Cold War Relic

Rating: 8/10 (13 February 2005)

This film played for a year in Tampa. (Remember ads reading "held over"?) It was made near the height of the Cold War, from a novel written by one of that war's heroes, Soviet dissident Boris Pasternak. "Dr. Zhivago" provided lessons in Russian history in the guise of soapy drama.
Owing to obvious East-West tensions, director David Lean could not film the Russian Revolution on Russian snows. (Others did so, and whatever happened to those films?) Southern Alberta and (oddly) urban Spain stand in for several parts of the Union. One can't see the Lake Louise train station without thinking of this film.
Presumably few Russian actors were available to Hollywood in the '60s, but the largely British cast is convincing as participants on both sides of those ten days that shook the world. The cheap and easy take on anything Russian is to claim that the real star is Russia, its winter weather and its sheer vastness. Denied access to the genuine soil, the filmmakers here manage to pay tribute to that land now freed, post-1991, from the Red serfdom depicted in "Dr. Zhivago".