The Skinny on Lean

The films of David Lean (1908-1991) were frequently concerned with the conflict of discipline and individualization, between a peculiarly British emotional reticence and Romantic excess. The widely contrasting locales of his latter films - the jungle in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Lawrence of Arabia's desert, the icy wastes of 1965's Doctor Zhivago, the wild coastline of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula in Ryan's Daughter (1970), the teeming subcontinent seen in Lean's last film A Passage to India (1984) - were surely not your garden variety pictorial backdrops. 

Lean's complex characters were shaped by their social and physical environs and were perpetually in conflict with them. They were placed in inhospitable and challenging landscapes that appeared to offer a sense of both refuge and self-discovery.

Like A Bridge Over The Troubled River Kwai, Lean's inspired 1957 war-epic.

And what would be parallel to these assertive and simultaneously tragic characters, was the precisely delineated societies founded on class barriers, discipline, traditional values and moral complacency all of which were tested and  remained remarkably indomitable. Lean's was a profoundly pessimistic vision, as testified by the respective fates of his characters :

Lean pulls Rank with this production (Ann Todd,Claude Rains) The Passionate Friends (1949)

Laura, in Brief Encounter renounces her love, and all for drab security; the ennui of a disconsolate Pip in Great Expectations; Mary; in The Passionate Friends (1949), driven like Laura to near suicide and then a living death; Madeleine (1950) ostracized and then to be condemned by the courts to spiritual limbo; Ridgefield, in The Sound Barrier (1952), sacrifices a son for an obsession; Jane, in Summer Madness (1955), slips back to her melancholy life; Nicholson, in The Bridge on the River Kwai, realizing at the moment of his death, that the very quality that made him such a good leader - his iron will of purpose - has paradoxically made him a traitor to his own country; Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, destroyed by his own legend; Lara and Zhivago, in Doctor Zhivago, frozen into anonymity; Rosy Ryan banished and damned in Ryan's Daughter; with a suicide and several shattered lives on her conscience. The paltry amount of happy endings were equivocal, undermined by the compromises which make such endings plausible.

Margaret Rutherford likes to ride her bicycle in the ebullient Blithe Spirit (1945)

Lean's films on a whole were decidedly pessimistic, albeit they were never what one would consider grim and although not hither and thither, Lean's earlier canon contained films of a lighter nature.  He waltzed with whimsy in 1941's fantastical yarn  Blithe Spirit which was based on Noel Coward's eponymous play and starred an ever endearing Margaret Rutherford as larger than life medium -Madame Arcati,  there would be an ever radiating warmth in 1954's Hobson's Choice and with a fine choice in casting by way of an unflappable Charles Laughton. Lean was at heart a masterful story-teller, a born entertainer with an innate sense of drama and humor, ever ironic - he is the ultimate paradox - a poet and imagist as referred to by his steady collaborator the playwright Robert Bolt.

Lean and lens.