Background
Lean, David was born on March 25, 1908 in Croydon, United Kingdom. Son of late Francis William le Blount Lean and Helena Annie Tangye.
director editor producer screenwriter
Lean, David was born on March 25, 1908 in Croydon, United Kingdom. Son of late Francis William le Blount Lean and Helena Annie Tangye.
Educated at Leighton Park School. Lean was a Quaker by upbringing, not allowed to visit the cinema as a boy. After a spell in accountancy, he joined the film industry and rose from tea boy, to clapper/loader, to cutting room assistant, to assistant director, to editor on Movietone News.
In 1934 he became an editor and worked on Escape Me Never (35, Paul Czinner); Pygmalion (38, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard); Major Barbara (41, Gabriel Pascal); 49th Parallel (41, Michael Powell); and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (42, Powell). His chance to direct arose in 1942 when he handled the action sequences of Which We Sene.
Whatever happened began in the 1950s. The Sound Burner was an interesting subject, but a dull, inconclusive film; Hobson's Choice was woefully slow and unfunny, yet seemingly bewitched by its own period recreation. Then came Bridge on the River Kwai, a strange mixture of conventional British heroics and antiwar message lit up with the Hash of Burmese jungles, schoolboy irony, and those little gods for best picture, best director, and actor. Lean was a romantic about himself, and those rewards may have persuaded him that he was too grand for small things. It was the Selznick syndrome.
The pictures that followed—Lawrence, Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter—seem to me examples of size and “the visual” eclipsing sense. No matter the version, it is so hard to discern what Lawrence is about—it seems afflicted with very English intimations that the desert is a place for miracles; Zhivago is a syrupy romance, without poetry or plausibility; and Ryan's Daughter may be as bad a film as any “great" director ever made.
From 1952 to 1991, he made eight films—and in only one of them - Lawrence—is the spectacle sufficient to mask the hollow rhetoric of the scripts. But the Lean before 1952 made eight films in ten years that are lively, stirring, and an inspiration—they make you want to go out and make movies, they are so in love with the screen’s power and the combustion in editing. Brief Encounter is slight and cozy, a bit of an exercise, but it works on screen—Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson are lovers to shame the posing of Dr. Zhivago. Oliver Twist is ravishing still: magnificent in its period recreation, its rank eitv, and its evil; it is greedily edited and beautifully designed (with a lot of Russian influence showing), and shot in sootv shadow and imperiled light, with great performances from Guinness, Robert Newton, Kay Walsh, and John Howard Davies (all supporting parts, as it were—Lean was never as relaxed with lead roles). Great Expectations is not as good, but it's still worthwhile. The Passionate Friends is the film most deserving recovery—an intricate triangle story, with Howard, Claude Rains, and Ann Todd (who was Lean’s wife then—she followed Kav Walsh). Todd is also the Scottish poisoner in the excellent Madeleine.
Those early films have pace, flourish, and a modesty of scale (even if Oliver Twist feels big). And then, slowly, Lean became the prisoner of big pictures, a great eve striving to show off a large mind. It will take a very good biography to explain that process.
Fellow British Film Institute.
Lean’s death was nearly a state occasion for many in British film. His reputation stayed very high, despite inactivity, despite even the sad disorder of A Passage to India, a film markedly less assured than the work of James Ivory. Lean became lost in the sense of his own pictorial grandeur. The Passionate Friends and Madeleine, for instance, stand up so much better than those battleship pictures that came later. Not even the rerelease of Lawrence—beautiful, and with some lost material restored—could furnish any sense of ideas behind it.
By the time of his death, he was a knight and a famous master. It was taken as tragic that obscure circumstances had prevented Lean from doing his versions of the Bounty story and of Conrad’s Nostromo. He had made a sail hash of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, yet somehow people persuaded themselves that he could have handled Conrad’s more difficult book. It is worth stressing that Lean was a charming egotist, endlessly handsome, and in pursuit of women, and achingly hopeful when he spoke. He was a spellbinder, and so it was easier for enthusiasts to miss his frequent discomfort with dialogue scenes. Lean was most striking when he could hark back to the pure narrative of silent films.
Son of Francis William le Blount Lean and Helena Annie (Tangye) L. Married Ann Todd, 1949 (divorced 1957). Married Leila Matkar, 1960 (divorced 1978).
Married Sandra Hotz, 1981 (divorced 1985). Married Sandra Cooke, 1990.