DoctorZhivago
DIRECTED BY: DAVID LEAN - WRITTEN BY: BORIS PASTERNAK (Novel), ROBERT BOLT (Screenplay)
STARRING: JULIE CHRISTIE, OMAR SHARIF, GERALDINE CHAPLIN, ROD STEIGER, ALEC GUINESS, RALPH RICHARDSON
AWARDS: BEST WRITING, BEST ART DIRECTION, BEST CINEMATOGAPHY, BEST COSTUME DESIGN, BEST MUSICAL SCORE
RELEASED: I965

octor Zhivago, heavy with historical and symbolic content, is a great film with top performances and visuals. A dramatic retelling of Russia's tormented history before during and after the Communist revolution of 1917; it could have easily died a hundred deaths; most directors wouldn't even attempt it; but the performances were skilled, the writing the best; and Director David Lean was in his prime; he could tell a story in one scene that some filmmakers couldn't tell in two hours. And Dr Zhivago wasn't honored with an Academy Award for best cinematography and for Art Direction without reason; the film is one of the finest examples of visual storytelling.

The protagonist is roughly modeled on Anton Chekhov, Russia's best playwright of the late-nineteenth century, who was also a medical doctor. Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is a poet and medical doctor, and one of the visual ways Lean hints at Yuri's poetic soul is by showing him occasionally gazing at the moon or some ethereal clouds, while other men's gaze is always fixed resolutely on where their next meal is coming from. It sounds corny, but it actually works to give us a feeling that here is one man with an inner life. Omar Sharif's liquid dark eyes look as if they’re thinking large thoughts, even if in real life Sharif loved to gamble and play cards. But as a medical doctor and poet in the film, he gives life in two ways; skills which will be needed greatly in the hard times to come.

The real star of the film is Russia, as symbolized by the lovely Lara (Julie Christie). At first she's seduced by Victor Komorovsky, a skeptic without heart, who seems to have connections everywhere; a Russian Babbitt. After being abandoned by him, it's the turn of the idealist, Pasha (Tom Courtney) to woo and wed her. But after a few years of marriage, neither is unhappy about being separated by Russia's entry into World War I. In Courtney's later appearance in the film, his casting in the role can be seen as a weakness in the film.

Lara becomes a nurse for the thousands war-wounded in a land of never-ending sorrows, and at a field hospital she and Yuri (who is a doctor is in the same hospital) become lovers - in spirit, if not consummated.

After the war, Zhivago comes home to a post-revolution Moscow. Squatters have taken over his town house except for one room, and give him the evil eye as a bourgeois. They remind him pointedly that he was living in a fine townhouse while they lived in huts. He agrees, but it seems he'll never be able to convince them of his political purity. Zhivago has an ace-in-the-hole however; his brother is a general in the Red Army; the scene in which the general arrives just in time and snaps his fingers to make the squatters disappear dramatically demonstrates the power the Communist Party now has over the people. Czar Nicholas Romanov is dead; Long Live the New Czar (Lenin).

That story alone would make a good picture, but we're dealing with the filmed version of a Russian novel; so we're only at the halfway mark. The General warns Yuri that his published poetry is considered to be politically incorrect - too personal, and therefore bourgeois (which parallels Boris Pasternak's own political troubles). Yuri must now take the Trans-Siberian railroad to the far eastern town of Yuriatin to hide himself.

Again, this train odyssey across Russia could almost be a film on its own. In a beautiful scene, the train steams and whistles into a station where thousands are sleeping on the tracks in the dim of pre-dawn; as if an industrial monster is calling them to their doom. Zhivago and family board a heavily guarded train, which includes a detachment of labor conscripts — including a wonderfully hotheaded anarchist intellectual, Kostoyed (the wonderful Klaus Kinski of Aguirre fame) — and a large contingent of Red Guards soldiers. In a nicely framed shot, Kostoyed watches an old couple snuggling for warmth on the floor of the boxcar; he stares and grins; unable to comprehend that love is the only thing that now really counts - as certain death awaits him in a Siberian labor camp.

Zhivago's family arrives at the outskirts of Yuriatin, where Yuri discovers, in yet another of perhaps too many coincidences, that Lara is the local librarian. After being forced to serve with the local Red Partisans for nearly two years as a medical officer (he saves life; others take it), during which he is forced to observe brutal acts of war, Zhivago eventually deserts; he staggers through the winter snow to Lara's home in Yuriatin where the two renew their relationship, but Komarovsky arrives from out of nowhere one night and informs them that they are being watched by the Communists due to Lara's former marriage to Strelnikov (Tom Courteney's new revolutionary name; roughly a sort of Stalin manque; but who is now out of favor.

Komarovsky offers Yuri and Lara his help in escaping, but they refuse; the two go with Lara's daughter, Katya, to the Varykino estate of the Zhivago family, which has been left open and is frozen inside. Yuri begins writing the "Lara" poems, which would later make him famous but incur government displeasure, because writing about personal feelings in the new USSR is suspect. He writes at night, to the accompaniment of a pack of wolves howling in the woods.

There's no room for poets and artists like Zhivago in the new USSR, unless they tow the party line. A new hell has been created, led by mass murderers like Stalin, which makes the old Russia seem like a paradise lost (although, to be sure, it wasn't). Only the new Soviet Man is left in a vast slave labor camp; the film documents the death of the soul of a great country, but offers us the sugar pill of the romance of Lara and Yuri to put in it on a human scale and help us absorb a the history. The film also abounds in scenes of natural splendor, to remind us that love and beauty must always exist; we have to have hope.

If all this rehashing of plot leaves you confused, you're not alone. Dr Zhivago isn't an intimate film. It's a story as big as Russia, with characters that are the many sides of Russia, on the scale of Tolstoy's War and Peace. The author of the original book, Boris Pasternak, lived through most of the history depicted in the film, in legitimate fear of his life; although not necessarily at the same time the film depicts. He wasn't writing about something he heard about, he was writing from personal experience. It's a tale of titanic forces in a huge land; of love and loss, and the sadness of so much human suffering. If you have any interest in history, it's a magnificent work of art and a monumental piece of storytelling. It's what Gone With the Wind tried to be for the USA; but this film succeeds with grandeur and grace

scenes from the film: Trailer ---- Zhivago & Laura ---- "Lara's Theme" Music ---- "The personal life is dead"

Author Boris Pasternak

Notes:
(a) Pasternak spent the summer of 1917 living in the steppe country near Saratov, where he fell in love. This passion resulted in the collection My Sister Life, which he wrote over a period of three months, but was too embarrassed to publish for four years because of its unusual style. When it finally was published in 1921, the book revolutionized Russian poetry. It made Pasternak the model for younger poets in the USSR.
(b) During the great purges of the later 1930s, Pasternak became progressively disillusioned with Communist ideals. Reluctant to publish his own poetry (which could result in death), he turned to translating Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear), Goethe (Faust), Rilke (Requiem für eine Freundin), Paul Verlaine, and others.
(c) As the book was frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled abroad by his friend Isaiah Berlin and published in an Italian translation by the Italian publishing house Feltrinelli in 1957. The novel became an instant sensation, and was subsequently translated and published in many non-Soviet bloc countries. In 1958 and 1959, the American edition spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times' bestseller list
(d) Pasternak was named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 for Dr Zhivago. He did not accept the prize, as he felt he would not be let back in the USSR if he once left.
(e) Omar Sharif loved the novel, and when he heard David Lean was making a film adaptation, he requested to be cast in the role of Pasha (which ultimately went to Tom Courtenay). Sharif was quite surprised when Lean suggested that he play Zhivago himself. (Peter O'Toole, star of Lawrence, was Lean's original choice for Zhivago, but turned the part down; Max Von Sydow and Paul Newman were also considered.) Rod Steiger was cast as Komarovsky after Marlon Brando and James Mason turned the part down. Audrey Hepburn was considered for Tonya, while Robert Bolt lobbied for Albert Finney to play Pasha.
(f) Since the book was banned in the Soviet Union, the movie was filmed largely in Spain, with the entire Moscow set being built from scratch outside of Madrid. Most of the scenes covering Zhivago and Lara's service in World War I were filmed in Soria, as was the Varykino estate. Some of the winter sequences were filmed in Finland, mostly landscape scenes, and Yuri's escape from the Partisans. Winter scenes of the family traveling to Yuriatin by rail were filmed in Canada.
(g) The "ice-palace" at Varykino was filmed in Soria as well, in a house filled with frozen beeswax. The charge of the Partisans across the frozen lake was filmed in Spain too; a cast iron sheet was placed over a dried river-bed, and fake snow (mostly marble dust) was added on top. Most of the winter scenes were filmed in warm temperatures, sometimes of up to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
(h) The film was banned in the Soviet Union. It was not shown in Russia until 1994.

Some of these notes are derived from Wikipedia's entry for Dr. Zhivago.