David Lean: Ten British Classics

[October 8th, 2008]

The standard line when discussing the early films of David Lean—films which the NW Film Center has had the excellent taste to bring to town on the 100th anniversary of the director’s birth—is that they are miniatures, intimate pictures whose small scale contrasts with the later spectacles. But let’s think about that for a moment: What’s the most memorable image in Lean’s canon? It’s a tiny match, extinguished by a puff of Peter O’Toole’s breath in Lawrence of Arabia. Lean’s greatest gift, even as he went on to racing camels and destroying bridges, was to understand the power of a small object, blown up to the dimensions of the big screen. He took the everyday, and expanded it to mythic proportions.

At his best, Lean managed the same transformation on an emotional plane. That’s certainly the magic of 1945’s Brief Encounter, justly the best known of his first pictures. Based on a play by Noel Coward (Lean was no second-rater in his initial source materials; he took only from Coward and Charles Dickens), the 86-minute romance approaches its central liaison obliquely, keeping its full emotional power in reserve for the ending. The hopeless love between Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard) is experienced in the ordinary corners of train-station tea rooms and movie-house balconies. The implicit critique of repressed middle-class values has been discussed for, oh, 63 years, but what’s most striking about Brief Encounter is its portrayal of infatuation and longing as a horrible invasion: a kind of disease which can only be endured so long. “There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore,” Laura thinks to herself as part of her constant internal monologue—and what’s awful (and true) about the line is how killing a part of the soul becomes the only route to peace. It’s the kind of everyday calamity that most movies would rather not notice.

Lean’s Dickens adaptations—Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948)—are far blowsier things, both marred by overacting (especially from Alec Guinness, playing a dandy in one movie and a hook-nosed anti-Semitic smear in the other). But there are precious details here, too: New Yorker critic Anthony Lane was right to single out, earlier this year, the shot of Bill Sykes’ terrified bulldog as one of the haunting sights of English cinema. It goes without saying that it’s a small dog.