SPOILERS AHEAD

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2002)

WARNING: SPOILERS
David Lean was so brilliant a film maker one doesn't so much watch as live his movies. This was true on "The Bridge on the River Kwai", and "Lawrence of Arabia". Those two Oscar-winning movies were produced by Sam Spiegel, who kept a close eye on expenses and on Lean's excesses. If the deserts look slightly different from the first half of "Lawrence" to the last, it's because Spiegel found shooting in Arabia too expensive and moved the production to Spain.
"Doctor Zhivago" was produced by Carlo Ponti. After finding out Lean didn't want Ponti's wife, Sophia Loren, for Lara, he gave Lean a free hand and stayed out of the process (if my wife was the 1960s Sophia Loren I'd not be bothered with such trivialities myself).
The unrestrained Lean shows signs of the descent that would result in "Ryan's Daughter", a misunderstood but nevertheless overblown film. But Lean does extremely well with "Zhivago", considering what he had to work with as a source.
For it's the story that's really the film's only problem. The novel DOCTOR ZHIVAGO was banned in the Soviet Union for too realistic a look at the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath. In a country like the USA it's difficult to understand this sort of repression (read Solzhenitsyn's THE OAK AND THE CALF and THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO for more examples). Author Boris Pasterak won a Nobel Prize for literature for his literary courage, a prize the USSR refused to let him accept, without exile. But courageous as the book was, perhaps due to the vicissitudes of writing a book one fears may send one to a slave labor camp if it's found, the novel has a miserable structure. It takes place over a long period of time, with quantum leaps from one place, time, and character to another. Like many Russian novels, it's brimming with colorful but otherwise poorly-limned characters. The first major challenge was finding a structure and themes and then whittling the book down to a manageable size for a film of three hours. Robert Bolt did a masterful job and won a well-deserved Oscar. One of the (few) joys in reading the novel these days is finding what tidbits he borrowed from various characters in order to build the memorable figures who somehow emerge from Lean's broadly-knitted tapestry of a movie and stand out as real people. Robert Bolt's script was a masterpiece, though it's hard to appreciate without a familiarity with the poorly-structured novel.

The cast is a exceptional. When you have capable actors like Guinness, Courtenay, Richardson, and Steiger in support, it hardly matters whom you have as leads. Both Sharif and Christie, as Zhivago and Lara, are beautiful and sultry; both have a powerful screen presence that compensates for their inexperience as actors.
SPOILER SECTION (LAST WARNING): Like the novel, the movie focuses on a small group of characters who weave in and out of each other's lives. They may disappear for long stretches, only to reappear in coincidences worthy of Dickens. Alec Guinness, mostly relegated to the job as narrator of flashbacks, pops into the movie only occasionally, but always with wonderful panache (watch that bit he does with the flower during the parade). Rod Steiger vanishes before the end of the first hour, but bobs back up with a memorable few moments at the end that make the movie. Tom Courtenay disappears slightly after the first hour, reappears in a brief scene about forty minutes later, then is gone forever, though he's mentioned a few times. This is where the biggest mistake was made in the movie. Courtenay's character commits suicide near the end, as is related by Rod Steiger's character, who takes obvious relish in the details. Robert Bolt thought Courtenay's character should actually reappear at the last house where Zhivago and Lara are shacked up; read Zhivago's poems; see all the Revolutionary blather he's spouted about the end of "the personal life in Russia" for the nonsense it is; and then shoot himself. Lean preferred to do it the way he presents in the finished film, with Courtenay's suicide being known through hearsay and unconnected to the central love story. According to Bolt's account, Lean later admitted he was wrong. This was a crucial mistake that almost wrecks the picture, and Lean should've listened to Robert Bolt. The fact is, the ending isn't as dreary as people think because of the winding down of the love story, but because at the end, until Rod Steiger pops in again like a jack in the box to add a little life to the movie, the film is carried at the end section by Sharif and Christie, who, pretty though they are, seem to miss their magnificent supporting players. Courtenay's reappearance at this juncture, as was Steiger's, would've been a breath of fresh air in a slowly stifling ending, and it would've wound up the Strelnikov character far more satisfactorily (I wouldn't second-guess Lean had I not read Bolt's account of Lean second-guessing himself).
Things to watch for: the cavalry charge on the lake (actually filmed in the summer); the dragoon assault on the marchers led by Tom Courtenay, looking like I want to remember him always; a remarkably subtle performance by Geraldine Chaplin as Zhivago's wife; and the lay of the land. David Lean's epic vision includes all the earth and its beauties, and Freddie Young's cinematography is at its peak (Young won five well deserved Oscars, for "Lawrence", "Zhivago", "Ryan's Daughter", "Nicholas and Alexandra" and "Ivanhoe"). Without Young, Lean couldn't have been Lean. Nobody can film a daffodil, or footsteps across an ice field, or a train approaching from the distance, quite as well as David Lean. If possible, GET THE WIDESCREEN VERSION OF ALL HIS EPICS, otherwise you lose as much as two-thirds of what Lean had to share with us.
It's absurd to judge movies in comparison with other movies, but as far as Lean's epics go, "Zhivago" lacks the cohesion in "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia", the former with its tension between Saito and Nicholson; and the latter with its focus on the title character. But as a soap-operaish love story, nothing beats "Doctor Zhivago", which does for t he Russian Revolution what "Gone with the Wind" did for the Civil War (i.e., relegate it to the background for its sweeping tale of a woman loved by many men -- only this time a nice one).