When mulling over a list of the best hangout films, of course you'd have to include the likes of American Graffiti, The Breakfast Club, Easy Rider, and Stand By Me—to name but a handful.
I'd like to add one picture that never seems to show up on any such online list. I'm talking about Summertime, in which Katharine Hepburn takes a European mini-break. And that's about all that happens. Okay, she does have a bittersweet romance with an Italian man (married but separated), but her real love affair is with the time and place: Venice, Italy, 1955. She spends the entire film there, and it is glorious. Seriously—if you ever need a de-stresser, spend a hundred minutes hanging with Hepburn, wandering the sun-soaked, watery city with her box camera in hand.
The camera behind her is turned by David Lean—whose full filmography will be screened at the Irish Film Institute throughout April and May. The British director is better known for his Cinemascope epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago than for this sort of laid-back escapist picture. Still, both he and Hepburn received Oscar nominations for their summer holiday—bringing to a close the first half of Lean's career. That’s the trouble with labels: they can become extraneous baggage. Before Lean ever set foot in Arabia with his widescreen lens, he was already responsible for one of the greatest love stories and one of the funniest comedies in British cinema—not to mention his peerless Dickens adaptations.
Though it’s hard to argue with success—especially when your next film after your first Oscar nomination is The Bridge on the River Kwai—I do think cinema lost something when Lean essentially moved on from his run of wonderfully observed and precisely directed films in Academy ratio. (That's the intimate 4:3 shape our TVs and cinema screens used to have, for the non-projectionists out there.)
Lean started his career as a film editor, a skill that deeply informed his directing style. It made him a master of space and transitions—on both compact and widescreen canvases. He edited films for over a decade before co-directing his first, In Which We Serve (1942), with his friend Noël Coward. Another collaboration followed with the moving This Happy Breed, Lean directing solo for the first time, from
Coward’s wonderfully observed screenplay set between the wars in a middle-class London suburb. Coward’s next script, an adaptation of his smash hit play Blithe Spirit, also had Lean at the helm. He shot that almost back-to-back with his first unadulterated classic—the Citizen Kane of unrequited love films—Brief Encounter. Dear god, never has simmering longing dripped from the screen with such intense politeness before or since. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson are right up there with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in my book—equally sexy, but in a very distinctly British way.
In the space of the next twenty-four months, Lean delivered probably the best adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations and Oliver Twist ever put to film. He also began collaborations with actors John Mills and Alec Guinness—both of whom would appear regularly in his films and win Oscars along the way. One of the joys of this IFI season, for me, is that I haven’t yet seen his next three: The Passionate Friends, Madeleine, and The Sound Barrier (which, incidentally, won an Oscar for Best Sound). But I have seen Hobson’s Choice (1954), and I own it on VHS, DVD, and now Blu-ray. I originally rented it from Xtra-vision while reading Kevin Brownlow’s brilliant book on Lean, which I’d borrowed from the Ilac Library. I expected a deft adaptation of the stage play—what I got instead is one of my top ten favourite comedies. Charles Laughton’s husky Hobson is right up there with John Candy’s Del Griffith in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. ("What’s for puddin’?" is still asked around our house).
After Lean’s Italian vacation, starting in 1957 his career ascended into the realm of the epic. Up until that point, he had made eleven films in about twelve years; from then on, he would make only five more over the next thirty-three, until his death in 1991. But of course, you know the titles: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, and A Passage to India.
That last film, released in 1984 (though Steven Spielberg tried unsuccessfully to get him to direct Empire of the Sun a few years later), was a return to the old, intimate Academy ratio—the format of his formative years. It's a sumptuous film with a strong cast (if you can overlook Guinness in brownface), based on the E.M. Forster novel. He’d been on the bench for fourteen years following the chilly reception to his Dingle-shot Ryan’s Daughter. Flawed? Sure. But if there’s any film that has to be seen in a cinema to be fully appreciated, it’s that one.
Yes, he hadn’t made a movie in years—but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Throughout the 1970s, he was prepping a two-part adaptation of The Mutiny on the Bounty. His go-to screenwriter, Robert Bolt, wrote the script for the first part, which was eventually used for the Mel Gibson version.
The emperor of filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick, once said, "There are very few directors about whom you'd say you automatically have to see everything they do. I'd put Fellini, Bergman and David Lean at the head of my first list." I’m certainly on the same page as Stanley. But if you're short on time and have already seen his undisputed jungle and desert epics multiple times… then it’s Summertime, Hobson's Choice, and Ryan’s Daughter for puddin’.
Throughout this month of April, the Irish Film Institute is screening eight of David Lean's works as the first part of a two-month long celebration of the work of this extraordinary director, with the second part to follow - find out more here.
