POLLance of Arabia - the Deavid Lean Director Poll

dude ur missing 'ryan's daughter' tho no-one will vote for it

bloody imdb.

he is one of my favorite directors - i think "brief encounter" is my favorite, "hobson's choice" a close second. love his adaptations of dickens. love the epics too.

Lawrence by a length over Great Expectations. Don't know if I rate him v. high, mostly, but those 2 plus a couple of others are legit great.

Brief Encounter is excellent and about all I can stomach.

Brief Encounter is good as is Hobson's Choice but c'mon, LoA is, well, epic.

Blithe Spirit and Summer Madness are well worth a look, but I will always drop everything if Lawrence of Arabia or Brief Encounter are on.

Confession: I went dressed as Elvira from Blithe Spirit for Halloween one year (green and white makeup, floaty dress, cigarette holder) and Lawrence of Arabia (kaffiyeh, bedsheets, curtain cords, plastic sword) the next.

LoA is a fantastically good film, but mainly because of the script, music and cinematography. The director is only tangentially to credit for these. I presume a bad director could easily have screwed it up and made a crappy, uneven film of it, though.

My HS cinema teacher said Sam Spiegel intentionally put the intermission after parched Lawrence crawls into officers' bar for a lemonade, LOL. Also:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_BGdnrNhQS88/SfoidpR0fSI/AAAAAAAAAMs/ZkVFbQrjf9g/s400/Peter+O%27Toole+in+desert.jpg

hobson's choice imo

i dont think kwai really holds up as well as it should, for all the memorable scenes and performances... it's way too fucking long, the endless scenes of william holden & his guides hacking through the jungle... holden in general just feels like he belongs in a different movie, when we first see his character we're supposed to be meeting a beaten down, starving POW and we get this hulking barrel chested guy with a little bit of scruff and a tan

but it does have that totally sick boner-popping explosion at the end

arabia looks amazing projected in 70mm but i feel like its something i admire more than i enjoy... havent seen it in years though

i prefer kwai to lawrence, though i've only seen the maximum longest cut of lawrence from 1990 or whenever; would prefer the mere three-hour original, probably

need to see a bunch more tbrr, would go 'brief encounter' at this point though

tbrr? u cold?

'to be really real' god don't you know ANYTHING?

i dont think kwai really holds up as well as it should, for all the memorable scenes and performances... it's way too fucking long, the endless scenes of william holden & his guides hacking through the jungle... holden in general just feels like he belongs in a different movie,

Agree. And Guinness' performance is one-note (a sharply drawn supporting performance marketed as a lead).

A Passage to India is an honorable try.

I'm voting for Lawrence or one of the Dickens adaptations.

'to be really real' god don't you know ANYTHING?

― rip whiney g weingarten 03/11 never forget (history mayne), Thursday, 2 December 2010 18:48 (0 seconds ago)

u cold

lawrence is probably the best biopic ever made imo. passage has some really great moments, but also some pretty bad ones.

Kwai--the first one I saw as a kid, and the one that's stayed with me.

i think guinness in kwai is his best mad bastard really

Kwai--the first one I saw as a kid, and the one that's stayed with me.

― clemenza, Thursday, 2 December 2010 18:51 (5 minutes ago)

thought this abt larry

saw again lately, was kinda w/e

just saw lawrence for the first time last year -- great, espec the first half.

i don't know if many ppl will vote for zhivago but it's the only movie ever made with both of my two favorite actresses in it (even if they never share a scene), so i have to love it.

zhivago is another one that has some amazing, amazing filmmaking in it, but I'm not sure if it is a masterpiece.
(seriously, these movies really should be seen on the big screen)

Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee, and Peggy Ashcroft more than compensate for Guinness', er, interesting imitation of an Hindu ascetic.

ungghh...Love Larry...love Zhivago though Zhiv love may be the score over all of it but damn nostalgia working hard on me here...I like Kwai but I don't have love for it...but Great Expectations might be where it's at for me. It was one of my mum's favorite books and I saw it as a kid. Indelible. Opening scene, and Miss Havisham's mansion...as vivid as the book imo.

I think it was Sarris who called the ending of Kwai incoherent. I like the ending a lot; Guinnesses' anguished refusal to do what he accidentally ends up doing anyway makes perfect sense to me.

Apparently, there are two Alec Guinnesses in Kwai. It's a Patty Duke thing.

Are they cousins?

Voted Great Expectations but maybe should have went with The Passionate Friends.

Brief Encounter is one of the truest depictions in film of depression and the expectations of people entering into relationships imo.

i loathed alec guinness in oliver twist

how come he took 20 years off in the 60s?

Voted for The Bridge on the River Kwai. There's a lot to love on this poll but this is one of my favorites of all time.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Anyone else in NYC seeing the remastered Lawrence of Arabia on Thursday? Don't totally get the ins/outs of the digital remastering that took place; just pretty pumped to get a chance to see it on a big-screen.

Big screen Lawrence should be amazing!

It's showing in Tupelo and I'm considering it. Pending circumstances may prevent me.

LoA is a fantastically good film, but mainly because of the script, music and cinematography. The director is only tangentially to credit for these. I presume a bad director could easily have screwed it up and made a crappy, uneven film of it, though.

― Aimless, Thursday, December 2, 2010 6:25 PM (1 year ago)

surely a 'good director' is someone who takes all these elements and makes them work perfectly?

lawrence on the big screen is soooooo good. i've seen it twice now over the years, and i never want it to end.

Heh, the first time I started watching LoA was on a phone in a train. Stuck with it for about fifteen minutes before I felt like I owed David Lean an apology and stopped. But yeah, LoA is just about at the top of my rereleases-to-watch-in-theater list.

I've been surprised by how many friends -- like, people who love movies, and some who even do film criticism -- haven't seen it. Can only chalk it up to being let down / kinda bored by so many '40s-'60s Big Epic Classic Movies. Think an unsung bit of LoA's magic is just O'Toole's lines / line delivery; that should be enough to sucker people into starting LoA.

Also: there's the assumption that You Can't Watch It At Home.

no twist voters? robert newton's sykes is terrifying, gorgeous expressionist cinematography, francis l. sullivan's jowls... its a good time

haven't seen OT in awhile, but GrExp is just better raw material.

Kwai/Laurance/Zhivago has gotta be one of the all-time 1-2-3s in cinema, no?

god no

great expectations & blithe spirit kick the shit out of these big spectacle films imo

holden in general just feels like he belongs in a different movie

yes, an utterly routine one. All WH's segments in Kwai are just flab. They don't even give him anything worthwhile to do in the climax (which changes the novel for a 'happy' ending -- no wonder Charlton Heston thought it was a great antiwar film; it's not antiwar at all.

Brief Encounter is the only Lean movie I've seen I have any affection for.

Man, Summertime (Summer Madness in some places, I guess) is underrated.

I think Summertime is going to be my next Hulu choice.

I love Hepburn in Summertime.

Summer Madness is just a bloody awful title for it.

Easily a better Hepburn-as-spinster movie than Rainmaker or African Queen.

But not Suddenly Last Summer.

she's a spinster aunt and not a mom in that one?

only saw that once, Liz kinda chafed.

Man, Guiness in Oliver Twist is grotesque. You'd think someone would have thought better of a Fagin-as-Jew-devil portrayal in friggin' 1948, but apparently not.

hey actors were still blacking up to do Othello about 30 years ago.

Brief Encounter is still the business.

I just saw Lawrence of Arabia in the 4K restoration on the AFI Silver big screen. I have so many things I want to say about it but I'm wary of its fanbase.

please do!

I'm an hour into the director's cut I recorded from TCM yesterday afternoon.

It's one of my favorites, but I do respect and acknowledge differences of opinion, even if I (in turn) don't always agree with *them*. I don't listen to too many podcasts, and I hate running, but back when I was doing both of those things more a year or so ago I listened to the Amy Nicholson/Paul Scheer Unspooled podcast about the AFI 100, where they go through those movies and decide which of them deserve or don't deserve a place on that list, or whether they should be demoted down. I was a little surprised when they reached Lawrence of Arabia, as armchair movie nerd Scheer iirc treated it a bit like a chore and critic Nicholson was pretty reserved in her praise, whereas every time I've watched it I've gotten lost in it the same way.

I liked it as a kid but maybe it’s a bit overwrought. I seem to recall a quote, from John Grierson? being applied to Lean in Roy Armes book on British Cinema, “when a great director dies he becomes a photographer.” Perhaps a bit unfair but also somewhat true. My favorite Lean may be the sleeper he made with his soon-to-be wife Ann Todd, Trevor Howard and Claude Rains, The Passionate Friends.

One of the reasons I love Lean is that he is of course known for these epic spectacles, but they came well after he had established himself as a maker of smaller movies. As a kid I remember his Dickens movies always being on TV.

Anyway, it’s tricky, because Lean is kind of an easy target to smeared as a maker of prestige pictures, like some kind of Stanley Kramer or something.

Ah, the original quote was “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer,” about Von Steinberg, about “Shanghai Express”!

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/feature-articles/david-lean-ann-todd/

Lean and Robert Bolt's orientalism presents itself in many ways, the oddest of which is to give the Arabs the heartiness of white executive boar members.

The film does dawdle, in part because Omar Sharif plays the conventional handsome Valentino-esque hero while Peter O'Toole gives a weird supporting performance-as-lead.

I saw it about two decades ago in 70mm and apart from the Imax like motorcycle opening it made little impression on me.

um yea it’s obviously a very beautiful well done movie but fuck white savior bullshit

/Left

Doesn't the movie ultimately mock white savior mentality?

At at least that's how I've always viewed it, partly as a movie that is a commentary on orientalism through the lens of orientalism, culminating with a message not just of Lawrence's failure as a person and as a leader, but as a failure of the whole cynical British mission.

The movie does both, I think, without quite figuring out how or why, which is its fascination for me.

Yeah, I think I agree with that, especially your choice of the word fascinating. There are not that many movies that earn that description.

Thank you everyone. I got the impression there's a rabid fanbase out there. Saying "So a blond British twink convinced the various tribes of the Arabian Peninsula--and the rest of the world--that they constituted The Arabic People?" felt like asking for trouble.

There's a definite throughline to Star Wars, quite apart from Alec Guiness--how many alien critters are basically space camels? I admire the spectacle, but if you've got a competent DP and a budget that allows for as many retakes as necessary that's not hard.

I am aesthetically offended at the idea that this film played on TV in some sort of pan-and-scan monstrosity of a cut (especially on the small B&W TVs my mother insisted on buying for years). I don't think the filmmakers were conscious of the "white savior" complex as we use the term today. But, possibly in spite of itself, it does show the feet of clay on which the idol of the British Empire was built.

hadn't seen Brief Encounter before now, it is pretty good

I remember having affection for his epics but haven't seen any of them in a long time. My recollection is that they were entirely about Hollywood movie-making and high glamour, with not many concessions to reality. The melodrama of Brief Encounter kind of points to that

LOA is more complex.

I.e. it's not just "about" Hollywood moviemaking and high glamour.

I really want to see it again

have recently seen In Which We Serve and Summertime, and want to watch Major Barbara, Blithe Spirit, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and Hobson’s Choice before going back to the epics

Hobson’s Choice is minor but worth the watch for Laughton.

I watched In Which We Serve on the same day as Preston Sturges' Palm Beach Story. They were both 1942 films but were so opposite in their views of the world