Noel Willman – Movie Musings

Julie Christie and Omar Sharif are star cross’d lovers in Lean’s epic but flawed Doctor Zhivago

Director: David Lean

Cast: Omar Sharif (Dr Yuri Zhivago), Julie Christie (Lara Antipova), Geraldine Chaplin (Tonya Gromeko), Rod Steiger (Victor Komarovsky), Alec Guinness (Lt General Yevgraf Zhivago), Tom Courtenay (Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov), Siobhan McKenna (Anna Gromeko), Ralph Richardson (Alexander Gromeko), Rita Tushingham (The Girl), Bernard Kay (Bolshevik), Klaus Kinski (Amoursky), Noel Willman (Razin), Geoffrey Keen (Professor Kurt), Jack MacGowan (Petya)

Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is one of the seminal 20^th century novels. Smuggled out of the USSR after being refused publication, it became an international sensation and led directly to Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize (although the USSR insisted he turn it down). A film was only a matter of time – and who else would you call but David Lean, master of the pictorial epic, to bring the novel about the Russian Revolution to the screen. Lean – with his masterful Dickensian adaptations – was perfect in many ways but Doctor Zhivago, for me, is the least satisfying of his ‘Great Films’. It’s strangely empty and sentimental, lacking some of the novel’s strengths zeroing in on its weaknesses.

Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is training to be a Doctor in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. Married to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of his father’s old friend Gromeko (Ralph Richardson), Yuri is part scientist, part poetic free-thinker. Events throw him together with Lara (Julie Christie), a young woman whose fiancé Pasha (Tom Courtenay) has ties to the revolutionaries, while she is trapped in an abusive relationship with the amoral Komarovsky (Rod Steiger). But are all these troubles worth a hill of beans in a country about to tear itself apart?

There are many things you can’t argue with in Lean’s film. It is of course unfailingly beautiful. Ironically filmed in Fascist Spain, it’s gorgeously lensed with a luscious romanticism by Frederick Young (who won his second Oscar for a Lean film). It’s not just pictorial beauty either: Young frequently makes wonderful uses of splashes of Monet red to dapple the frame. From poppies in a field to the ubiquitous communist imagery on uniforms and walls. There are some wonderfully cool blues employed for the snow, while slashes of light pass across eyes with a gorgeous lyricism.

Romance is the name of the game, with everything working overtime to stress the star cross’d lovers plot. Maurice Jarre’s score – in particular its balalaika inspired Lara’s Theme – mixes Russian folk inspirations with an immortal sense of longing. It plays over a film that, while very long, often feels well-paced, even if (just as the novel) its episodic and at times rambling. Lean’s direction of epic events revolving around personal loves and tragedies is still exquisite in its balance between the grand and intimate. The film is wonderfully edited and a fabulous example of long-form storytelling.

So, what’s wrong with Doctor Zhivago? In a film with so much to admire, is it possible Lean and co spent years working on something only to bring the word but not the spirit to the screen? The key problems come round to Zhivago himself. This is man defined by his poetic soul. His poetry becomes a sensation after his death. His balalaika is a constant companion, and his playing of it an inherited gift (which even has major plot implications). Inexplicably, the film has not a single word of poetry in it (when it had Pasternak’s entire back catalogue to work with) and Zhivago never so much as strums the strings of his balalaika. It’s like filming Hamlet and then making him a mute.

The problem is, removing the character’s hinterland makes him a rather empty character. Zhivago is a liberal reformer, in sympathy with the revolution but not it’s methods. This should be at the heart of understanding his character, but like his poetry the film has no time for it. Instead, Zhivago is boiled down into a romantic figure, nothing more. He has no inner life at all, a blank canvas rather than an enigma.

Suddenly those long lingering shots of Sharif’s puppy-dog eyes end up carrying no real meaning. They aren’t the windows to his soul, only a big watery hole with not much at the bottom. Sharif is awkwardly miscast – and lacks the dramatic chops O’Toole bought to Lawrence – but it’s not completely his fault. His character has had his depth removed. When we see him struggling at the front, trapped on a long train ride to Siberia or forced to work with partisans, he’s not a man who seems to be considering anything, but just buffeted by fortune, neither deep or thoughtful enough to reflect on the world around him. That’s not really Pasternak’s intention.

Instead, the film boils the novel down to his plot-basics and, in doing so, removes the heart of what got the book banned in the first place. Lean misunderstood the future of Soviet Russia so much, he even chose to end the film with a romantic rainbow at the foot of a waterfall. The horrors of the civil war and the revolution are largely there briefly: a gang of deserting soldiers unceremoniously frag their officers and Zhivago frequently stares sadly at villages burned out by Whites or Reds (or both). But the film is more of a romance where events (rather than politically and social inevitability) gets in the way of the lovers – like Gone with the Revolution.

By removing the more complex elements – and the poetic language of Pasternak – you instead have the rather soapy plotline (with its contrivances and coincidences) left over. Again, it’s Hamlet taking only the events and none of the intellect or language. (And Pasternak’s novel didn’t compare with Hamlet in the first place.) Both Zhivago and Lara are shot as soft-focus lovers, with Julie Christie styled like a perfectly made-up slice of 60s glamour. It’s a grand scale, but strangely empty romance, because both characters remain unexplored and unknowable – in the end it’s hard to care for them as much as we are meant to do. For all the epic scale, small moments – such as an aging couple sharing a cuddle late at night on a train floor – carry more impact. How did the director of Brief Encounter – a romance that speaks to the ages for its empathy – produce such an epic, but empty, posture filled romance as this?

Julie Christie does fare better than Sharif – she’s a better actor, and her character has a bit more fire and depth to her. But she’s not in the picture enough, and Lean quietly undersells the terrible trauma of her eventual fate. Ironically, the smaller roles are on surer ground. Geraldine Chaplin is rather affecting as Zhivago’s wife, a dutiful and caring woman who her husband loves but is not besotted with. Ralph Richardson is witty and moving in a tailor-made role as her eccentric father. Tom Courtenay landed the films only acting Oscar nomination as the reserved and conflicted Pasha. Rod Steiger is very good as the mass of greed, selfishness and barely acknowledged shame as Komarovsky. Alec Guinness is bizarrely miscast as Sharif’s younger brother (!) but handles some of the film’s duller scenes well (Lean’s decision to have him never speak on screen except in the film’s framing device works very well).

There is a lot of good stuff in Zhivago, but this is a neutered and even slightly shallow film, that’s far more about selling a romance than it is telling a true adaptation of the themes of the novel. In Lawrence, Lean showed us multiple aspects of a conflicted personality to leave us in doubt about who he really was. In Zhivago, he just presents a rather empty person and seems unsure if he wants to use to ask who he is. The film concentrates on making the romance sweeping and easily digestible. What it doesn’t make us do is really care for them as people.

Jon Voight narrowly misses a train in The Odessa File

Director: Ronald Neame

Cast: Jon Voight (Peter Miller), Maximilian Schell (Eduard Roschmann), Maria Schell (Frau Miller), Mary Tamm (Sigi), Noel Willman (Franz Bayer), Derek Jacobi (Klaus Wenzer), Shmuel Rodensky (Simon Wiesenthal), Peter Jeffrey (David Porath), Klaus Löwitsch (Gustav Mackensen), Kurt Meisel (Alfred Oster), Günter Meisner (General Greifer)

One of the best thriller writers in the game is Frederick Forsyth. He never gets quite the credit he deserves, probably because he’s a very safe writer and he has certain character formulas which he reuses over again. But what his plots lack in depth, they more than make up for in the gripping intensity and extreme readability. A Forsyth plot barrels along and doesn’t let you rest for a minute.

The Odessa File is an adaptation of Forsyth’s journalistic style thriller, exploring the shady world of former Nazi war criminals, now hiding in new identities in positions of influence throughout the German republic. Set in 1963, Peter Miller (Jon Voight) is an idealistic young investigative journalist, who finds the diary of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor. Horrified by the stories of the Holocaust, Miller decides to hunt down the “Butcher of Riga” Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell playing a real war criminal), a renegade Nazi recently spotted alive by the writer shortly before his death.

The Odessa File is an episodic film that carefully follows Miller’s investigation, at first alone, later as an undercover operative for Israeli intelligence. Each scene takes us step-by-step closer towards the final target (Roschmann), which means each scene introduces new characters and locations. The one consistent note we have is Voight, who is pretty good as the driven, idealistic (and arrogant) Miller, and he holds the film together rather well. Each of the tense set-ups works well as a self-contained little story, although it does mean that the overall arc of the film is less engaging than it should be. However, you are invested in wanting the investigation to succeed.

This is partly because the black and white flashbacks to the Holocaust are surprisingly effective from a film from the 1970s. Atrocities are implied and sensitively shown, in an unsensational way, but remain very affecting. Schell’s bombastic acting style also really works as a fanatical and sadistic Nazi (it also works very well in the film’s final confrontation). Combine this with the well-written, unembellished readings from the diary (good work from Cyril Shaps as the voiceover artist) and the film very sensitively establishes its anti-Nazi credentials early on.

Where it doesn’t really work is its whole Odessa plot. The shadowy group of Nazis proves laughably easy to penetrate. The network is then blown wide open seemingly within hours. There is a sub plot about the Nazis supplying missiles to Nasser to fire at Israel which is totally unclear (it has something to do with the factory Roschmann is now running). In fact, the whole organisation’s structure is unclear and the film lacks a real face for its antagonists. The film barrels along fast enough that you don’t notice it too much when viewing it, but reflecting on it afterwards everything makes slightly less sense, and the contrivances become far more glaring.

Other than Miller (whose motives the film is deliberately obscure about) not many of the other characters get a look in. In particular the female characters are little more than ciphers or “stop reading about the Holocaust and come to bed” girlfriends. The Nazis are all pretty interchangeable, although Noel Willman brings a nice sense of menace to a Nazi fixer. The strange intermixing of real and imaginary characters (including Simon Wiesenthal) is also a little odd.

But the story is exciting enough, and Voight’s earnest performance makes you care about Miller enough, that you’ll enjoy watching it. It’s not a classic like The Day of the Jackal (a perfect cinematic expression of Forsyth’s forward motion as a writer) but it’s going to keep you entertained for a couple of hours.

SPOILERS AHEAD FROM HERE!
I also think the final revelation of Miller’s motives is bungled and undermines the anti-Nazi message. It turns out Miller is primarily motivated by concluding Rorschmann murdered his father during the war. This immediately trivialises the horrors of the Holocaust – yeah, it was bad, but you can’t expect someone to go to all this trouble to hunt a bad man for that alone can you? It’s a problem in the book as well, but at least there, more weight is given to Miller’s anger at the war. Here he drops a few lines about the evils of Nazism, but it never quite snaps together.

This is a good, decent, sharp thriller – but it has its chances to be more than that, and it misses them.