Peter Viney's Blog

Doctor Zhivago

1965 / 1966

Directed by David Lean
Produced by Carlo Ponti
Screenplay by Robert Bolt
Based on the novel by Boris Pasternak
Music by Maurice Jarre
Cinematography by Freddie Young (some scenes by Nicholas Roeg)

CAST

Omar Sharif – Dr Yuri Zhivago
Julie Christie – Lara Antipova
Geraldine Chaplin – Tonya
Rod Steiger – Komarovsky
Alec Guinness – Lieutenant General Yevgraf Zhivago
Tom Courtenay- Pasha Antipova aka Strelinkov
Siobhan McKenna- Anna Gromyko
Ralph Richardson – Alexander Gromyko
Rita Tushingham – The girl (daughter?)

The date? I’d say it was effectively 1966. It premiered in New York on 22 December 1965, and went on general release in the USA on New Year’s Eve 1965. It premiered in Britain at the end of April 1966.

It sold 248 million tickets worldwide, and is reckoned the ninth highest grossing film (corrected for inflation) worldwide of all time.

It vied with The Sound of Music for awards, doing better in technical areas, but surprisingly gaining no acting Academy Awards. Both films dominated screens. In those days there were no multiplexes. Where I lived, in Bournemouth, Doctor Zhivago was showing in three cinemas at one point. Because it was a holiday resort with new holidaymakers every week, major films played all season. Not only did Dr Zhivago run in the huge 1,978 seater Odeon, Lansdowne in 1966, but it was back there for the whole summer of 1967 too. The LP soundtrack didn’t enter the Top Ten until summer 1967, so it must have been on everywhere. No videos, three TV channels (two on older sets), so we all happily rewatched what was available.

Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel was banned in Russia, smuggled out, and became a major hit in the west. For the movie, the team of David Lean (director), Robert Bolt (screenwriter) and Maurice Jarre (music) moved on from Lawrence of Arabia (1962), bringing Omar Sharif who had played Sherif Ali, with them. Omar Sharif was in from the outset, but there was much discussion before Julie Christie was cast as Lara. Producer Carlo Ponti had wanted Sophia Loren, but Lean doubted her ability to appear as a 17 year old virgin on screen. Bolt won the 1965 Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Doctor Zhivago then adapted his own stage play A Man For All Seasons for film, and took the 1966 Oscar as well.

The scenery was stunning, snow covered Moscow streets, trains puffing through vast landscapes, icy lakes, battles, cavalry charges, killing in cornfields (60s directors were obsessed with cornfields)  … and it’s mainly fake. Moscow was created near Madrid in hot summer, Finland provided a bit of snow and the train ride, though the locomotives were said to be in Spain. A second unit went to Canada to get shots of scenery from the train. The huge dam was on the Spanish-Portuguese border. We knew none of this at the time, nor did we ponder how a story banned in Russia could have been filmed in what looked like Russia. Cinematically, it felt real … and even with hind-knowledge, it still looks real. Yes, if you read the IMDB “Goofs” they note lots of wrong Cyrillic letters in scenes, and that David Lean didn’t care. Nor do I.

It’s long, and was always shown with an intermission (a good idea!). The break point was designed in from the outset, and plot summaries follow the two parts. Our DVD is unusual- it’s double sided as laser discs used to be, with Part One and Part Two on separate sides of the same disc. We watched it over two evenings.

Initial reaction in 1965 and 1966 was varied. A lot of critics were negative because of the heavy helpings of romance, the words sugary and saccharine are over-used. I recall that it was (sexism warning here) often a movie that girls would suggest going to see, which is why I saw it several times, and was simply grateful they hadn’t chosen The Sound of Music which I managed to avoid right up to watching it with our kids circa 1990 (it was much better than I expected).  I thought there was sufficient action in Doctor Zhivago for the boys too. Of course nothing gets the critics backs up more than huge box office takings, and it got them.

Early critics also compared it to the novel, which I hadn’t read then, and I still haven’t. Movie Locations says it’s based on “bits of Pasternak’s novel.” Halliwell’s film guide says:

Beautifully photographed and meticulously directed, this complex epic has been so reduced from the original novel that many parts of the script simply do not make any kind of sense. What remains is a collection of expensive set-pieces, great for looking if not listening.

Viewers disliking film versions of novels which they know well is a classic syndrome. We are more used to less linear and logical narratives fifty years on, and I didn’t note the “not making sense” but instead got the feeling of being plunged into great events, where Yuri and Lara’s lives intersected almost randomly with happenings way beyond their control, and they were storm-tossed by them. For me, that worked.

PLOT … long and laden with plot spoilers, but hey, you’ve seen it.

PART ONE

The Girl (Rita Tushingham) and The General (Alec Guinness)

The story is bookended by scenes in the 1950s, where General Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness) is looking for his niece at an industrial complex. The niece would be the daughter of his half-brother, Dr Yuri Zhivago, who was a poet and author of The Lara Poems. He finds The Girl (Rita Tushingham) and tells her the story of his brother’s life … and we go back in time to imperial Russia. (Those “Goof” spotters on IMDB point out that the girl would have been conceived in the early 1920s, so in her thirties … in the novel, these scenes are 1940 ish).

Back in time …

Yuri is eight, and at his mother’s funeral somewhere deep in Central Asia. She leaves him her balaika (keep an eye out for this, and remember Rosebud in Citizen Kane!) Yuri is adopted by the Gromykos (Ralph Richardson and Siobhan McKenna) , wealthy friends with a home in Moscow. They have a daughter, Tonya. Yuri and Tonya grow up together and fall in love. Tonya returns from Paris, they are to marry. She sweeps along the station platform, pretty in pink, followed by two porters laden with hat boxes.

Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin)

Lara is 17, and lives with her dressmaker mother. Lara’s mother is the mistress of a rich wheeler dealer, Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger). Pasha (Tom Courtenay), the idealist demonstrator, is Lara’s fiance. He is nearly arrested distributing socialist pamphlets and Lara rescues him saying he is her brother.

Czarist cossacks attack peaceful demonstrators

Yuri has become a doctor, and is also a poet. One evening a socialist demonstration takes place with Pasha  leading it. Yuri sees it from the balcony. Czarist troops charge the demonstrators, sabres drawn. Yuri runs to help the wounded, but is forced away by the troops who are throwing the dead and injured into wagons.

Pasha arrives at the house / dressmaker’s workshop, he has a sabre cut across his face which she treats with iodine.  Pasha asks her to hide his revolver.

Lara, the Lady in Red (Julie Christie)

Komarovsky is pursuing Lara, who meets him in private rooms, dressed in red with a plunging neckline. Her mother finds out about the affair, and tries to commit suicide. Komarovsky sends for a specialist doctor friend, who happens to be Yuri Zhivago’s professor of medicine.

Komarovsky (Rod Steiger) watches the stomach pump being applied

Yuri goes with him and they apply a stomach pump. Yuri sees Komarovsky with Lara through a glass partition. He recognizes Komarovsky, who was a business partner of his father and ripped him off.

Lara (Julie Christie) shoots Komarovsky

Komarovsky is furious that Lara is to marry Pasha, and rapes her. She takes Pasha’s revolver and goes to a Christmas party where Komarovsky will be. Yuri and his soon to be wife, Tonya are there. The hostess is announcing their engagement as Lara arrives. Lara shoots Komarovsky, but only hits his hand (aim lower!). He insists that she is not arrested. Yuri treats his wound. Rod Steiger is one of the most compelling performances in the film (impeccable English accent too):

Rod Steiger gives his finest movie performance as the opportunistic lawyer who cheerfully robs Zhivago of his inheritance, Miss Christie of her virtue, and always seems to remain on top, a success with royalists or communists. He is a heartless blackguard but possessed of an infectious life force that is engaging if not commendable.
Hollywood Reporter, December 1965

Yuri (Omar Sharif) and Tonya (Geraldine Chapman). They are passing Lara’s window, which is why he is looking up

After the shooting, Pasha and Lara marry and have a daughter Katya.

When we say Epic … the Russians are rushing to World War One.

We leap to the start of The Great War with Bolsheviks like the young Zevgraf joining the Imperial army in order to subvert it. Pasha shows leadership where officers fail. Then Pasha is missing in action. We see Yuri as a battlefield doctor where he meets Lara who is a volunteer nurse seeking Pasha. I have to say credibility fails seeing her a lone woman wandering about with filthy defeated soldiers in rags. I would fear for her safety … but never mind, she spends months helping Yuri in a field hospital.

Dr Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) operate on a wounded soldier. The Germans are coming, but the selfless Dr Zhivago carries on …

Yuri innocently writes letters to Tonya praising Lara extravagantly. The soldiers hear that Lenin is in Moscow. ‘Is he the new Czar?’ asks one old soldier.

The war is over and Yuri returns to Moscow and the Gromyko mansion. Anna has died, and Alexander is living there with Tonya and the children. The mansion has been sub-divided into apartments by the Soviets, and they retain just one. Yuri’s half brother Yevgraf arrives (this is definitely one of the plot holes, as I never worked out his relationship or how they were separated). Yevgraf tells Yuri his poems have been condemned as anti-Communist (being personal).

L to R: Yuri (Omar Sharif), Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin)

Yevgraf:  He told me what he thought of the Party … and I trembled for him. 

Things are getting unpleasant in the shared building. The new supervisor tells them a rule, “50 square meters maximum for a family of less than five.”  They’ll need to move to a smaller room.  Yevgraf suggests they go to the Gromyko estate, Varykino, in the Ural Mountains. He obtains them passes.

They board a guarded train, freight cars laden with people, and set out on an eleven day train journey. They’re told the straw on the floor will be replaced at ten day intervals, the old straw to be burned.

They’re going through dangerous territory, contested between the Red partisans (Communists) and the White Partisans (Royalists, but also anti-Communists in general). They pass a burned out village and a woman begs them to take a baby on the train. They ask who destroyed the village, Red soldiers or White soldiers. The woman replies blankly, ‘Soldiers.’  A telling moment.

Streinikov’s train approaches

The Red army trying to secure the area is led by a Bloshevik commander, Strelnikov. The Bolsheviks abandoned given names and adopted new names … Lenin (from the Lena River), Stalin (“steel”)… Strelnikov (“executioner”). Strelnikov travels by armoured train. He is in fact, Pasha Antipov, Lara’s husband.

Strelnikov (aka Pasha) (Tom Courtenay)

INTERMISSION

PART TWO

We ended with Strelnikov, and we return with him. Yuri is summoned to an interview and recognises him as Pasha.

Tom Courtenay as Strelnikov, in conversation with Dr Zhivago

He hears that Lara is now living in Yuriatin, close to the house at Varykino. White forces are still in that region. Yuri is allowed to return to the train. They get to Varykino. Their main house has become a deserted ice palace, but they decide to occupy the cottage … Yuri, Tonya, Alexander Gromyko and the child. Tonya becomes pregnant for a second child. Bliss,  but …

Zhivago meets Lara in Yuriatin and their suppressed emotions come to the fore, and end up in passionate embrace. Yuri has access to the key to her apartment. Discovering Tonya is pregnant. Yuri travels to Yuriatin to break it off with Lara.

Yuri with the Red partisans … Comrade, we are red partisans, and we shoot deserters.

On the way back, he is captured by Red partisan cavalry, and pressed into service as their medical officer. He serves two years with them as a semi-prisoner. During this, the partisans fight White soldiers in a cornfield (yes, I know, it’s always a cornfield).

The obligatory 1960s cornfield shot

They machine gun them, and they turn out to be cadets from a school. Boys. The partisan leader kicks their dead schoolmaster / leader, proclaiming, ‘You old bastard!’

Yuri is with the partisans for two years. He trudges back through the snow … icy moustache stuff … and finds Lara in Yuriatin. She informs him that Tonya had contacted her while searching for him, and is now back in Moscow. Lara hands Yuri a letter mailed 6 months earlier and it is revealed that Tonya, her father, and their children were deported are now in Paris. Importantly, Yuri remains dedicated enough to the cause not to follow.

Komarovsky returns …

Yuri and Lara resume their passionate relationship. One night Komarovsky arrives and warns them they are being watched by the Cheka because of Lara’s marriage to Strelnikov. Komarovsky offers her and Yuri, his help in leaving Russia, which they decline.. Instead they return to the abandoned Varykino estate, taking up residence in the icy main house, where Yuri begins writing his “Lara” poems which will later make him famous,  bit this will lead to  government censure.

Yuri and Lara

Some time later, Komarovsky returns to their house and tells them that Strelnikov was captured five miles away, while looking for Lara, and shot himself on the way  to his own execution . Lara is now in real risk as the wife of Strelnikov.

Komarovsky, the ultimate survivor, has been appointed as an official  to the Far Eastern Republic (aka Chita Republic) which sets our date between 1920 and 1922 when it existed. Komarovsky offers to take them with him, but the sleigh has ONLY three seats … Komarovsky, Lara and her daughter. Yuri says he’ll follow the next day. It’s one of the enigmas … he knows Komarovsky must still be after Lara, but does he intend to follow? Or does he just want her to be rescued, even at the price of her submission to Komarovsky?

The sleigh leaves the Varykino house … only room for three

Yuri stays behind. We move on eight years to Moscow. Yuri is ill, jobless. Yevgraf meets him and finds him a job. Looking out the window of a crowded tram, Yuri sees Lara walk by. Unable to attract her attention, he struggles to get off at the next stop, and runs after her, but has a fatal heart attack before she sees him. At Yuri’s funeral  Lara tells Yevgraf that she gave birth to Yuri’s daughter in the Far East, but the girl was lost in the civil war in Mongolia. They seek the girl, but fail. Yevgraf loses touch with Lara, and can only guess she died in a Stalinist labour camp.

Lara and Yetgraf looking for the girl

Back to the 1950s …  Yevgraf at the hydo-electric dam. He believes the girl, Tania Komarovsky, is Yuri and Lara’s daughter. She has a balalaika and is a gifted player. An inherited gift? She leaves with her sturdy worker boyfriend, David. The dam symbolizes  progress. I guess it says it was worth the struggle, or that was Pasternak’s necessary reaction when he wrote it.

OVERALL

It stands up perfectly well. It is one of the best of the epic era. It reminds that you could have a stellar film career without going to Hollywood too. Julie Christie went on to Far From The Madding Crowd, two epics in a row. Both she and Omar Sharif deserved more awards. Contemporary critics felt Yuri was a bit “wet” – acted upon, rather than acting. Surely that’s the point. He’s a medical doctor and a poet caught up in a huge upheaval. You don’t expect action hero antics. It was certainly a change from his other 1965 character, Genghis Khan, and Che Guevara lay in the future.

DVD

Very good. It’s quite an old DVD, in a box set of epics with Ben Hur and GoneWith The wind. Shiny gold doesn’t scan.

SOUNDTRACKS

Record collector expertise here. Great soundtrack albums are usually collectible. Maurice Jarre is usually collectible. Dr Zhivago like the major musicals of the era, is not. That’s because there are so many copies around. If I went crate-digging for LPs in several charity shops on a day, I’d be virtually guaranteed to find a copy. It didn’t fare so well in the album chart. The Sound of Music was in the Top Ten for two years, and was number one several different times. Mary Poppins also had a long Top Ten run. Doctor Zhivago didn’t hit the Top Ten until the summer of 1967, fifteen months after its initial release. It peaked at #4 in October 1967 which indicates that Bournemouth was not alone in bringing the film back onto major screens in the summer of 1967. Back to crate-digging for secondhand LPs, you are far more likely to find Doctor Zhivago than The Sound of Music  which must have sold vastly more copies. The reason is that The Sound of Music is one people hung onto. Doctor Zhivago has no songs. It dates from the era when people bought soundtrack LPs because there were no videos, no DVDs. You couldn’t “buy” copies of any films in any format.

Lara’s Theme aka Somewhere, My Love is so catchy that it begins to irritate.

JULIE CHRISTIE  … see also:
The Fast Lady (1963)
Darling (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Petulia (1968)

RITA TUSHINGHAM

A Taste of Honey (1961)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Trap (1966)

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)