One of the most ambitious and watchable of the "big" Sixties films...

Rating: 9/10 (10 September 2009)

"Doctor Zhivago" tells a simple love story in a turbulent setting and, for the most part, avoids easy resolutions to disordered emotional relationships... Even though the focus is openly on those relationships, everything in the film recurs around the general destructive effects of the Russian Revolution... The irrational actions of both World War I and the prolonged struggles among the various Bolshevik factions are the driving forces behind the tragic plot... In adapting Boris Pasternak's novel to the screen, writer Robert Bolt tells the story in flashback, with the powerful Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness) questioning a teenaged girl (Rita Tushingham) about her past... He thinks she might be the daughter of his brother Yuri (Omar Sharif), the dreamy poet-physician and Lara (Julie Christie), the love of his life... Flashback to their youth and the first time that Yuri and Lara's paths cross on a streetcar... He's a promising, successful medical student and poet, engaged to his childhood sweetheart Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin). Lara is the daughter of a dressmaker who has a long-term "arrangement" with Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), a political chameleon who comes out on top no matter who is in power... Lara's fiancé Pasha (Tom Courtenay) is an idealistic revolutionary who is part of that change... Komarovsky's interest in Lara is not platonic... As those relationships are being selected, protesters are marching in the streets and the Czar's troopers are taking them seriously... In the first big confrontation between a demonstration and a cavalry charge on snow-covered streets, Lean avoids the inevitable comparisons to Sergei Eisenstein's Odessa steps scene in "The Battleship Potemkin," but he can't he1p but make a few references to it... The clash in the streets also serves as a counterpoint to Komarovsky's seduction of Lara, and the two elements are cleverly interwoven... The combination of the personal and the political has rarely been so striking as it is in that effective sequence... The most memorable scenes, however, take place during World War I and the revolution: a mass of deserters meets a mass of replacement troops on a lonely road; Yuri and family embark on a long severe rail journey from Moscow to the Urals and negotiate territory controlled at times by Red Guards and at times by White Guards; a machine gun attack on an unseen enemy across a field; Yuri's being harried into service and then his long trek back home through the snow... Lean gives the film an impression of stark, beautiful expanse... Like all love stories, "Doctor Zhivago" depends on viewers' involvement with the characters, and these work very well... While Lara is the effective expression of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times, Yury can see no happiness in his existence without the love of this beautiful woman, which to him is immortal... And while something was broken in Lara's whole life, she continues to be for Yuri an expression of life, and from the distressing emotion of losing her a new and unexpected life of poetry arises... Julie Christie and Omar Sarif are attractive, but not in conventional Hollywood terms, and their supporting cast could not be better... The film remains one of the most ambitious and watchable of the "big" Sixties films, and one of the best depictions of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia with all its turmoil and torment...