Lean's Epics Filled the Screen; His Early Films, the Heart

Before he became an official Big Deal, David Lean was simply another movie director in England. In his first 10 years behind the camera (after 10 earlier years behind the Moviola as an editor) he made solid, craftsmanlike pictures admired for their taste and restraint, as well as their high-gloss sheen.

Then, in 1956, he ventured to far-off Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with a big American bankroll, a big American star (William Holden), a flotilla of superb British actors and several tons of dynamite, and came back with "The Bridge on the River Kwai." The rest is box-office history. "Kwai" was a smash, both critically and financially, and Lean became committed to the megabudget epic. His next three projects were grand dramas set in faraway, glamorous places: "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) and "Ryan's Daughter" (1970).

Those films were of a piece, and he was of a piece: Noted for his intelligent epics set against turbulent history, he became the premier prestige director in the world. But the negative response to "Ryan" enraged him ("Gush for the millions," Pauline Kael called it), and he beat it into retirement. He came back, 14 years later, for another big one, "A Passage to India," then hung up the jodhpurs and the riding crop forever, settling into a dotage of endless love, honor and respect as the estimable Sir David, the face of British film.

That was the official story, at any rate. In fact, he was working on an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel that endured the vicissitudes of typical Hollywood "development" and ultimately ended in bitter disappointment. But through it all, in his last 30 years he eschewed the smaller film, the human drama of emotional subtlety and vivid motivation.

Critics, subversive little beasts that they are, squabble over his legacy (he died in 1991). The base line for a number of years has held to the sheer greatness of "Lawrence," the near-greatness of "Kwai," the surrender to kitsch in "Ryan" and the regaining of the skill in "Passage." The earlier films were less remarked upon.

The other side -- there's always an other side -- argues that he became a prisoner of his own success and his own great eye, and that the bigger pictures are ponderous boondoggles. It follows, implicitly or explicitly, that the first 10 years' worth of Lean films, rarely seen, hardly remembered, were the director's highest achievement. "They make you want to go out and make movies, they are so in love with the screen's power and the combustion in editing," wrote film historian David Thomson.

Those movies, for the first time in years, are now available on, of all places, an actual big screen. "David Lean Restored" will play at the National Gallery of Art tomorrow through Sunday and Dec. 26-28, with all showings in the Large Auditorium of the East Building Concourse. The series, which features superb restorations of the old movies and particularly some of the soft, beautiful early color efforts, was sponsored by the British Film Institute and paid for by the usual cast of community- (or publicity-) minded corporate full-pockets. A complete schedule is found online at http://www.nga.gov/programs/film/davidlean.shtm.

It's interesting to watch Lean grow in both skill and presumption over the course of the eight films in this series, the ultimate destination his arrival as master craftsman, with an ego so great he thought his movies should be allowed to run forever. ("Zhivago" almost did, at 197 minutes.)

In the beginning, of course, it was different. He was very much the creation of the great British wit-playwright-composer-film star-bon vivant (I'm running out of hyphens!) Noel Coward. Coward had agreed to make a morale-boosting film for British audiences at the darkest moment in World War II, and signed on as star-producer-writer-director. At a certain point, even he, dervish that he was, had to admit he'd put one too many hyphens in the task list, and so he inquired, or so the story goes, for "the best film editor" in Britain to serve as co-director.

Typical brilliance from the canny Coward: He didn't want a real director to compete with him, so he chose Lean, who'd started in the business as a "clapper boy" ("Scene 32, lights, camera, action!" CLACK!), soon discovered a gift for knitting film together and, as an editor, progressed upward from shorts to newsreels to features. That he was handsome and charming probably didn't hold him back.

The film, "In Which We Serve," was the first to carry Lean's name, though it was secondary to Coward's, and is remembered as one of the finest war movies. It tells, without bombast or patriotic gore, of the life and death of a British destroyer, HMS Torrin, in the Mediterranean. Coward is the commanding officer, modeled on his own close friend Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had had a destroyer bombed out from underneath him.

Trim, brusque, smart, loyal, Coward's Capt. Kinross is the ideal. The ship is envisioned as a sort of microcosm of British society, and the emphasis is on teamwork, coping, improvising and seeing it through. Each fellow depends upon the other, but there's still a sense of class difference so intense it cannot be banished, and the Coward-Lean team was honest enough to portray that. (Coward and Lean were lower-class blokes whose talent and charisma allowed them to transcend class. But both presumably knew how it was to be an outsider in your own country because you had an accent.)