1908, in Surrey, and began his career in the film business on the bottom rung of the ladder, working first as a tea boy and then a clapper boy. His enthusiasm and raw talent were rewarded, as he soon became an assistant director, and spent the 1930s and early 40s making his name as an editor. His first directorial role arrived as a collaboration with Noel Coward, in making the war time propaganda film In Which We Serve about the exploits of a British battleship during the war. Other directing opportunities soon followed, notably including Brief Encounter, an adaption of Coward’s one-act play Still Life, and Great Expectations, an adaption of Dickens’ novel which also marked his first collaboration with Alec Guinness, who would later reappear as a staple of his epic historical dramas. In 1955, he made Summertime, which he later described as his favourite production, about an American secretary’s holiday romance in Venice.

The following decade would see the huge, panoramic films for which he’s best remembered: 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, and 1965’s Doctor Zhivago. In 1970 he directed Ryan’s Daughter, a romantic drama set in nationalist Ireland during the First World War. Though the film would receive two Oscars, it was a practical failure. The seventies and early eighties brought a series of false-starts and funding crises for productions which never got off the ground. Despite receiving a CBE in 1974 and a knighthood in 1983, Lean’s career looked to be calcified, but his enormous creative energy never burned itself out. His final triumph came with 1984’s A Passage to India – an adaption of the novel by E.M. Forster. Lean’s final years were occupied with the troubled pre-production of another literary adaption – this time Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo – which, despite a roll call of famous actors and producers, failed to materialize before his death by throat cancer in 1991.

In surveying Lean’s career, what stand out more than the catalogue of now-acknowledged masterpieces are the enduring twin themes of human dissolution against an unforgiving environment, whether of nature, society, or the mind, and the human struggle for self-definition. What unites Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence, Omar Sharif’s Yuri Zhivago and Katherine Hepburn’s secretary Jane is the need to be the author of one’s own life story, and the actions which characters produce as a by-product of that need, which often end up hurting those around them. The paradoxical nature of Lean’s own character also flashes intermittently – he was always a hard man to work with, and had a general dislike of actors, yet what stands out from the casting of his films is the continuity and repetition of contributors – John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, and of course Alec Guinness. And, of course, the sheer variety of tone and style – contrast the graveyard suspense from Great Expectations with the panoramic exultation of Lawrence enduring the Sun’s Anvil.

It’s not often, then, that directors of film can be called artists with a straight face; and yet if anything in the medium of cinema may ever come close to being artwork, then it’s the films of David Lean.

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