REDISCOVERING THE MASTER

ooking at any given poll of greatest directors, David Lean’s name is bound to be on the list. His most celebrated epics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)and Doctor Zhivago (1965) are household names that will be forever remembered for their lavish cinematography and sophisticated set pieces. But years before Lean achieved his glory in Hollywood, he was known for intimate dramas in his native England. In the months of January and March, Houstonians will have a chance to experience eight of these ten recently restored classics at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), one of the only two places in town (Rice Cinema is the other) with reel-to-reel projection equipments suitable to screen these valuable prints.

Given the chance to restore some of the best works by Britain’s most acclaimed director, the British Film Institute (BFI) chose to work on Lean’s first ten films with the help of Granada International and Studio Canal. In my conversation with the BFI’s senior curator Nigel Algar, he mentioned the costly and labor-intensive restoration process would not have been possible without the generous support from the David Lean Foundation. The British director, who is famously known to have waited for days in the desert to get one great shot of a sunrise while filming Lawrence of Arabia (1962), leaves behind a foundation that is true to his spirit. During the restoration process, Mr. Algar told a trustee of the David Lean Foundation that certain parts could be slightly improved, but not without a hefty price. Mr. Algar suggested that maybe they should take a more pragmatic attitude towards the process. The trustee, who was Lean’s lawyer, replied, “ ‘Pragmatic’ is not a word in David Lean’s vocabulary!”

After his unsuccessful attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps as an accountant, Lean entered the movie business at an early age and worked his way up from the bottom. Eventually, he made a name for himself as a skilled editor. His first big break came when he was given a chance to co-direct In Which We Serve (1942) with notable British playwright Noel Coward. Coming from a theatrical background, Coward had little knowledge about filmmaking and hence David Lean became the de facto director in charge of camera placement and the actors when Coward was in front of the camera. The World War II film about life on a warship established Lean’s position as a director and Noel Coward was so impressed with Lean that he offered the film rights of his popular plays to the young director and his production company Cineguild.

David Lean’s next three films are all adaptations of Cowards’ plays, which guaranteed him a certain degree of public interest, but also put the fledging filmmaker in the big-name playwright’s shadow. 1944’s This Happy Breed was praised for its portrayal of life in Britain between the two World Wars. The following year, Lean adapted Coward’s comedy Blithe Spirit for the big screen. The film was one of only two comedies in his career (the other was Hobson’s Choice) and Lean’s brand of comedy was not very well-received. His command of shooting in Technicolor with simple special effects was laudable, but Noel Coward was far from being impressed. Mr. Algar told me that upon seeing the film, Coward told Lean, “You just fucked up the best thing I’ve ever written.”

Brief Encounter (1945), a film expanded from Coward’s one-act play Still Life, would be the last collaboration between David Lean and Noel Coward. In fact, the film is a turning point for Lean’s career, not only because he finally emerged from Coward’s shadow, but also because this is the film in which he exhibits virtuosic command over the film medium. The clever combination of noir-style lighting, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 and the flashback storytelling signifies the emergence of a great director. Brief Encounter, like a cinematic ancestor of the popular foreign film In The Mood For Love (2000), is a film about an unfulfilled affair made more than sixty years ago, yet little of its magic is lost over the passing of time, especially for a film that was initially ridiculed by preview audiences for its lack of physical intimacy. The love affair between the middle-class housewife Laura (Celia Johnson) and the idealistic lonely physician Alec (Trevor Howard) has little to do with the act of adultery, but is instead marked by Laura’s agonizing guilt of falling in love. MFAH film curator Marian Luntz noted that David Lean evokes the kind of British sensibility that one will not find in his Hollywood genre pictures.

The narration from the first-person perspective of a female protagonist in Brief Encounter was almost unheard of at its time of production. How Laura feels about her annoying friend, her guilt over her passion, and her sadness over the lost affair are all exposed to the audience, which makes Laura such a realistic and wholesome character. Thank goodness Celia Johnson’s Laura is not a desperate housewife and every bit of her performance shows more restraint than drama. Her ethereal presence is in the same vein as Setsuko Hara’s depiction of a dutiful yet conflicted modern woman in the films of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, Late Spring). As for the choice of Trevor Howard as the married doctor, it was most certainly a bold and wise move on Lean’s part, for Howard was more known for his supporting roles than his leading-man qualities. His everyday-man demeanor is a perfect match for the role and his chemistry with Celia Johnson is essential to the film’s success.

As Ms. Luntz suggested, some of these largely forgotten gems reveal different sides of Lean, such as Hobson’s Choice (a comedy featuring Charles Laughton), The Sound Barrier (an adventure drama), and Madeleine (a melodrama). Regardless of genres, David Lean’s early films remind viewers of the passionate side of a filmmaker whose legacy is ironically dominated by his technical achievements.