A man born to make magic: Obituary of David Lean
So, I now have home access to PSU's online journal database subscriptions and so on. Hey, I'm paying nearly $500 for this summer course; I might as well use my library privileges for all they're worth, no? Academic journal databases are like CRACK to me, only, y'know, less harmful to the health. A lot less harmful.

So, the full text of the Guardian article derryderrydown found a quote from before.

Here is the quote and associated context:

OVER the years [Lawrence of Arabia] fared less well, however, with Lawrence specialists complaining that the film played fast and loose with the chronology of the Arabian campaign; and that the film's homosexualisation of Lawrence was at odds with what they believed to be the real man's asexuality and/or fear of sex.

Lean dismissed these criticisms airily. He contended - with some justification - that the movie was historically accurate so far as the truly important questions were concerned. As to the suggestion that the film was pervasively homoerotic, he said: 'Yes. Of course it is. Throughout. Lawrence was very, if not entirely, homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time: Lawrence and Omar, Lawrence and the Arab boys.'

*does the happy vindicated slasher dance of JOY*



Copyright 1991 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London)

April 17, 1991

LENGTH: 2419 words

HEADLINE: A man born to make magic: Obituary of David Lean

BYLINE: By JONATHAN YARDLEY

BODY:

SIR DAVID LEAN was one of the legendary figures of postwar film. For The Bridge On The River Kwai and Lawrence Of Arabia he won Academy Awards as Best Director, and from Doctor Zhivago he made more money than all his other films put together.

Such was the acclaim of his output he could have retired without apology years ago, but he went on working to the last, on a project to film one of Joseph Conrad's most complex novels, Nostromo.



Lean was born in 1908 in Croydon; his father was senior partner in a London firm of accountants, his mother at the tail end of a Birmingham industrial dynasty. They were practising Quakers, to whom films and film people were sinful, but less rigid in their orthodoxy than most: last year he recalled going with his father to see either The Thief Of Baghdad or The Three Musketeers. 'I became absolutely dotty about the movies, and I used to spend all my money going in to the ninepennyseats' Lean was about 10 when a pivotal moment took place: One of his uncles gave him a Brownie box camera.

'You usually didn't give a boy a camera until he was 16 or 17 in those days. It was a huge compliment, and I succeeded at it. I used to print and develop my films. It was my great hobby. It was the only thing I was good at, and I loved it.'

When his formal education ended at 19 - he was hopeless in school, and university was not considered - his father suggested he should work in his office. So Lean put on bowler and striped trousers and took the train each day into London: he stuck it for a year.

Then providence arrived in the form of an aunt, the wife of the same uncle who had given him the Brownie. Young Lean came home from the office one day and was told by his mother that the visiting aunt had suggested that, as film magazines rather than accountancy journals littered the lounge, he should go into films.

For Lean, barely 20 years old, it was a moment of revelation. He recalled: 'It was almost as though I'd been hit in the face; it was a shock to me. I suppose it had the attraction of the forbidden. It may seem odd today, when everybody thinks they should be directors, but I thought: My God, why not?'

The Quaker in his father was appalled. But a two-week trial was arranged for Lean through a friend who had a studio connection. He was to carry tea and do errands, without pay; if he was taken on, it would be at a pound a week. He got the job as camera assistant, and hung around at all hours, insinuating himself into the favor of cameramen and projectionists and directors, learning the business from the bottom up.

Everywhere he looked, there were lessons to be learned. As he recalled last year: 'I sneaked onto the set and there were Charlie Laughton and the director, apparently fighting. They were pushing each other about, and Charlie was puffing and blowing, and then he said, 'Right! I'm ready!' and the man dashed behind the camera and said: 'Action!' This of course was the way that Charlie got into a part.'

Not long after his arrival at the studio, Lean discovered his true vocation. A projectionist who had taken a liking to him said: 'Come look at the cut stuff.' He rolled the camera, and I saw on the screen the rough cut of the film I'd worked on, and it was magic - it still is magic, cutting.' Then sound came in, and the cutting process became all the more intricate and important, for in those days the soundtrack and the picture were on different films that had to be synchronized:

'I had worked on a two- or three-reel short. At the end of the film the director was absolutely crestfallen because he didn't know how to synchronize the picture for sound. The one man in the studio who knew how was the editor of the Gaumont newsreel. He said to this director, 'Look, I can spare you an hour.' At the end of it I'd picked up how to do it and the director hadn't. So I literally cut the picture.'

It was not until 1942 that Lean got his first director's credit: as co-director, with Noel Coward, of In Which We Serve. Coward, having no experience in films, had asked a number of people in the business to recommend the best technician around: it was Lean. Their partnership began uncertainly - when Lean insisted on co-director's credit, Coward's assistant allegedly snapped, 'Who's ever heard of David Lean?' - but Coward was so pleased with the movie he promised Lean every script he wrote from then on.

So for a time Lean became, in effect, Coward's personal director. He made, with full director's credit, This Happy Breed (1944), a drama of English family life; Blithe Spirit (1945), a tart drawing-room comedy; and, most significantly, Brief Encounter (1945), a heartbreakingly bittersweet romance.

BRIEF Encounter established Lean as not merely a director but one of a certain style. Shot in black and white, it anticipates motifs that recur both in his next films and in his later, more famous, colour films: trains, gray nocturnal scenes, panoramas of urban rooftops, achingly romantic music (in this case, at Coward's suggestion, Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto), the pain and elusiveness of love.

The film was a great hit. No doubt Lean could have gone on with Coward for years, but for all the ease with which the two worked together, there was a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between them: Coward was a word man, Lean a picture man.

'I like movies, you see,' he explained. 'It's a visual medium, and I love doing action scenes. That's why I'm very often said to be slow, because the expensive stuff is action.'

One year later, in 1946, he announced himself as storyteller in pictures. In the opening scene of his Great Expectations, which 45 years later is still perhaps the finest of all Dickens dramatisations, he introduces Pip and Magwitch in a setting and atmosphere at once terrifying and beautiful, in which pictures rather than words draw the audience in.

The film, Lean's favourite among his early works,contains numerous dramatic visual images, vivid scenes both dramatic and comic, and several fine performances. It also contains, as do several of his films, a sanitised conclusion. Where Dickens leaves Pip and Estella friends but nothing more, Lean sets them on the road to romance. About this, as about his other softened endings, Lean was unapologetic: 'I thought the end of the novel was a kind of letdown. I don't mind going to see a movie and coming out on the street highly moved, but I don't like going out on the street and feeling depressed. I love tragedy because it rises - good, real tragedy - to a terrific high and you leave elevated.'

Tragedy not being Lean's milieu, he preferred to end his films on a pleasing, if not necessarily uplifting, note. This he was able to do in his next film, an adaptation of Oliver Twist (1948), notable for its depiction of Dickensian London and for its daring portrayal of Fagin by Alec Guinness, who over the years appeared in six of Lean's films.

Lean seemed at this point to enter a period of drift. Then, uncharacteristically, he made a comedy: Hobson's Choice (1954), starring Charles Laughton. Lean's comic touch was consistently underrated by his critics, as this deft and oddly tender film illustrates.

Soon after finishing Summertime (1955), a pleasant, if inconsequential film, he had a call from Sam Spiegel, a Hollywood producer with a reputation as a difficult man but also as the force behind some of the better movies of the period. Spiegel had acquired rights to a slender, rather didactically anti- war novel called The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Lean read the novel and admired it; he could see in it the raw ingredients for what would become the hallmark of his style - a literate spectacle featuring distinguished actors - in its tale of an obscure British colonel who becomes obsessed with building a monumental bridge for the Japanese enemy.

The film, released in 1957, won an Oscar for Lean. Audiences in the 1980s who have seen it only on a television screen can barely guess at the authority with which Lean used the Cinemascope screen to convey both the terrible heat of tropical Sri Lanka (where the film was shot) and the intense private warfare between the British colonel, played by Alec Guinness, and the Japanese commandant, played by Sessue Hayakawa. But even on television, the intelligence of Lean's direction and the brilliance of his cast are undiminished. The Bridge on the River Kwai was that rarity, a film based on a serious novel that is superior to the original.

The film made Lean's reputation, but it did not make him as much money as he claimed he had coming to him and it taught him a painful lesson in the realities of Hollywood. Lean later claimed that Spiegel cheated him out of his rightful part in the credits (he had had a major hand in the script but the screen-writing Oscar went to Pierre Boulle) and of his full share at the box office.

Still, in these early years of their association, Lean was fond of Spiegel. 'Look,' he explained recently, 'in those days I liked Sam very much. He really did love movies. I had a lot of respect for those old villains, like Harry Cohn, who was a dreadful man in his way. They loved movies, they really did. They had a kind of size; and now, you know, producers don't really like movies. They're just straight businessmen, and all they think of is profit.'

So when the time came to begin his next project, Lean didn't hesitate to ally himself once again with Spiegel. He wanted to make a film about Gandhi, but for a variety of reasons it didn't work. Lean was discouraged, until Spiegel suggested they do a film about T. E. Lawrence and the Arabian campaign in the first world war.

It was, for Lean, the perfect idea: a highly dramatic story, set in a landscape of incomparable beauty and mystery, and focused upon a character at once formidably heroic and deeply flawed. Add to that Lean's fascination with, and ambivalent attitude toward the Empire, and the story of Lawrence of Arabia offered just about everything he could have wished for.

He made the most of it. Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962, remained the favourite among his 'big' pictures, and with good reason. It was his first collaboration with the writer Robert Bolt and it brought together the finest group of actors ever to assemble in one of Lean's films: Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole (in his film debut). The film won seven Oscars and quickly acquired an international cult following.

OVER the years it fared less well, however, with Lawrence specialists complaining that the film played fast and loose with the chronology of the Arabian campaign; and that the film's homosexualisation of Lawrence was at odds with what they believed to be the real man's asexuality and/or fear of sex.

Lean dismissed these criticisms airily. He contended - with some justification - that the movie was historically accurate so far as the truly important questions were concerned. As to the suggestion that the film was pervasively homoerotic, he said: 'Yes. Of course it is. Throughout. Lawrence was very, if not entirely, homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time: Lawrence and Omar, Lawrence and the Arab boys.'

Lawrence was not much helped by Maurice Jarre's score, the superficial prettiness of which quickly becomes grating. Jarre, however, became Lean's house composer thereafter.

Lawrence was the end of the Lean-Spiegel alliance: two films, 14 Academy Awards, international applause - and bruised feelings that never really healed. When next Lean went into production it was with Carlo Ponti, and the film was Doctor Zhivago.

Zhivago, released in 1965, was long and in patches dull, but like Kwai it was more successful than the book from which it was adapted. Lean made sense of Pasternak's confused plot, toned down his rhetoric and filmed a number of truly spectacular crowd scenes, though he could not resist the seductions of Jarre and the insistent repetition of Lara's Theme.

The film made millions for its principals but, as so often happens with huge popular successes, it was slated by the critics. The worst notices, though, were yet to come. Bolt had it in mind to do an adaptation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but the story of an French doctor's adulterous wife was transformed into that of an Irish schoolteacher's adulterous wife, Ryan's Daughter. The film was released in 1970, and the critics gave it a pasting.

The failure of the film was devastating to Lean. For a time he simply walked away from movie-making. Then, in the mid-seventies, he read a book that purported to be the true story of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty: 'I read it and I thought, this could be marvellous,' he said. 'Captain Bligh is the hero. Robert Bolt and I had the best script we'd ever written, and it all collapsed because of Dino De Laurentiis.' The Bounty story took two years of Lean's life, and came to nothing. It was the greatest disappointment of his career.

Yet, characteristically, he recovered from it in a short time, and in the early eighties began work on A Passage To India. Lean wrote the screenplay himself. It was an elegant piece of work, as was the finished film, released in 1984: intelligent, handsomely acted, beautiful to look at - and, with one crucial exception, singularly faithful to Forster's book.

That exception comes, as it often does in a Lean movie, at the end. Forster's novel closes as the Indian doctor, Aziz, parts company with the teacher, Fielding; the two men are unable to be true friends so long as India remains subjugated.

But in Lean's film the two part affectionately, their friendship restored, bitter thoughts cast aside. To the suggestion that this violates the intent of Forster's masterwork, Lean was abruptly dismissive: 'Look. This novel was written hot on the movement for Indian independence. I think the end's a lot of hogwash, so far as a movie is concerned. It's highly symbolic. They both liked each other very much, those two men. It's finished, that. India's free. It may have been relevant at the time, but I can't expect an audience to pick that up now.'

For an essentially literary movie, A Passage To India was a popular success. It won two Academy Awards - neither for Lean himself - and was followed by his knighthood.

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David Lean, born March 25, 1908; died April 16, 1991