Sir David Lean obituary
June 30th, 2008
The death of Sir David Lean in April 1991 afforded East Enders a brief glimpse into the fabulous home he had built for himself in Limehouse’s Narrow Street, when the luxurious home went, briefly, onto the market.
For one of the giants of British cinema, a move to an area of the East End forgotten by all but the residents seemed curious. By the 1980s, large parts of Limehouse were desolate, local people living in the shadow of the thousands of square feet of deserted warehouses and wharves, left behind by the departure of the docks trade. Lean bought four warehouses on Narrow Street’s Sun Wharf and knocked them together. A no-expense-spared modernisation converted the space into a massive luxury home, close to the City and right on the river.
With the current celebrations of Lean’s centenary, he is today regarded as a great film director. But by the time he moved to Limehouse in 1987, Sir David’s halcyon days in pictures were behind him, and critical opinion was divided.
Born in Croydon on 25 March 1908, he started in movies at the bottom, as a clapperboard boy in the 1920s. He worked a solid apprenticeship during the 1930s, editing newsreels for Gaumont and Movietone. It would give him a feel for structure and the technicalities of making a movie, and for the look of a film. He moved on to edit features, including Pygmalion in 1938 and Major Barbara in 1941. He worked with the British industry’s biggest names: Powell & Pressburger on Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), and directing with Noel Coward on In Which We Serve (1942).
He went on to adapt a number of Coward’s plays as films, with This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945). There were hugely successful adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). And he made The Passionate Friends, from HG Wells’s novel, and the 1950 melodrama Madeline, before working with Terence Rattigan on 1952’s The Sound Barrier. This ‘greatest adventure story of our time’ went some way to establishing Lean’s reputation for stunning visual work - with the unbeatable accompaniment of music by Malcom Arnold. ‘I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That’s why I like pictures,’ Lean once mused. It was to be his trademark, but also a source for criticism later on.
Then followed Hobson’s Choice in 1954 and Summertime the year after, before the run of sumptuous, and very long, epics for which Lean became famous. In the austerity years of the fifties, British cinema was already nostalgically harking back to the victories of World War II, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lean did far more than deliver a patriotic potboiler. The director, almost unknown outside Britain, was a risk for producer Sam Spiegel, who had already considered John Ford, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, Fred Zinnemann, and Orson Welles. Spiegel half joked that the Brit was chosen “in the absence of anyone else”. Malcom Arnold scored the movie once more, memorable for his arrangement of ‘The Colonel Bogey March’. In a black-and-white movie world of goodies and baddies, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson’s maniacal pride -leading to his helping the Japanese to build their bridge - was unusually ambivalent. The film further cemented Lean’s reputation for spectacle - he used a full-size train and bridge for the final spectacular explosion.
The director was now playing on the biggest stage. In 1962, Spiegel employed him to make Lawrence of Arabia. The director’s cut would run to 227 minutes, while the budget would run to €15m. It would make a star of Peter O’Toole and influence a new generation of film makers, including Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. He followed with Doctor Zhivago in 1965, another huge popular success, but not so with the critics. This love story set around the Russian revolution sprawled over 26 years of plot time, cost €11m and ran to 197 minutes. ‘Too long’ they complained, and a hurt Lean said he would never make another film. He returned though, with Ryan’s Daughter in 1970, another monster, at €15m and 195 minutes. The critics roasted the movie, saying the story was dwarfed by Lean’s epic visuals. A rural Irish take on Madame Bovary, it failed to repeat the box office success of Lean’s two movies (which would have been some feat), and it would be another decade before he returned … for his last film.
A Passage to India, in 1984, introduced Lean to a new generation of filmgoers, and re-established the director’s reputation. Lean was back in fashion, and the movie won two Oscars, with a further nine nominations. The same year, he received a knighthood. Lean wasn’t a prolific director - just 16 films in 43 years, and it got harder and harder to get his epic films made. At the time of his death he was planning a production of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Lean married six times, and was survived by his last wife, Sandra Cooke.
