This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
When Christopher Nolan’s new film of The Odyssey slashes and intrigues its way into cinemas next month, it is inevitable that critics will compare his picture to the work of David Lean. This is a comparison that Nolan himself has courted throughout his career.
The shadow of Lean lies large over many contemporary filmmakers, whether it’s Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott or, less successfully, Atonement’s Joe Wright. By rights, the director should be talked of in the same breath as Hitchcock, Kubrick and Kurosawa, but for some reason, there is a strange gulf between Lean’s towering, Oscar-winning achievements and his public standing.
Hitchcock and Kubrick have been portrayed on stage and screen by actors of the calibre of Stanley Tucci and Anthony Hopkins, but you search in vain for the Lean biopic: this despite his being responsible for Lawrence of Arabia, Brief Encounter and Bridge on the River Kwai. There is no director, British or American, who is so synonymous with epic cinema (sorry, Sir Christopher and Sir Ridley) and whose pictures, at their best, combine sweeping visuals with a rare degree of psychological acuity.
Yet whilst Lean is best known for creating worlds that range from revolutionary Russia and wartime Thailand to WWI Arabia and Twenties India, he was also someone who was just as effective when he dialled it down. The director of Dr Zhivago also made the greatest Noël Coward adaptations ever put on screen.
Lean was brought up in a strict Quaker family in Croydon, the son of an accountant. It is possible for armchair psychologists to trace the repression inherent in his upbringing in his pictures, which often revolve around their central characters failing to achieve their desires and suffering miserably in the process. A “hopeless” schoolboy who lacked the academic ambitions of his younger brother, the Inklings member Edward Tangye Lean, the filmmaker began his career in the early days of the British film industry, working as an editor or “cutter” on pictures like Pygmalion and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.
His first collaboration with Coward came on the patriotic WWII picture In Which We Serve, and although it was his responsibility to direct the mise-en-scène and action sequences — the sentimental, stirring moments with the actors were Coward’s domain — the film was a hit and began a happy collaboration between director and playwright that produced Blithe Spirit, This Happy Breed and, most notably, Brief Encounter, which became the template in miniature for every picture that Lean made subsequently.
Based on Coward’s play Still Life, it focuses in acute, almost painful psychological detail upon a flawed but captivating protagonist, in this case Celia Johnson’s Laura Jesson, who audiences are introduced to whilst she silently contemplates the end of an unconsummated love affair with Trevor Howard’s charismatic doctor Alec. Amidst the cloying and stifling surroundings of middle England and moneyed suburbia, Laura feels true emotion for the first time in her life, only to be forced back into the prison of her loveless marriage and horrible, entitled children.
Lean’s stroke of genius — apart from his sensitive work with Johnson, whose career never reached the same heights again, through her own choice — was to use Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto throughout on the soundtrack, elegantly counterpointing the tidal waves of stiff-upper-lip repression on screen.
Although Lean worked with Johnson and Coward repeatedly, his most important collaborator first appeared in his next film, Great Expectations; a film that, as Coward’s biographer Oliver Soden observes in Masquerade, the playwright originally gave him the idea for. Alec Guinness and Lean enjoyed (if that’s the mot juste) a love-hate relationship that went on for four decades and over six films.
The actor was not tested by his work as Herbert Pocket, but lobbied hard for the role of Fagin in Oliver Twist. He proved his bona fides to the astonished director by turning up for a screen test in character and make-up. As Lean recalled, “He came on looking not far removed from what he looks like in the film. Of course I was bowled over and he got the part without another word. He just had to walk on the set and we knew we were in business.”
Yet the casting of the gentile Guinness in the decidedly semitic role of Fagin began another prevalent issue in his collaborations with Lean: the director’s willingness, even near-insistence, in casting the very English Guinness in a range of inappropriately ethnic roles. He just about got away with his ice-cold Russian military man in Dr Zhivago, on the grounds that both characters were at least Caucasian, but his casting as the Arab sheikh Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia and, egregiously, the Indian mystic Professor Godbole in his final film A Passage to India were both in the most regrettable tradition of brownface acting.
It is notable that when Lean cast Guinness in the no-tricks role of the blinkered (and British) Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai, the actor responded with a mixture of misery and disbelief. (The first choice for the role had been Charles Laughton, but it was pointed out, accurately, that the large-framed Laughton would not have been convincing as a British officer on the verge of starvation.)
Guinness railed against Lean as a humourless taskmaster, a Napoleon-manqué whose obsession with making the film his own way turned him into his very own version of Nicholson, whose fixation on British exceptionalism leads him, inadvertently, into collaboration with the enemy.
Yet there was method in the filmmaker’s apparent madness. When the director showed Guinness and his family his first cut of footage, he walked out without comment, leading Lean to believe he had mortally offended his star actor. Later that evening, a penitent Guinness knocked on Lean’s bedroom door and said, “Before going to sleep tonight I ought to tell you that all of us thought it was the best work I’ve ever done.” Deservedly, both men won Oscars for their work on the picture, which also won Best Film.
If Bridge on the River Kwai has been overshadowed by both the desert behemoth that is Lawrence of Arabia and the weepy romantic drama Dr Zhivago, that is only because both of those were far greater hits. (Zhivago, by no means his best work, is one of the top ten-grossing films of all time, allowing for inflation.)
In the case of Lawrence of Arabia, the all-time favourite of Spielberg (and David Cameron), the hype is wholly deserved. No matter how many times you see it, the combination of Freddie Young’s astonishing cinematography, Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable music and the epic sweep of the narrative continue to amaze and enthral. Four hours seldom pass so quickly.
Yet its most underrated quality might be in Lawrence himself. As played to star-making effect by Peter O’Toole, Lean’s intense concentration on his protagonist’s complex, contradictory psyche — with the vastness of the desert itself a mocking metaphor for Lawrence’s own emotional and sexual aridity — harks back to Brief Encounter.
Celia Johnson’s Laura fantasises about throwing herself in front of a train; O’Toole’s Lawrence plays the hero, leading his forces into a merciless attack on the Ottoman forces after derailing a locomotive in an expanse of nothingness. Thanks to Lean’s genius, we venture inside their minds, and their tangled motivations unfold with startling clarity.
Most directors meet their Waterloo at some time or another, and Lean’s came with a disastrous Oirish version of Madame Bovary, 1970’s Ryan’s Daughter. Guinness, scenting a flop, stayed away, and Lean’s obsession with making another epic led him to ignore the carefully nuanced focus on character that his earlier work had demonstrated so richly.
In its place, we had a rote love triangle between Robert Mitchum’s middle-aged schoolmaster, Sarah Miles’s free spirit and Christopher Jones’s soldier, with John Mills’s village idiot gurning on the sidelines. (Mills won an Oscar, as did Lawrence cinematographer Young for his work: still, when it came to sensitive depictions of mental health, it was Another Time.)
It was a disappointing film on its own terms, but it is not hard to feel that a great deal of the resentment towards it came because of the wild financial success of Dr Zhivago, which made Lean an outrageously wealthy man. Critics, who had clearly been waiting to pile into the director for years, sharpened their knives through a mixture of disdain for the picture and simple professional jealousy, leading to what he called “one of the most horrible experiences I have ever had” as they publicly piled into him in one disastrous encounter at the Algonquin Hotel.
Now, at a time when access to filmmakers is carefully rationed by publicists, it is impossible to imagine Lean making himself available to answer their criticism, but he swiftly regretted his bravery. The man from Time asked, “Can you please explain how the man who directed Brief Encounter can have directed this load of shit you call Ryan’s Daughter?” When, goaded to distraction, Lean yelled at the powerful New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, “You won’t be content until you’ve reduced me to making a film in black and white on 16mm,” she snapped back, “We’ll give you colour.”
As Lean’s friend, Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson put it, “The result of this devastating attack was a self-imposed exile from filmmaking for a period of fifteen years.” We can only regret the pictures he didn’t make, including a two-part epic about the Bounty mutiny. We can offer two cheers for his swansong film, A Passage to India, but it is far from his finest.
Instead, it feels like an attempt at an epic-by-numbers, even down to a Jarre score that offers sad memories of his superior work on Lawrence. Yet by the time that the director died at the age of 83 in 1991, having been knighted seven years before, his standing in the annals of international cinema was assured.
Lean the private man was another matter altogether. He was married six times, usually for short-lived and disastrous periods, and was an almost obsessive adulterer, as his combination of charm, wealth and good looks remained a potent aphrodisiac right up until the end of his life.
Yet his films are oddly devoid of sex, either because of their casting (Lawrence contains no female speaking roles) or through the characters failing to get it together. Appropriately, the best scene in A Passage to India is a Lean interpolation, in which the repressed spinster Adela Quested (Judy Davis) becomes both horrified and oddly excited by the erotic sculptures in an abandoned temple.
The director had troubled, distant relationships with his son Peter and grandchildren, apparently preferring the makeshift family life of his film collaborators to his own relatives, and his fixation on perfectionism and detail could make him a fearsome taskmaster. Famously, he waited a year for the perfect storm to erupt before filming a pivotal scene in Ryan’s Daughter, which sent production six months over schedule.
Whilst Lean has the enviable accomplishment of having seven of his films in the BFI’s list of the hundred top British films — even more impressively, Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia and Great Expectations were voted the second, third and fifth — it is salutary to wonder why he doesn’t have the cult-like reputation of some of his peers. The main reason is because his films are relatively straightforward narratively and cinematically, eschewing the tricksiness of Kubrick or latter-day Hitchcock.
In this they reflected their director’s personality, of a hard-working professional who was often exasperated by the apparent inability of actors or crew to do their job as well and conscientiously as he was doing his. This in turn led to estrangements and arguments and fallings-out, which were gleefully reported by a press only too keen to find fault with Lean: hence the deluge of criticism that overwhelmed Ryan’s Daughter.
Still, as O’Toole later said, “I did my degree in Lean.” The director’s influence on other filmmakers, actors and anyone who loves cinema will persist as long as the art form survives. When audiences leave The Odyssey, undoubtedly bowled over by the picture that they have just watched, they should know that this kind of epic filmmaking — endangered though it undoubtedly is — would never have existed without the tireless and gutsy determination of a man from Croydon who saw the potential, like Nolan, to dream a little bigger.
