Barnaby Thompson's David Lean Documentary: A Bold Portrait of a Visionary Director

Barnaby Thompson’s thoroughly exhilarating and enjoyable documentary about movie director David Lean is proof of the old maxim – fortune favours the bold. Lean’s career feels like more than ever like a dashing military adventure; like Napoleon or the young Winston Churchill in Sudan or, indeed, TE Lawrence in his greatest film, Lawrence of Arabia. It involved brilliantly improvising strategy in hostile terrain and imperiously imposing his command over troops who had to be subdued by force of will, as well as a mastery of the theatre involved in leadership, displaying an almost hammy sense of one’s own skill in oratory and the eroticism of giving orders.

Watching this documentary, you can appreciate how Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence is in many ways a comic, absurd figure – dressed up in borrowed and culturally appropriated Arab robes – but one that no one would dare mock. Perhaps Lean, in his director’s robes, could see what his subordinates wouldn’t, or couldn’t; he could see his own faults, and suffer from impostor syndrome and secret doubts. The movie repeatedly tells us that he could be impossibly bad-tempered and dictatorial on set – but there is no film or audio record of this, just Lean himself in various interviews being endlessly charming and self-deprecating. (Although I suspect that patrician accent perhaps reverted a little, at times, to something a bit rougher under duress.)

Perhaps this film doesn’t place enough emphasis on the enormous importance of music in Lean’s greatest pictures, including the swirling themes of Maurice Jarre in Lawrence of Arabia and his adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. But it does give us an intriguing and richly watchable history, supported by an impressive gallery of directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass, Celine Song and Lean superfan Steven Spielberg at various ages in archive footage. It shows a deeply driven man, propelled by his vocational dedication to the cinema as well as by his own romantic and sexual restlessness: compulsively seducing, marrying and remarrying an extraordinary catalogue of overlapping wives and girlfriends. This official record is very possibly just the tip of an unknown iceberg of sexual transgression.

Thompson makes a convincing case that this element of Lean’s character is down to his father, Francis Lean, who walked out on the family and never looked back. Lean did the same to his own wife and child, and the themes of romance, temptation and infidelity in his movies show up all the more starkly. He also wanted his father’s approval, but never got it; incredibly, his father never watched a single one of his films.

Starting out as an editor, a job that perhaps gave him a taste for overall control, Lean graduated to the role of Noël Coward’s co-director (really sole director in all but name) on the wartime crowd-pleaser In Which We Serve. He became a superb studio director on the the Coward-scripted romantic melodrama Brief Encounter (Gerwig is a shrewd critic here, noting its mixture of innocence and eroticism) and then the great Dickens movies Great Expectation and Oliver Twist, cleverly using complex and beautifully constructed sets. It was with his 1955 Venice-set film Summertime that he fatefully branched out into working on location abroad, to which another spur was having to become a tax exile; it was a nomadic life in which, hilariously, he brought his Rolls-Royce with him. (I wonder what’s happened to Lean’s Roller now?)

Emboldened by a tumultuous creative-financial bromance with producer Sam Spiegel, Lean began his great era of vast epics, shot outside in the real world: The Bridge on the River Kwai, shot in Sri Lanka; Lawrence of Arabia, shot in Jordan; and Doctor Zhivago, shot in Spain – doubling, bizarrely, for Russia. But as the 1960s came to an end, and tastes changed in favour of the new wave counterculture, Lean found himself out of fashion. Zhivago was derided by some, though colossal box office success silenced the nay-sayers. His Irish drama Ryan’s Daughter was jeered at and the film was, incidentally, a vessel for one of the most shaming moments in the history of film criticism: a hanging jury of self-important New York critics, including Pauline Kael, who summoned Lean to a lunch at the Algonquin hotel, for the sole purpose of pillorying and embarrassing him.

Lean’s career ended on a high note: his adaptation of EM Forster’s A Passage to India was rapturously received, although here perhaps Thompson’s documentary, at the risk of censorious cultural correctness, might have discussed the unease of casting Alec Guinness in brownface as Prof Godbole. Notwithstanding, this film takes us through Lean’s thrilling life and times at the pace of a cavalry charge; it is a very enjoyable gallop.