Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941)

Robert Newton, Wendy Hiller, Robert Morley, Rex Harrison, and Emlyn Williams in Major Barbara

Cast: Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Sybil Thorndike, Emlyn Williams, Marie Lohr, Penelope Dudley-Ward, Walter Hudd, David Tree, Deborah Kerr, Donald Calthrop, Marie Ault, Cathleen Cordell, Torin Thatcher, Miles Malleson, Felix Aylmer, Stanley Holloway. Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, based on his play. Cinematography: Ronald Neame. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: Charles Frend, David Lean. Music: William Walton.

George Bernard Shaw's plays often seem to me as if they're about to collapse underneath their own cleverness: so many paradoxes, so much witty dialogue, such tantalizingly heretical ideas. Major Barbara is a prime example of this, a duel between faith and realism, between rich and poor, between capitalism and Fabian socialism, between men and women, all treated with the would-be drawing-room-comedy lightness of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, down to the climactic revelation that the play's ostensible hero is a "foundling" (a euphemism for "bastard"). But the film version slumps down into tedium because Shaw can't resist trying to make his characters, especially Barbara (wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller), into something like real people whenever he wants the audience to feel something instead of just laughing at the bright repartee. The film remains a three-act play, despite attempts to provide some scenes -- the initial meeting of Barbara and Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison being archly ardent), the fight between Bill Walker (Robert Newton) and Todger Fairmile (Torin Thatcher), Barbara's tossing her Salvation Army bonnet (and almost herself) into the Thames, and the tour of the hellish munitions factory and its heavenly benevolent-capitalist planned community -- in between the ones we would ordinarily see on stage. We are supposed to continue the dialogue of ideas among ourselves after the movie's over, but the effect of the two-hour-plus barrage of wit is to make me want to be stupid again. The film was rightly celebrated for the skill of its performers and for the tenacity with which it was filmed during the Blitz, but as a whole it's an achievement that hasn't stood the test of time.

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)

Cast: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt, Finlay Currie, Alec Guinness, Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan. Screenplay: David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Kay Walsh, Cecil McGivern. Cinematography: Guy Green. Production design: John Bryan. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: Walter Goehr.

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

Cast: Ann Todd, Claude Rains, Trevor Howard, Betty Ann Davies, Isabel Dean. Screenplay: Eric Ambler, David Lean, Stanley Haynes, based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography: Guy Green. Set designer: John Bryan. Film editing: Geoffrey Foot, Clive Donner, Jack Harris. Music: Richard Addinsell.

Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945)

Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945)

Cast: Rex Harrison, Kay Hammond, Constance Cummings, Margaret Rutherford, Hugh Wakefield, Joyce Carey, Jacqueline Clarke. Screenplay: David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan, based on a play by Noël Coward. Cinematography: Ronald Neame. Art direction: C.P. Norman. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: Richard Addinsell.

Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, 1938)

Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard in Pygmalion

Henry Higgins: Leslie Howard
Eliza Doolittle: Wendy Hiller
Alfred Doolittle: Wilfrid Lawson
Mrs. Higgins: Marie Lohr
Col. Pickering: Scott Sunderland
Mrs. Pearce: Jean Cadell
Freddy Eynsford Hill: David Tree

Director: Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis
Based on a play by George Bernard Shaw
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Art direction: John Bryan
Film editing: David Lean
Music: Arthur Honegger

The perfect antidote for those who think Rex Harrison is the only Henry Higgins, as well as for those, like me, who usually find Leslie Howard a bland and uninteresting actor. He's wonderful in this film, and he's beautifully matched by Wendy Hiller as Eliza. Unlike other Elizas one has seen, Hiller does the flower girl Eliza without coyness or the sense that she has been coached to speak cockney as thoroughly as Eliza is coached by Higgins to speak "proper." It does seem to me that the cockney dialect in the film has been smoothed out a bit more than necessary -- even more than in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) -- for the sake of American audiences. I'm also struck by the fact that the word "damn" remains so prominent in Pygmalion when it caused such a flap with the censors only a year later in Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), and that the reference to the fact that Alfred Doolittle never married Eliza's mother wasn't removed. Did the Production Code administration not have to approve this import?

Madeleine (David Lean, 1950)

Ivan Desny and Ann Todd in Madeleine

Madeleine Smith: Ann Todd
William Minnoch: Norman Wooland
Emile L'Anglier: Ivan Desny
Mr. Smith: Leslie Banks
Mrs. Smith: Barbara Everest
Bessie Smith: Patricia Raine
Janet Smith: Susan Stranks
Christina Hackett: Elizabeth Sellars
Thuau: Eugene Deckers
Defending Counsel: André Morell
Prosecuting Counsel: Barry Jones
Dr. Thompson: Edward Chapman
Mrs. Jenkins: Jean Cadell

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Stanley Haynes, Nicholas Phipps
Cinematography: Guy Green
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Clive Donner, Geoffrey Foot
Music: William Alwyn

I wanted Madeleine to have the emotional depth of Brief Encounter (1945) or the imaginative finesse of Oliver Twist (1948), just to sustain my argument that David Lean was a greater director before he aimed for the epic scale of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). But even Lean would later admit that Madeleine is something of a dud. The story of an "unproven" murder -- the verdict the Glasgow jury returned at the trial of the real Madeleine Smith -- the film needs to generate a Hitchcockian tension that Lean never quite masters. One reason, I think, is that it stars the rather pallid Ann Todd, Lean's wife, who had played Madeleine Smith in a stage version of the story, when it needs a more accomplished and charismatic actress, a Deborah Kerr or a Jean Simmons, to bring out the ambiguities in the character. Todd rises to the role only in the final scene, when Madeleine rides away a free woman, a mysterious smile flickering across her face as the voiceover narrator questions whether she was guilty or not guilty. Otherwise, she generates little heat in her love scenes with Ivan Desny as L'Anglier* and the scene in which she throws him over for her father's choice as a fiancé, William Minnoch, comes as an abrupt about-face. Lean seems to be trying to do something with the character of the lover, including much business with his brandishing a phallic walking stick, but it doesn't come off. On the plus side, there are good performances by Leslie Banks as Madeleine's father, the quintessential tyrannical Victorian paterfamilias, and André Morell gives a rousing argument for the defense in the trial scene. Guy Green's chiaroscuro cinematography creates the proper mood, as do John Bryan's sometimes oppressive interiors.

*The spelling in the credits. The historical figure was called L'Angelier, which is also the way André Morell, playing the defense counsel, pronounces it.

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)

Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter

Laura Jesson: Celia Johnson
Dr. Alec Harvey: Trevor Howard
Albert Godby: Stanley Holloway
Myrtle Bagot: Joyce Carey
Fred Jesson: Cyril Raymond
Dolly Messiter: Everley Gregg
Mary Norton: Marjorie Mars
Beryl Walters: Margaret Barton
Stephen Lynn: Valentine Dyall

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame
Based on a play by Noël Coward
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Lawrence P. Williams
Film editing: Jack Harris
Music: Percival Mackey, Muir Mathieson

It had never occurred to me until I started reading essays about Brief Encounter that the movie is a period film: It's set in 1938, which explains why there is no visual evidence of or reference to World War II, which was still going on when it was made. This also helps explain some of the film's jitteriness or reticence about sex. Why, given the facility with which Laura Jesson lies about her relationship with Alec Harvey, don't they just go ahead and have sex? The film is a portrait of prewar middle-class morality, something the war helped break down, especially with the arrival of American troops, proverbially "oversexed and over here," in Britain. When it gained great popularity after the war ended, it was possible to debate whether Brief Encounter was a validation or an indictment of this morality. Is it really healthy for Laura to spend the rest of her life with her pleasantly stuffy husband, dreaming of what might have been? Is it necessary for Alec to uproot his family and emigrate to South Africa just because of sexual frustration? The resolution to their dilemma seems easier to us: We wish Laura and Alec could unbend, the way the working class characters Albert and Myrtle seem to do. (For all her pretense at refinement, it's easy to see that Myrtle has a healthy off-duty sex life.) But then we get glimpses of the social milieu in which Laura and Alec move: He has to contend with the catty nudge-nudge-wink-wink of Stephen Lynn, the friend whose apartment almost becomes a venue for the consummation of their passion; she is surrounded by friends whose only pleasure in life seems to be to talk. There is a real brilliance in the way which Lean, greatly aided by Robert Krasker's noir-expressionist black-and-white cinematography, suggests the entrapment of the lovers in a world they are afraid to break out of. Celia Johnson is magnificent, of course, and it was a stroke of genius to cast Trevor Howard opposite her. For all his kindness and attentiveness, there is something faintly menacing about him, a hint of danger and possibility that can only attract but also subtly frighten a woman whose life consists of helping her husband with the crossword and spending Thursdays in town returning her library book and shopping for an ugly desk tchotchke for his birthday. Everything in this movie is so well judged and efficiently presented that it only makes me regret that Lean turned from such intimate stories and entered on his epic phase.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

Alec Guinness and David Lean made six features together, starting with Guinness's film debut in Great Expectations (1946). The Bridge on the River Kwai won him his only Oscar, but he seems to have been as much a good-luck charm for Lean as vice versa, since Lean miscast him rather badly in two otherwise successful films: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), in which he is rather embarrassingly non-Arab as King Feisal, and A Passage to India (1984), in which he plays Prof. Godbole with an accent that sounds more like Apu on The Simpsons than any actual Brahmin scholar. The part of Col. Nicholson in Bridge is a bit underwritten: We never really learn what the character's motives are for his eventual collaboration with the Japanese in building the bridge, and his moment of self-awareness as he says, "What have I done?" when he realizes the bridge is about to be blown up, is not adequately prepared for. But Guinness was a consummate trouper, even though he often clashed with Lean about the character, whom he wanted to be less of a stiff-upper-lip type than the director did. The movie won seven Oscars, including one for screenplay that was presented to Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel on which it was based. In fact, Boulle spoke and wrote no English; the screenplay was by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were blacklisted for supposed communist ties and were judged ineligible under Academy rules. Their Oscars and their screen credit were restored posthumously in 1984. Today, Bridge looks like a well-made entertainment with some major flaws: The moral dilemma that centers on Col. Nicholson, who wants to demonstrate the superiority of the British at the expense of actually serving the Japanese cause, feels artificially created -- surely some of the officers and enlisted men under Nicholson's command had something to say about the colonel's plans. Sessue Hayakawa deserved his supporting actor nomination as Col. Saito, though the part verges on stereotype. The role of the American, Shears (William Holden), who opposes Nicholson, seems to be cooked up to provide something for a major movie star to play: Note that Holden receives top billing, and that Guinness, even though he was nominated for and won a leading actor Oscar, is billed third. The trek through the jungle by Shears, Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins), Lt. Joyce (Geoffrey Horne), and their attractively nubile team of female bearers takes up a lot of not very involving screen time. And the demolition of the bridge and the train crossing it seems oddly anticlimactic, owing to some complications in blowing up and filming an actual full-size bridge and train. Today, of course, miniatures and special effects would be used to make the scene more exciting, but even for an actual blowing up of a bridge and a train, a sequence that had to be got right the first time, the one in Bridge is actually less successful than the one done 30 years earlier by Buster Keaton in The General (1926).

Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948)

After George Cukor's 1935 David Copperfield, I think this is my favorite adaptation of Dickens for film or TV, and god knows there have been plenty of them. What Lean does right is to treat the Dickens book as a fable, not a novel. A novel takes its characters seriously as human beings; a fable sees them as embodiments of good and evil. And there's plenty of evil on display in Oliver Twist, from the brute evil of Bill Sikes (Robert Newton) to the venal evil of Fagin (Alec Guinness) to the stupid evil of Mr. Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan) and Mrs. Corney (Mary Clare). Oliver (John Howard Davies) is innocently good, whereas Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson) is a man of good will. Nancy (Kay Walsh) and, to a lesser extent, the Artful Dodger (Anthony Newley) are potentially good people who have been corrupted by evil. We need fables like this from time to time, just to keep ourselves from despair. The performers are all beautifully cast, especially Davies as Oliver: He's just real-looking enough in the role that he doesn't become saccharine, the way some prettier Olivers do. This is Lean in what I think of as his great period, when he was making beautifully filmed movies with just the right measure of sentiment: Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946) in addition to this one. But he would be bit by the epic bug while working on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and its success would betray him into bigger but not necessarily better movies: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and the rest of his later oeuvre would have the same attention to visual detail that make his early movies so rich, but they seem to me chilly in comparison. Here he benefits not only from a perfect cast, but also from Guy Green's photography of John Bryan's set designs. There are probably few more terrifying scenes in movies than Sikes's murder of Nancy, which sends Sikes's dog (one of the most impressive performances by an animal in movies) into a frenzy. Running it a close second is Sikes's death, seen from a vertiginous rooftop angle. We don't actually see the death, but only the swift tautening of the rope as he plunges, punctuated by a sudden snap. The film is not as well known in America as in Great Britain, where it engendered controversy: Guinness's portrayal of Fagin elicited charges of anti-Semitism, especially since the film appeared so soon after the world learned about the Holocaust. The truth is, Guinness doesn't play to Jewish stereotypes, but Fagin's absurdly exaggerated nose (which makeup artist Stuart Freeborn copied from George Cruikshank's illustrations for the novel) does evoke some of the caricatures in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. The film was edited to remove some of the shots of Fagin in profile, and was held from release in the United States until 1951. 

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

T.E. Lawrence: Peter O'Toole
Prince Faisal: Alec Guinness
Auda Abu Tayi: Anthony Quinn
Gen. Allenby: Jack Hawkins
Sherif Ali: Omar Sharif
Turkish Bey: José Ferrer
Col. Brighton: Anthony Quayle
Mr. Dryden: Claude Rains
Jackson Bentley: Arthur Kennedy
Gen. Murray: Donald Wolfit
Gasim: I.S. Johar
Majid: Gamil Ratib
Farraj: Michel Ray
Daud: John Dimech
Tafas: Zia Mohyeddin

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Based on the writings of T.E. Lawrence
Cinematography: Freddie Young
Production design: John Box
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Maurice Jarre

It's often said -- in fact, it was said in today's San Francisco Chronicle -- that David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of those films that must be seen in a theater. That statement kind of gets my back up: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? As it happens, I first saw Lawrence in a theater in the year of its release (or at least its European release, which was 1963), but it was a theater in Germany and the film was dubbed in German. Only moderately fluent in spoken German, I don't think I followed the dialogue very well, though I certainly appreciated the spectacle, especially Freddie Young's Oscar-winning cinematography. It took some later viewings on TV in the States for me to grasp the movie's story, though the film was trimmed for time, interrupted by commercials, and subjected to atrocious panning-and-scanning because viewers objected to letterboxing of wide-screen movies. So this viewing was probably my first complete exposure to Lean's celebrated film. And though I watched it at home -- in HD on a 32-inch flat screen TV -- I think I fully appreciated both the spectacle and the story. Which is not to say that I think the movie is all it's celebrated for being. The first half of the film is far more compelling than the latter half, and some of the casting is unforgivable, particularly Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal and Anthony Quinn as Auda. Guinness was usually a subtle actor, but his Faisal is mannered and unconvincing. Quinn simply overacts, as he was prone to do with directors who let him, and his prosthetic beak is atrocious. Omar Sharif, on the other hand, is very good as Ali. The producers are said to have wanted Horst Buchholz or Alain Delon, but they settled on Sharif, already a star in Egypt, and made him an international star. His success points up how unfortunate it is that they couldn't have found Middle Eastern actors to play Faisal and Auda. In his film debut, Peter O'Toole gives a tremendous performance, even though he's nothing like the shorter and more nondescript figure that was the real T.E. Lawrence, and it's sad that screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson couldn't have found room in the script to trace the origins of Lawrence's obsession with Arabia. I recently read Scott Anderson's terrific Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which not only depicts Lawrence's complexity but also the madness of the spy-haunted, oil-hungry wartime world in which he played his part. It's beyond the scope of even a three-and-a-half-hour movie to tell, though maybe it would make a tremendous TV miniseries some day.