David Lean: A Centennial Celebration
Date: Fri, July 4th 2008 - Mon, September 1st 2008External Link: Event Website
Event Tags: The Movies
Location: AFI Silver Theatre & Cultural Center
DAVID LEAN: A CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
July 4 - September 1
This year marks the centennial of the birth of one of the cinema's greatest filmmakers, David Lean. AFI Silver presents a selection of Lean's finest work, from his early, intimate British films to his sprawling international co-productions that, in their scope, ambition and expansive humanism, came to define the word "epic."
AFI Member passes will be accepted at all screenings in the David Lean: A Centennial Celebration series.
OLIVER TWIST
Dickens's extravagant vision of Victorian London is perfectly balanced by superb performances and Lean's fierce grip on the sprawling narrative. Guy Green and John Bryan lend an Expressionist look to Fagin's hellish underworld and Alec Guinness, in his second major role, gives a finely drawn theatrical--if controversial--depiction of Fagin. Lean was always eager to open a film without dialogue and here he outdoes himself with a tour-de-force sequence of Oliver's pregnant mother battling against a storm. (Note courtesy BFI)
DIR/SCR David Lean; SCR Stanley Haynes, based on the novel by Charles Dickens; PROD Ronald Neame. UK, 1948, b&w, 116 min. NOT RATED
Friday, July 4, 4:30; Monday, July 7, 7:00; Wednesday, July 9, 4:30
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
David Lean's international reputation was established with this study of unfulfilled passion and guiltÑthemes that were to recur in his later work. Critically debated, mocked, referenced and remade, this account of an unconsummated affair between a middle-class housewife (Celia Johnson) and a doctor (Trevor Howard), forced to meet at a railway station, retains a tight emotional grip on any contemporary audience. (Note courtesy BFI)
DIR David Lean; PROD Noël Coward. UK, 1945, b&w, 86 min. NOT RATED
Friday, July 11, 5:00; Sunday, July 13, 3:00; Wednesday, July 16, 5:00; Thursday, July 17, 5:00
BLITHE SPIRIT
David Lean's first comedy, scripted by frequent collaborator Noel Coward from his stage hit, stars Rex Harrison as a successful and cheerfully cynical novelist whose marital bliss is interrupted by the mischievous ghost of his first wife, visible to him but invisible to everyone else. The simple but effective special effects, all the more impressive in Technicolor, won an Oscar. (Note courtesy BFI)
DIR/SCR David Lean; SCR Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Noël Coward, based on his play; PROD Noël Coward. UK, 1945, color, 96 min. NOT RATED
Saturday, July 12, 3:00; Monday, July 14, 5:00; Tuesday, July 15, 5:00
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Undoubtedly one of the finest Dickens adaptations, the film is studded with memorable set-pieces, from young Pip's hair-raising encounter with Magwitch in the graveyard to the eerie Gothic fantasy world of Miss Havisham. The Oscar-winning team of cinematographer Guy Green and production designer John Bryan bring Dickens's settings to vivid, indelible life--as does the terrific cast, including Alec Guinness, Jean Simmons and John Mills as the grown up Pip. (Note courtesy BFI)
DIR David Lean; PROD Noël Coward. UK, 1945, b&w, 86 min. NOT RATED
Friday, July 18, 4:30; Saturday, July 19, 3:00; Tuesday, July 22, 4:30; Thursday, July 24, 4:30
SUMMERTIME
After years spent saving for it, American schoolteacher Katharine Hepburn takes her dream vacation to Venice, Italy. Shopping for antiques, she meets handsome art dealer Rossano Brazzi in Piazza San Marco, and while she discovers he's not above dealing fake antiquities to tourists, falls for his charms nonetheless. Lean's sensitive handling of the romance between Hepburn and Brazzi, who both deliver top performances, is combined with a powerful sense of place provided by the Venice locations--it plays like BRIEF ENCOUNTER transported to one of the exotic locations that would typify Lean's later works.
DIR David Lean; SCR H.E. Bates, Arthur Laurents and David Lean; PROD Ilya Lopert. UK/US, 1955, color, 100 min. NOT RATED
Sunday, July 27, 1:00; Tuesday, July 29, 4:45; Wednesday, July 30, 4:45
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
"Madness . . . madness." Burma, 1943: ordered by Japanese prison camp commandant Sessue Hayakawa to construct a bridge, British POW Colonel Alec Guinness at first refuses but then acquiesces, reasoning that the undertaking will provide a morale boost for his men. But in his obsession with detail and pride in his work, Guinness loses sight of the fact that the bridge will serve a deadly purpose--the transport of Japanese munitions. It falls to American escapee William Holden and British Major Jack Hawkins to lead a mission back to the camp to destroy Guinness's folly. A powerful portrait of war and madness, and winner of seven Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Guinness.
DIR David Lean; SCR based on the Pierre Boulle novel Le pont de la rivière Kwai; PROD Sam Spiegel. UK/US, 1957, color, 161 min. RATED PG
Friday, August 1, 4:00; Saturday, August 2, 4:20; Sunday, August 3, 2:30; Tuesday, August 5, 3:45; Thursday, August 7, 3:45
In 70mm!
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
David Lean's signature achievement, winning seven Oscars in 1962 including Best Picture, and the film that made a then-unknown Peter O'Toole an international star (and for which O'Toole would earn the first of his eight Oscar nominations for Best Actor--amazingly, none of which he won!). O'Toole is riveting as T.E. Lawrence, the legendary British officer who rallied the Arabs against Turkish invaders during World War I, and Lean's film, a two-year undertaking shot entirely on location, is one of the true masterpieces of 70mm photography. With Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif.
DIR David Lean; SCR Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson; PROD Robert A. Harris and Sam Spiegel. UK, 1962, color, 216 min. RATED PG
Friday, August 8, 3:00; Saturday, August 9, 3:00; Sunday, August 10, 3:00; Monday, August 11, 3:00; Tuesday, August 12, 3:00, 7:30; Wednesday; August 13, 2:30; Thursday, August 14, 3:00
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
Ten nominations and five Oscar wins for Lean's adaptation of the Pasternak classic recounting the time before, during and after the Russian revolution, as experienced by soulful doctor-poet Omar Sharif and recounted later by his half-brother, Soviet Army officer Alec Guinness. Sharif navigates a difficult love triangle between his aristocratic wife Geraldine Chaplin and new love Julie Christie, a nurse who has suffered heartbreak as the former lover of self-righteous revolutionary Tom Courtenay, and dishonor at the hands of politician/rapist Rod Steiger.
DIR David Lean; SCR Robert Bolt, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak; PROD Carlo Ponti. US, 1965, color, 197 min. RATED PG-13
Friday, August 15, 3:00; Saturday, August 16, 3:30; Sunday, August 17, 3:30; Monday, August 18, 3:00; Tuesday, August 19, 3:00; Wednesday, August 20, 3:00; Thursday, August 21, 3:00
RYAN'S DAUGHTER
The third collaboration between Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt (after LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO), again places complex, even contradictory character psychology against a backdrop of world-changing historical events. A British-occupied village in 1916 Ireland is scandalized when word gets out that Sarah Miles, the much younger wife of staid schoolteacher Robert Mitchum (puzzlingly miscast, but slyly effective), is carrying on an affair with British officer Christopher Jones. Despite hysteria among the townspeople, Mitchum's reaction is to patiently let the fire burn out. But when Miles's father turns informer for the British, the personal and the political become entwined.
DIR David Lean; SCR Robert Bolt; PROD Anthony Havelock-Allan. UK, 1970, color, 195 min. RATED R
Saturday, August 23, 3:00; Monday, August 25, 7:30
A PASSAGE TO INDIA
Nominated for 11 Oscars, Lean's first film after a 14-year hiatus was also his last, a suitably grand gesture of both return and farewell from the filmmaker who had by this time become synonymous with epic cinema. In 1920s colonial India, headstrong Brit Judy Davis befriends local doctor Victor Bannerjee, but--after she suffers a mysterious spell while touring the mystical Marabar caves with him--later accuses him of rape. Lean exquisitely realizes E.M. Forster's classic novel for the screen--meticulous in its period detail, spectacular in its setting, and faithful to Forster's implicit, allusive criticism of colonialism.
DIR/SCR David Lean; SCR based on the novel by E.M. Forster and the play by Santha Rama Rau; PROD John Brabourne and Richard B. Goodwin. UK/US, 1984, color, 163 min. RATED PG
Friday, August 29 3:30; Sunday, August 31, 1:00; Monday, September 1, 1:00