Keeping the Doctor Away

...The editing is not up to what we expect from a Lean film, and shows drastic departures from the shooting script, especially some Draconian cuts...

...The episode of Lara's attempted assassination of Komarovsky turns -into arrant theatrics, with Komarovsky condescending to Yury and belittling Lara like a perfect cad, and Pasha appearing as the gallant rescuer: A chance for acrid humor and social raillery deteriorates into a conventional sc??ne ?  faire...

...I do not think it is anywhere near the masterpiece that a world hot for uncertainties from the land of arrogant self-assurance took it to be...

...and mostly because so much of the novel is metaphoric, symbolic, anagogical while yet striving to be "realistic," that its texture cracks from selfcontradiction...

...More bothersome are the dialogues, which, even when they are not reluctantly disguised monologues, turn into set pieces or arias...

...Mostly melodramatic oversimplifications and the standard romantic pablum...

...shored against window panes, it frames and isolates the faces behind them more broodingly than mere glass could...

...and a quivering, humane cynicism...

...What a movie this would be for someone who couldn't hear-and, if possible, think...

...it is exemplary, symbolic, mythopoeic-its actors, besides being individuals, are signposts of history, religion, ontology and teleology...

...in Lawrence, it was pulpy Tchaikovsky...

...partly because, as a lyric poet, Pasternak lacked the fiction writer's patience and respect for development and linkage...

...That leaves us with the images...

...It is not so much the chary characterizations that bother me, or the symbolically charged but arbitrary and tiresome coincidences, which would have it that hardly a character can appear after a certain point in the book without being someone from before, transmuted or merely transplanted-until the unexpected can no longer travel incognito...

...It would be foolish to argue that there is no room for the perishable pleasure, the impermanent work...

...But let us begin at the beginning, with Pasternak's novel...

...One more example will have to suffice...

...Like the John Le Carr?© novel, the film presents the world of espionage and counterespionage as, to be sure, fiendishly and wisecrackingly clever, but also drab, squalid, and fraught with a mortal danger lacking all glamor: It strikes you dead in the dark, from behind, without a peroration...

...Edmund Wilson correctly notes about the book's principal characters: "The personalities of Yury and Larisa stream back into wider reaches, a realm in which their contours and features are lost, in which they become indefinables, unclassifiable poetic elements that can only be conveyed by imagery...

...according to Lean and Bolt, the Captain is guilty of ruling-class slogans, "My country...

...As excellent as this may be in poetry, so dubious is it in prose fiction, and so inconceivable on film-at least commercial film, as it is now practiced...

...And what must be counted as the twin strengths of the novel-its exultant leaps into poetry and its tireless imaginative proliferation (in a letter to Pasternak, the already dying Rilke thanked him for "was Sie in sich so wunderbar vermehrt haben," the "marvelous multiplication" that describes also this novel's economy)-cannot be readily transferred to the screen...

...at film's end, she ages before our eyes, and the sadness of bruised innocence radiates from her final moments...

...parts of it, in fact, are quite tidy...

...And the bitterly splendid last 13 days of Lara and Yury at Varykino yield lines like, "We'd have got married and had a house and children If we'd had children, Yury, would you have liked a boy or a girl...

...The love story is not highly personal, except in some of its details...

...At such a moment, the imagery is less indebted to Boris Pasternak than to that even betterloved poet, Walt Disney...

...A few incidents do come off, such as Zhivago's mistaking, on his terrible wintry foot journey back to Yuriatin, a family of frightened refugees for his own...

...His plays have ranged from poor (Flowering Cherry) to very able (A Man for All Seasons...

...But, it might be asked, what does the film accomplish independently, as film...

...and for images such as Pasternak distilled, having, as he said, "brilliance and unimperative quality" and "interchangeability," film has no equivalent: for the brilliance, yes...

...Art is that which gets better with re-experiencing...

...It makes the blood of the Cossacks' victims look redder...

...it would be wrong to call it art...

...Maurice Jarre's music is usually his third-best when geared to the American market...

...Julie Christie and Rod Steiger make the most of flattenedout versions of Lara and Komarovsky, but Omar Sharif and Tom Courtenay cannot coax conviction out of this Yury and Pasha...

...Most enervating is the fragmentariness, the decentralization, the rebarbative deviousness of it all-partly because this clandestine autobiography must serve as vehicle for contraband disclosure...

...It would be slipshod not to evaluate it, too, according to its greater or lesser interest...

...For such copiousness, even a film of some 200 minutes is not capacious enough...

...Here, however, he is taking liberties with art...

...In both cases, the speaker is shot grotesquely in a barrel, but how the implications have been altered...

...As Richard Burton plays him, he has only two basic moods: a stolid, almost impassive, agony...

...In the film, they return to a house into which snow has fallen and in which ice has gathered, so that the interior is like something out of an Andersen fairy tale, or, more precisely, an earlier David Lean movie-Miss Haversham's cobweb-encrusted parlor in Great Expectations...

...here it is piddling Rimski-Korsakov, atwitter with balalaikas...

...The film, departing from the novel in minor ways only, questions whether it is possible to tolerate the traffic in lives that spying and counterspying involveparticularly the dastardly business of sacrificing one's own good men to protect some swinish double agent whom expediency places above all...

...But it would be wrong to make too much of it...

...And just when one can feel sympathy for an honest enemy, one must cause his death for the sake of a monster with whom one finds oneself allied...

...Most disappointing of all is the Tonia of Geraldine Chaplin, who seems to have inherited only some of her mother's looks and none of her father's talent...

...As this ruddy glow defies the surrounding gloom of emerald and amethyst, as the sleeper smiles in a dream no more frail than reality, some approximation of one of Zhivago's moving stanzas is achieved (my translation is even more approximative): But who are we and wherefrom If of all that the years begot Gossip alone survives In the world where we are not...

...When Zhivago and Lara return to Varykino for their last, doomed idyll, the house they inhabit is merely deserted and sparsely furnished...

...Martin Ritt has directed the crisp screenplay with restrained efficiency...

...non-art is what can be fully relished only once...

...It is present even in absence: the summer scenes, because of it, harbor a pang in their rapture...

...and it is not only the imagery of these metaphors but their rhythms of recurrence, their alienations, their confluences and interfusions that express the real sense of Zhivago...

...The protagonist, Leamas, is burdened with a conscience and a girl he cares for...

...But you enjoy it none the less...

...The Spy Who Came in from the Cold comes out of the cold of mere suspense into the warmth of concern...

...If none of Zhivago's artistic and metaphysical concerns come across anywhere in the film, something of Pasternak's poetry is caught in a rufous gleam hovering just above Lara's sleeping face at Varykino...

...And you wonder if the whole thing isn't just a shade farfetched...

...not even the most toweringly personal love story can be painted across an entire, huge, impersonal revolution), he had already missed every possible point...

...when his bosses in British counterespionage destroy the girl and all but crush the conscience, he opts out and prefers to die...

...his screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia took considerable liberties with history but remained artistically sound...

...Although the reader may disagree with my evaluation of these elements in the book, he will have to concede that they are hardly calculated to make transposition onto film easy, or even possible...

...Yury's return to Moscow from the war, instead of revealing small, ominous changes creeping up from everywhere, plants him in something rather like the last part of Ninochka: a ludicrous pair of petty officials, male and female, ordering about a teeming houseful of socialized scarecrows, and joining with them in bullying the Zhivagos...

...But by expert gradation or sudden change, Burton wrests such a repertoire of shadings and shocks from the role, that he turns in a master performance...

...Soon, we feel, they too will be snowbound...

...The fault of the Commissar is, according to Pasternak, his St...

...I do not know to what extent Robert Bolt, the scenarist, is to blame...

...And the Revolution is not the d?©cor, but the eternal antagonist: the danger of coarsening, collectivizing, dehumanizing what must remain inviolably individual and intimate...

...I wish something else about Doctor Zhivago were as beautiful as the snow...

...Those pained eyes and lips, that cantankerous voice, become very meaningful to us, and very dear...

...It questions also the still less tolerable business of using innocent bystanders as decoy ducks that, however, get killed as very real ones...

...even the occasional bravura process shot or tricky camera angle does not disrupt the seedy starkness...

...They don't, at that, make fools of themselves as do Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson, as Yevgraf and Gromeko...

...Thus the killing of an idealistic Red commissar of upperclass background by a mutinous faction of the proletarian soldiery, becomes in the film the murder of a Tzarist captain by populist deserters at the front...

...If you have not read the book, the details of the plot are a bit hard to follow, and the characters seem, though credible, a trifle skimpy...

...I went back to see part of the film a second time, and was still impressed by the performances and over-all conception, but it struck me that this was not the sort of thing to see more than once, and that even having read it beforehand may constitute a d?©j...

...A large and excellent supporting cast, in which Oskar Werner, George Voskovec, Peter Van Eyck, and Robert Hardy especially distinguish themselves, manages to convey much more than the brief and often one-dimensional parts would seem to permit...

...But, for the rest of the time, one reacts to this film rather as G. K. Chesterton did to nocturnal Times Square: "What a glorious sight for someone who couldn't read...

...for unimperative interchangeability, no...

...As the girl, Claire Bioom exudes youthful good-will and perilous na??vet...

...When David Lean proposed to reduce this to a "highly personal love story" for which "the Revolution simply provides the canvas" (he must have meant "background" or "setting...

...If you have read the book, you are impressed by the general fidelity to the text, but the suspense is gone, and without suspense, what is left of a spy thriller...

...Even the central, proto-Christian resurrection motif rings more willed than true...

...Still, such an image from the film as that of two slanting red flags atop a moving train that reach out, like arms, to take possession of endlessly white lands, is, for primordial beauty no less than for its color symbolism, the equal of many a masterwork that has settled on a museum wall...

...Under Lean's fastidious direction and for Fred Young's inspired camera, the snow waltzes like an intoxicated corps de ballet, forms little parasitic stalactites on a wandering man's moustache, cowers submissively under sibilant sleighs...

...And proud of it...

...The performances are less than outstanding...

...A movie such as this one does, however, present one very serious problem: the problem of not being art...

...Petersburg accent and highpitched voice...

...Well, most of the photography is, except for an occasional false note, as when Lara's face emerges from the corolla of a jonquil...

...Aside from the fact that such a snow palace would have to be roofless and uninhabitable, this is turning oppressive reality into mere Gothic romance...

...From blue, through white, to silver -baleful in storms, pristine in the moonlight, boding in time of war -the snow is decorative on a Moscow street (in suburban Madrid) and majestic on the Urals (in northern Finland...

...A MUCH MORE successfulthough much less arduousscreen adaptation is that of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold...