🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of David Lean

Film · British & Irish

David Lean

1908–1991 · British

British studio cinema; the widescreen epic

David Lean began as a film editor, made his name with intimate British dramas adapted from Noël Coward and Dickens, and then reinvented himself as the master of the widescreen epic. He won two Best Director Oscars, for a Burmese prisoner-of-war camp and for the Arabian desert, and his late films were made at a rate of roughly one a decade. A hostile reception for one of them kept him from directing for fourteen years.

How to spot them

  • ▸The 70mm horizon — desert, steppe, jungle — with a single tiny figure walking into it
  • ▸Four Noël Coward collaborations at the start, and two Dickens adaptations
  • ▸Maurice Jarre's scores for the three great epics; Freddie Young's photography
  • ▸A former editor's precision: the famous match-cut to a desert sunrise
  • ▸Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif as his epic company

Key films

Grit in the eye, a suburban housewife and a doctor meeting on Thursdays in a railway refreshment room, and a piano concerto on the soundtrack (1945)

Brief Encounter, from Noël Coward's Still Life — it won the Grand Prix at the first Cannes festival in 1946

A Salford bootmaker's daughter marries his best workman and sets up in competition against him (1954)

Hobson's Choice — it won the Golden Bear at Berlin

British prisoners whistle a march as they build a railway bridge in Burma; the last word of the film is 'Madness!' (1957)

The Bridge on the River Kwai — seven Oscars, including his first for Best Director; the tune is the Colonel Bogey March

A blown-out match becomes a desert sunrise; an English officer crosses the Nefud and takes Aqaba from the landward side (1962)

Lawrence of Arabia — seven Oscars and his second for Best Director; Peter O'Toole's first leading role

A poet and physician caught in the Russian Revolution; an ice-sheathed country house and a balalaika theme (1965)

Doctor Zhivago — Maurice Jarre's 'Lara's Theme'

An Irish village schoolmaster's wife takes up with a shell-shocked British officer during the Troubles of 1916 (1970)

Ryan's Daughter — critically savaged, and the reason he did not direct again for fourteen years

An English girl accuses an Indian doctor of assault after an incident in the Marabar caves; his last film (1984)

A Passage to India, from E. M. Forster

A destroyer sinks off Crete and her survivors cling to a raft, remembering; a wartime film he co-directed with its writer and star (1942)

In Which We Serve, co-directed with Noël Coward — his first film as director

Key ideas

  • Landscape as a character, and the individual measured against it
  • Ambivalent heroes: the obsessive colonel, the self-mythologising Lawrence, the compromised idealist
  • Editing first: he cut newsreels and features for years, and his epics are built on the cut

Quick-fire facts

  • •He worked as an editor through the 1930s, including on Pygmalion (1938) and Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel
  • •He co-directed In Which We Serve (1942) with Noël Coward, and adapted three more Coward works
  • •With Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan he founded the production company Cineguild
  • •He won the Oscar for Best Director twice, for The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia
  • •The Bridge on the River Kwai's blacklisted screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were only credited with Oscars posthumously in 1984
  • •Ryan's Daughter was attacked at a critics' lunch in New York in 1971, an occasion Lean said stopped him working
  • •He was knighted in 1984 and received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1990
  • •He died in 1991 while preparing an adaptation of Conrad's Nostromo

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources