Mean Lean Film Making Machine

David Lean: Ten British Classics at Film Forum, Sept. 12-25

“We are naked!” gasps a Victorian-era father when his middle-class Scottish daughter’s affair with a Frenchman is exposed. It’s a highpoint of the 1950 film Madeleine—one of director David Lean’s unsung masterpieces, part of Film Forum’s long-awaited series, David Lean: Ten British Classics (Sept. 12-25). That howl of paternalistic shock powerfully reverberates throughout Madeleine, shattering the misguided notion that Lean’s movies epitomize unsensual, predictable, Tory blandness. This showcase of Lean’s first 10 features reveals one of the strongest, most impressive careers in movie history (his final six films conclude the series). Perfectionist Lean was a giant; only small-minded moviegoers would miss this retrospective.

Ironically, Lean’s most celebrated film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), unbalanced his reputation: linking his name to the cliché of epic-length stories in exotic locales. While Lawrence is certainly one of the greatest films ever made, its awesome spectacle has obscured its precise psychological detail, grasp of history and astonishing craft. The earlier, lesser-known films are intimate spectacles—fine scrutinies of England’s class system; but, more impressively, they examine the empire’s emotional and sexual underpinnings. Lean’s second most-acclaimed film, Brief Encounter (1946), has recently been dismissed as a bourgeois weepie, largely because of the paradox of film critics (that most bourgeois profession) objecting to Lean’s spiritual dissection of their class.

Critics’ enthusiasm has, instead, shifted to Lean’s colleague Michael Powell whose fervent theatrics (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Peeping Tom) carry more obvious sentiment and are easily comprehended. Lean’s reputation has suffered from his lack of ostentation. His taste and refinement have distracted casual viewers from recognizing his depth and daring—as when Madeleine mocks her father’s urge for her to marry by suggesting he wants to bring her suitor “to the boil”; the father harrumphs, “That is both vulgar and flippant!” The response isn’t stodgy—and it isn’t Lean’s. Rather, it shrewdly conveys the middle-class hypocrisy that rebellious Madeleine flouts yet secretly shares.

That Lean has a complex understanding of British class doesn’t mean he is uncritical; England’s best artists traditionally critique social inequities. But Lean’s critique is finely complicated—something even scholar Edward Said misunderstood when he fashionably slagged Lawrence of Arabia in the P.C. 1980s. Since 9/11, it’s been apparent that no aspect of the West’s historical involvement/arrogance regarding the Middle East escaped Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt’s vision. Remarkably, that film’s inside/outside view of Lawrence—strategist, adventurer, homosexual, hero, enigma—is consistent with Lean’s other protagonists.

Starting with his directorial debut, the WWII film In Which We Serve (1942), Lean connected national character to cultural idiosyncrasy, personal drama to social adventure. Co-directing four films with playwright-performer Noel Coward instilled in Lean a distinct appreciation for characterization as well as a flawless sense of dramatic structure—such that Spielberg copied In Which We Serve for the dramatic climax of Schindler’s List. (It’s also significant that Lean’s early career as a film editor included the 1938 version of Shaw’s Pygmalion—another example of social critique melding personal drama into eloquent comedy.) Coward was one of the protean figures of 20th-century theater (Britain’s Orson Welles) yet Lean himself became Welles’ cinematic equal.

To this day, Lean remains an unsurpassed film artist—a supreme technician on the level of Welles, Bresson, Antonioni and Kubrick, matching their gravity and wit, too. In Madeleine, Lean’s deep-focus compositions and chiaroscuro evoke the sumptuous historicism of The Magnificent Ambersons. It starts as contemporary documentary, then cinematographer Guy Green shifts to the 19th-century setting through a style resembling high-relief engravings. Seeing this movie is like touching it. Lean’s visual command has been held against him for too long. Key to his artistry, Lean’s visual accents prove his erudition.

Although his famous Dickens films, Great Expectations (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948), also delimited his reputation, they are far more than mere literary adaptations. Both revere English cultural heritage yet bring it to life. It’s as if those books were suddenly lit from within and their meanings made radiant. Every image, camera movement, every edit and sound communicates ideas and feelings. Lean used Dickens to express what Roland Barthes called “The Pleasure of the Text,” but this was Lean’s own pleasure in kinetic narrative. Unembarrassed by cultural tradition, Lean’s sophisticated adaptations distilled Dickens to cinematic essence. The caricatures have psychological essence and social truth. Finlay Currie’s Magwitch, Martita Hunt’s Miss Havisham, Jean Simmons’ Estella and Alec Guinness’ Fagin still haunt pop culture.

Dickens’ stories of cruelty and compassion link the two through recognizable human nature and its odd ardent forms (like Guinness’ discreetly fey Herbert Pocket). For Lean, story order and balance (not Powell’s hysterics) represent an artist’s search for existential justice, which is a constant theme. He was less interested in realism than in stylizing and elucidating experience—whether with his phantasmagorical Dickens movies or his later, big-screen spectacles of man within phenomenological environments.

All Lean’s movies are Life Epics, about individuals’ (from John Mills’ Pip to Katharine Hepburn’s Rosie; and from Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence to Victor Bannerjee’s Dr. Aziz) and their dawning conscience. This is most apparent in his underrated (or unknown) quartet of love stories: Brief Encounter, Madeleine, The Passionate Friends and Summertime. All feature female protagonists with Lean (collaborating with wives Kay Walsh and Ann Todd) visualizing their emotional candor and psychological torment. Without being a 19th-century British woman, I’m still stunned with empathy when Madeleine’s yearning for personal satisfaction leads her into the cellar of her home, pushes her to resist the codes of her society and then fight her own guilt as in the unnerving confession, “The pain makes me stupid.” Meryl Streep would give up both Oscars for dialogue that true.

In each film, Lean’s attention to weather, locale and nature represents a personal agony, as do his legendary landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes. Madeleine’s narrator describes her story as “romance,” which for Lean isn’t a lesser genre but a mature means of perceiving behavior and desire. The U.K. Guardian recently called these intimate dramas “personal,” but that wrongly implies that the epics were not “personal.” This series allows us to see how personal the late epics are and appreciate the epic dimensions of the early intimate stories.

Perhaps the greatest rediscovery at Film Forum is The Passionate Friends (1949). It confirms two things about Lean: his absolute artistry and his uniqueness. Of all cinema’s orthodox storytellers, Lean is the most misunderstood since Josef von Sternberg (given that the conventions Sternberg came out of have long passed into camp legend, he now stands practically sui generis). Lean’s reputation is tied to narrative forms we think we know too well, but the excitement of his movies is primarily—primally—photographic and kinetic.

Passionate Friends demonstrates Lean’s strange talent for composing shots and constructing shot-sequences that illustrate a story but also create a startling and awe-inspiring kinesthetic response. (Critics accused Lean of pictorial perfection, the John Ford crime.) It takes willful blindness to dismiss Passionate Friends as a soap opera—that’s merely its premise. Lean does audacious visual, aural and montage “experiments” throughout. It would be easy to call this Michael Powell expressionism, but Lean’s tricky; he’s got something like Cartier-Bresson’s straightforward photographic approach, yet it’s judiciously applied to moments of ecstasy and hysteria.

That scene where the love triangle—Ann Todd, Claude Rains and Trevor Howard—sit in a room and withhold emotions from each other has Lean cut-in shots of a tryst/theater ticket, cheap music playing on the phonograph, while drinks are poured and set down. It would be mundane by a truly conventional director, but Lean keys-up the tension—visually. Not mere melodrama. For a movie lover, it’s an epiphany.

It’s as if Lean decided to fuck with his then-biggest hit Brief Encounter and let loose with unruly sexual desire—both the illicitness and the repression—that Brief Encounter was bursting to contain. The images and talk of bedrooms, marriage and “love” are so frank it’s almost French. (The opening chaotic New Year’s Eve ball surely was inspired by Carne’s Children of Paradise.) If this is a “woman’s picture,” I can’t think of another that so matches the sensual anarchy of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. (Except maybe for Ophuls’ Frenchness yet again.)

How bizarre for a veddy British filmmaker like Lean to be so artful—ribald yet controlled. Focus on Ann Todd’s performance: those glazed porcelain features that can look desperate, enchanted or desolate. She’s terrific—the screen’s most catastrophically sexual Caucasian woman until Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. Todd is like a reverse negative of Celia Johnson’s conscientious housewife in Brief Encounter; sexual danger pours through her image like light through an x-ray. I use a photographic simile because it is appropriate to how Lean (and Guy Green) presents faces, aura, nature. Trevor Howard may be Lean’s alter-ego (the big-eared, sedate yet sexually avid British male), but Todd, the temporary Mrs. Lean, is a radiant example of the director’s spiritual conflicts. Even in black and white, she is so white and blond she anticipates O’Toole’s Lawrence—and Lawrence’s embodiment of risk-taking Imperialism.

Ann Todd’s distress is not only situational like Hitchcock’s Joan Fontaine figures, she illustrates Lean’s interest in man’s mortal distress. Nature fascinates his innate camera-eye and vivifies his sense of existence (Howard and Todd going up a funicular through clouds, or basking in lakeside sunshine). Lean’s interest in natural phenomena includes his penchant for contrasting the fickleness of human behavior against settings that are awesome and portentous.

I love how the visual allegory of emotions in Passionate Friends plays with time and memory—different angles on desire—to create one epiphany after another: Howard tensely waiting in an office while a ticker-tape machine clatters on the right and the wind blows the curtains on his left! The soft-edged flashbacks that put quotation marks around “romance” a full decade before Louis Malle did the same in The Lovers!

Lean’s epiphanies are a delirious comment on the straightness of Brief Encounter (which isn’t all that “straight” either—it’s the most intense movie ever made about stages of lust). Yet this craziness in Passionate Friends gives way to awareness of how people compromise, sacrifice and live together that may be far more adult than Brief Encounter. And is this not the ultimate Claude Rains cuckold role? But Rain’s eventual angry-husband eruption is the most thrilling and righteous of all. (Consider this and The Shanghai Gesture as movies that embarrass the hell out of Casablanca.) Rains becomes an important fulcrum for the story and the emotional shifts Lean dramatizes. “Wow!” describes the moment Rains’ secretary tries to keep the secret of her boss’s wife’s deception; Lean plays suspensefully with various points-of-view including a hotel guest’s singular, lonely, petulant, gay vanity. (This subtle suggestion of the secretary’s unrequited love bests the wife fetishizing John Wayne’s army coat in The Searchers.)    

Accumulating images of complicated, thwarted emotions leads to the film’s final coup: Convention says cheating wife Todd will not commit suicide but Lean’s superbly rendered emotionalism—his vertiginous visual style—commands that she will indeed; that she will do what Celia Johnson only dared in Brief Encounter. And this gives genuine surprise to her fate. “Woman’s fiction” conventions are subverted. Yet, there’s one more turn in the story and this, in the final shot, can only be described as beautifully tragic. Passionate Friends’ characters are emotionally naked. Lean goes beneath the manners—the high-life, the genitalia—to their souls.

It’s fitting that Film Forum resurrect Lean’s 1970 Ryan’s Daughter (showing Sept. 22), giving viewers the opportunity to finally understand Lean’s most trammeled intimate-epic, summing-up his misunderstood artistry. Recently praising Ryan’s Daughter, director John Boorman recalled Lean’s death-bed testimony: “We’re very lucky. We got to make movies.” Now the luck is ours. This David Lean series ignites the fall film season and sets film history right.