Movie Lists by Paul Simpson

Author:Paul Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2008-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

David Lean

The British director’s career is a game of two halves: he made a lot of stirring, black and white and very British movies until the 1950s and then turned his hand to epics that, whatever critics said, were usually spectacular enough to win an Oscar or four.

Lawrence Of Arabia

Dir David Lean, 1962, 216m

This is, as Omar Sharif pointed out, “four hours long, with no stars, no women and no love story and not much action either”, but it is still magnificent. Lean captures the desert brilliantly, with a very British attitude that miracles can happen there, but also makes it clear that it is but a stage for T.E. Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole with a voice that hovers somewhere between amusement and insolence and a crazed charisma that perfectly conveys how inspiring and irritating the real Lawrence could be.

Great Expectations

Dickens, Charles

Brief Encounter

Dir David Lean, 1945, 86m, b/w

One of the most delicately heartrending movies ever made, based on Noël Coward’s play with wonderful, utterly convincing performances by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the ordinary English couple who fall in love but can’t consummate their gentle affair. Their self-sacrifice epitomises a stiff-upper-lip Britishness now out of fashion, but the film also reveals a darker side with a Blighty ravaged by war, where repression and restraint lead to lies, deceit and pain.

Oliver Twist

Dickens, Charles

Hobson’s Choice

Northern lights

Dr Zhivago

Dir David Lean, 1965, 197m

Although Omar Sharif’s doctor/poet is the eponymous hero, Julie Christie is the beautiful hub of this whirlpool of Russia, revolution and romance, loved by Sharif, Rod Steiger’s cynical fixer, and Tom Courtenay’s student sweetheart who becomes a feared, Trotskyesque commissar. Majestic, visually powerful, with some cogent points to make about beauty and brutality, Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel isn’t perfect – ironically, it lacks a certain poetry – but it lives on in the memory.

The Bridge Over The River Kwai

Dir David Lean, 1957, 161m

“Madness, madness, madness”. Lean’s shifting epic is awash with insanity. Sessue Hayakawa’s sadism is obvious, though, later, we see he is in part driven by fear of being ordered to kill himself. Alec Guinness’s colonel, determined to build the bridge (even though it helps the Japanese), is a thoughtful study of the British bureaucrat, so obsessed by military discipline he forgets the war until his final, Lear-like, realisation. Despite the memorable scene in which the British march into their POW camp whistling Colonel Bogie, this is a distinctly unheroic war movie.

This Happy Breed

Dir David Lean, 1944, 114m, b/w

Lean’s adaptation of Noël Coward’s play features an “ordinary” family living in London between the wars, facing everyday travails with a staunchly British approach featuring a lot of “mustn’t grumble” and “these things happen”. It is surprisingly fresh because the main characters, the extended Gibbons family, mirror the family experiences of any audience. Birth, marriage, death, it’s all here. Celia Johnson’s no-nonsense performance saves this from sinking into sentimentality.

The Passionate Friends

Dir David Lean, 1949, 90m, b/w

Very similar to Brief Encounter, though not as accomplished, this is an intricate triangle between Ann Todd, her husband Claude Rains and lover Trevor Howard.

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