Doctor Zhivago (film)

 

Doctor Zhivago (film)

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Doctor Zhivago
Theatrical release poster design by Tom Jung
Directed by	David Lean
Produced by	Carlo Ponti
Screenplay by	Robert Bolt
Based on	Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Starring	Omar Sharif Julie Christie Geraldine Chaplin Rod Steiger Alec Guinness Tom Courtenay
Music by	Maurice Jarre
Cinematography	Freddie Young Nicolas Roeg (Uncredited)
Editing by	Norman Savage
Studio	Sostar S.A.
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	December 22, 1965 (1965-12-22) (US) April 26, 1966 (1966-04-26) (UK) December 10, 1966 (1966-12-10) (Italy) September 28, 1999 (1999-09-28) (US re-release)
Running time	197 minutes 193 minutes (UK) 200 minutes (1992 re-release) 192 minutes (1999 re-release)
Language	English Russian
Budget	$11 million
Box office	$111,721,910[1]

Doctor Zhivago is an American 1965 epic drama–romance film directed by David Lean, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. The film is loosely based on the famous novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak. It has remained popular for decades, and as of 2012 is the eighth highest-grossing film of all time in the United States, adjusted for inflation.^[1]

 

Background

 

^{The novel of the same name, upon which the film was based, written by Boris Pasternak, was published in the West amidst celebration and controversy. Pasternak's book had been known in Samizdat since some time after World War II. However, the novel was not completed until 1956. The book had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union by an Italian called D'angelo to whom Pasternak had entrusted the book to be delivered to Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher who published it shortly after. Helped by a Soviet campaign against the novel, it became a sensation throughout the non-communist world, famously winning the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature. It spent 26 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list. The film, though faithful to the novel's plot, has depictions of several characters and events that are noticeably different.}

^{The sweeping multi-plotted story form used by Pasternak had a distinguished pedigree in Russian letters. The author of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, had used characters as symbols of classes and historical events in describing the events in the Russia of Napoleonic times. Pasternak's father, who was a painter, had produced illustrations for War and Peace.}

 

Plot

 

The film takes place mostly against a backdrop of World War I, the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. A narrative framing device, set in the late 1940s to early 1950s, involves KGB Lieutenant General Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago (Alec Guinness) searching for the daughter of his half brother, doctor Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago (Omar Sharif), and Larissa ("Lara") Antipova (Julie Christie). Yevgraf believes a young woman, Tonya Komarovskaya (Rita Tushingham) may be his niece, and tells her the story of her father's life.

We first meet the protagonist Yuri Zhivago as a young boy who is orphaned after his mother's death. He is given his mother's balalaika, a Russian musical instrument, which becomes a symbol of the creativity that runs in his family. He is taken in by his mother's friends, Alexander 'Sasha' (Ralph Richardson) and Anna (Siobhán McKenna) Gromeko — and grows up with their daughter Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin). We next see Zhivago as a medical student in training, but a poet at heart, who declares that he wants to be a family doctor rather than a medical researcher. Tonya returns after a trip to Paris, wearing the latest fashions. Shortly after, Yuri marries Tonya because her mother expects him to do it, but does so without much enthusiasm.

In a parallel plot-line, Lara, a dressmaker's daughter and schoolgirl, becomes involved in an affair with Victor Ipolitovich Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), her mother's (Adrienne Corri) lover. That same night, the idealistic reformer Pavel Pavlovich ("Pasha") Antipov (Tom Courtenay) is wounded with a sabre cut across his face by hussars during a peaceful street protest. Pasha runs to Lara, whom he wants to marry, to treat his wound, and asks her to hide a gun he picked up at the demonstration. He declares that the days of peaceful protests are over; a new spirit of cynicism and militancy are what is needed, which symbolize his and others turning to Bolshevism (Communism) as the answer to the autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II. Zhivago witnesses the same event from his balcony, seeing the brutality of the Tsarist hussars. He is deeply shaken by the event, attempts to save the wounded in the street, and is told by a Tsarist officer to get off the street.

Lara's mother discovers her affair with Komarovsky and attempts suicide. Komarovsky summons help from a the physician who is Zhivago's medical professor and Zhivago arrives as the physician's assistant. He sees Lara for the first time. When Komarovsky later learns of Lara's intentions to marry Pasha, he tries to dissuade Lara, and then rapes her. In revenge, Lara takes the pistol she has been hiding for Pasha and shoots Komarovsky during a Christmas Eve party also attended by Zhivago, wounding Komorovski. At this point the separate plots merge and all the characters become aware of each other. Komarovsky insists that no action be taken against Lara, who is escorted out by Pasha. Zhivago tends Komarovsky's wound. Although enraged by Lara's affair with Komarovski, the formerly idealistic Pasha marries Lara, and later they have a daughter, Katya.

With the beginning of World War I, the Russian Empire declares war on the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we witness the patriotic hysteria in Moscow, and the new recruits marching off to war. Yevgraf Zhivago is sent by Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the first incarnation of what later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to join the Imperial Russian Army for purposes of subverting the troops at the front. Pasha, who has joined the army because of his idealism and his dissolving marriage with Lara, is reported missing in action following a foolhardy frontal attack on the German lines. Lara enlists as a nurse in order to search for Pasha. Yuri Zhivago is drafted and becomes an army doctor. Following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the February Revolution, revolutionary fervor spreads to the front-line troops, who have been ill-led, half-clothed, and without enough weapons. When a group of newly arrived troops meet a mass of military deserters from the front, the Russian officers are killed, and doctor Zhivago enlists Lara's help to tend to the wounded. Together they run a field hospital in a former country estate for six months, during which time radical changes convulse Russia, as Vladimir Lenin arrives in Moscow and stages the October Revolution in Petrograd (not shown in the film), then the capital of Imperial Russia. During this time at the field hospital, Zhivago and Lara are in daily contact, and fall in love.

After the war, Yuri returns to his wife Tonya, son Sasha, and his father-in-law, Alexander, whose house in Moscow has been divided into flats by the new Soviet government. Zhivago, not knowing the political situation, is watched by the leader of the local Soviet committee. As a physician, Zhivago knows that there is an epidemic of typhus in the city, which is officially denied; his first experience of the new government's deception or cover-up. His half-brother Yevgraf, who is now a CHEKA officer, in one of many coincidences throughout the film, sees Zhivago scavenging wood, follows him to Alexander's apartment, dismisses the hovering local Soviet committee persons with a snap of his fingers, and reveals his identity as half-brother to Zhivago. He informs him that his poems are "not liked" by certain powerful persons, as being petty bourgeois and "personal." Zhivago, naive about the new political order, asserts to Yevraf that "he cannot approve today what the (Communist) party may do tomorrow." Hearing those sentiments, Yevgraf realizes that Zhivago will soon be arrested as politically unreliable, so he arranges for passes and documents in order for Yuri and his family to escape from the new political capital of Moscow to the far away Gromeko country estate at Varykino, west of the Ural Mountains.

In contrast to Tonya's earlier arrival on a comfortable train from Paris, Zhivago, Tonya, Sasha and Alexander now board a train of boxcars in which crude bunk beds have been built, at which time they are informed that they'll be travelling through contested territory (during the Russian Civil War), which is being secured by a famous Bolshevik commander named Strelnikov (Russian for "The Shooter"), who steams up and down the Trans-Siberian Railway line in an armoured train. It is at this point that we meet Kostoyed (Klaus Kinski), an anarchist intellectual being sent to Siberia in chains. The journey in the boxcar filled with fifty people seems to the Zhivago family to be interminable, with only Yuri and Yuri's son seeing it as an adventure. While the train is stopped on a siding, Zhivago wanders away, and stumbles across the armoured train of Strelnikov, stopped at a siding in the forest. Zhivago is taken as a prisoner to Strelnikov and recognizes him as the former Pasha Antipov. Zhivago is first suspected as a White Russian agent sent to assassinate Strelnikov. Zhivago is subjected to an interrogation during which Strelnikov asserts that "the personal life is dead in Russia; history has killed it" and Zhivago answers that "I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it." The tension level drops. After determining that he and Zhivago have met before, and that Zhivago is a famous published poet, Strelnikov informs Yuri that Lara is living in the town of Yuriatin — very close to where Yuri will be living.

The Zhivago family arrives at Varykino, which has a large mansion and a small outbuilding. Since there is a notice that the mansion is the property of the state, they live in the outbuilding. They grow their own food and lead lives much as the Russian serfs had in the past. In the spring, Zhivago's thoughts turns toward Lara, whom he knows is living close-by. Zhivago finds Lara in nearby Yuriatin. They surrender to their long repressed feelings, beginning an affair, and a blissful time for them both. But when Tonya becomes pregnant, Zhivago swears he will break off with Lara, only to be conscripted that day into service by Communist partisans. After two years as a military doctor with the forces fighting the White Russian rebels, Zhivago at last deserts, struggling through deep snow, almost dying, to Yuriatin, and Lara. After six happy months, Lara reveals a letter from Tonya, in which she tells Yuri that she, her father, and Sasha have been deported, and had met with Lara while searching for Yuri.

During a fierce storm one night, Komarovsky arrives and informs them that they are being watched by the CHEKA due to Lara's marriage to Strelnikov and Yuri's "counter-revolutionary" poetry and desertion. Komarovsky offers Yuri and Lara his help in leaving Soviet Russia, but they refuse. Instead, they go to the isolated Varykino estate, which during the winter has turned into a kind of frosted ice-palace. To the sound of wolves howling in the nearby forest, Yuri begins writing the "Lara" poems, which will later make him famous but incur government displeasure. The wolves are a premonition; Komarovsky reappears again and tells Yuri that Strelnikov tried to reach Lara, was detained by authorities, and shot himself while being taken to his execution; Lara is in immediate danger, as the CHEKA had only left her free to lure Strelnikov into the open. Zhivago sends Lara away with Komarovsky, who has used his influence within the Communist Party to be appointed Minister of Justice of the Far Eastern Republic, a Soviet puppet state in Siberia. Refusing to leave with a man he despises, Yuri remains behind.

Years later, during the Stalinist era, Yuri sees Lara while travelling on a tram, a mirroring of the tram scene in which he first sees Lara. Forcing his way off the tram, he runs after her, at which point he suffers a fatal heart attack. Yuri's funeral is well attended, as his poetry is already being published openly due to shifts in politics. Lara informs Yevgraf that she had given birth to Yuri's daughter, but lost her in the collapse of the White-controlled government in Mongolia. After vainly looking over hundreds of orphans with Yevgraf's help, Lara disappears during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, and "died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labour camps," according to Yevgraf.

While Yevgraf strongly believes that Tanya Komarovskaya is Yuri's and Lara's daughter, she is still not convinced. Yevgraf notices that Tonya carries with her a balalaika. He recalls that Yuri's mother left him one after her death. Finding that Tanya learned to play the balalaika by herself, he smiles, "Ah, then, it's a gift," thereby implying that she truly must be their daughter after all.

 

^Symbolism

Symbolism is used throughout the story. The name Zhivago is from the Russian root word "zhiv", or "life", and the names of the other characters have similar associations. Throughout the film, no matter how much bloodshed is going on around him, Zhivago tries to bind up the wounded, and his poetry speaks of life. Lest we miss the point, the novel's author, Boris Pasternak, made Zhivago a doctor as well as poet, because doctors save lives, and very important to a state that glorifies work, they also labor. At one point, when they first meet, he tells his half-brother Yevgraf, a CHEKA policeman, that, "cutting out the tumors of injustice, that's a deep operation; someone must keep life alive while you do it". He never joins the Communist Party or engages in violence. He admonishes Strelnikov that he hates what he says about "the personal life" being dead. He asks the partisan band's political commissar, after the massacre of some boys, whether "he ever loved a woman". His most prized poem is about his love for Lara. At several points in the film, we see Yuri casting his gaze toward trees, the sky or the moon, symbolizing his tie with a life force, more like a poet might see life; not just for what he can get out of it. Russia has a tradition of great respect for poetry, and in the film Zhivago, as a famous published poet, is many times accorded respect by men who might otherwise would have had had him shot. Following Zhivago's journey through a tumultuous time allows us to be present at many of the major events of a revolution that shook the world. For instance, after the Russian Revolution, we see Zhivago growing his own food and living in an outbuilding at the former estate at Varikino, an example of using characters and situations as symbols or metaphors.

Lara, too, is a symbol. Throughout the film, in the midst of chaos and bloodshed, men are drawn to her beauty and charm. She symbolizes Russia itself, going through rape, desertion love and birth. Men's attitudes toward her closely track their attitude toward life, Russia, and the Russian people.

In contrast, Alexander "Sasha" Gromeko, Anna Gromeko, and to some extent, Tonya, represent the benign side of the upper classes; old-money, educated, comfortable, and relatively clueless about the goals and means of the revolution. When Zhivago marries Tonya, he is part of that class. When the Gromekos, including Tonya and her child by Zhivago, are forced to emigrate to France, Zhivago makes no attempt to join them. He becomes more of a poet and less of a doctor, and stays with Russia, symbolized by Lara. He has got a foot in both worlds, thus making him politically dubious in the new Russia, and as a famous poet he is respected but also suspected by the Party.

Victor Komarovsky, as his first name implies, always goes with the victors in any struggle. When we first meet him, in Tsarist times, he is a debonair lawyer and man-about-town; knowing everyone important and having contacts in business, government and even amongst the revolutionaries. He changes his stripes with the change of government; his only allegiance being to himself. He sees life only for what he can get out of it; his affair with Lara is metaphor for that and for his class's attitude toward the common people of Russia. In context of Communist ideology (the novel upon which the film was based was written in Soviet Russia), Komarovksy would stand for the rapacious side of the upper classes. At one point in the film, he compares himself to "Caliban", a character from Shakespeare's play The Tempest; a sort of sacred monster. He also symbolizes the principle of grim reality, or a cynical view of life, as he appears many times in the film to shake people out of their illusions about themselves and life. He could be thought of as the polar opposite of Zhivago-as-poet and lover-of-life; Komorovski in the film is a voice of doom; whenever he appears, something bad happens.

Tom Courtenay's depiction of Pasha/Strelnikov symbolizes the ideals of the Russian Revolution; first begging for justice, then demanding it, finally killing anyone who stands in the way. As much as he wants to be a man of the world, Pasha is taken in by almost everyone and everything. His final apotheosis as Strelnikov is cast in the film as an attempt to be what he thinks of as a real "man", burning villages and slaughtering anyone he sees as an enemy. As he remarks to Zhivago, "feelings, insights, affections, it's suddenly trivial now." He stands for the promise and the cynical finish to the Russian Revolution.

[edit] Politics

This section is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (February 2013)

The film follows a neutral course to what in the film's release year of 1965 was still a very controversial subject. The Cold War was then at its apogee; although many critics^[who?] have criticized the film's emphasis of the love story over the historical story, those historical events at the time of the film's making were still a political minefield, and taking a strong viewpoint of whether the Russian Revolution was a good thing or not would have caused problems for the film's popularity, and this was a big budget film that was geared to a mass audience.

Boris Pasternak, the Russian author of the novel, who lived through the events of the film as personal experience (he was born in 1890, making him 27 at the time of the revolution), shows in the novel what he thought went wrong in the revolution: that initially, revolutionary leaders had good ideas, but because of human failings these ideas were warped, forgotten, or deliberately put aside as the revolution progressed. Since novels and films cannot easily embody ideas^{[dubious – discuss]}, whole periods and mass movements, Pasternak's and director David Lean's strategy to convey these ideas and historical changes was to introduce symbolic characters who personify the various forces in play. The one neutral character in the film is Zhivago's half brother Yevgraf, who acts as a kind of stand-in for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at first seemingly without illusions or morals, sometimes threatening, sometimes encouraging, but as the years pass in the film, softened by Lean and actor Alec Guinness into a benevolent older brother, perhaps a kind of benevolent older "big brother".

[edit] Cast

• Omar Sharif as Dr. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago
• Julie Christie as Lara Antipova
• Geraldine Chaplin as Tonya Gromeko
• Rod Steiger as Victor Komarovsky
• Alec Guinness as General Yevgraf Zhivago
• Tom Courtenay as Pasha Antipov/"Strelnikov"
• Siobhán McKenna as Anna Gromeko
• Ralph Richardson as Alexander "Sasha" Gromeko
• Rita Tushingham as Tanya Komarovskaya/"The Girl"
• Klaus Kinski as Kostoyed Amoursky
• Gerard Tichy as Liberius
• Noel Willman as Commissar Razin
• Geoffrey Keen as Professor Boris Kurt
• Bernard Kay as Kuril, the Bolshevik
• Jack MacGowran as Petya, the Groundskeeper
• Gwen Nelson as the female janitor

Production

This famous filmed version of Doctor Zhivago by David Lean was created for various reasons. Pasternak's novel had been an international success, and producer Carlo Ponti was interested in adapting it as a vehicle for his wife, Sophia Loren. Lean, coming off the huge success of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), wanted to make a more intimate, romantic film to balance the action- and adventure-oriented tone of his previous film. one of the first actors signed onboard was Omar Sharif, who had played Lawrence's right-hand man Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia. Sharif loved the novel, and when he heard Lean was making a film adaptation, he requested to be cast in the role of Pasha (which ultimately went to Tom Courtenay). Sharif was quite surprised when Lean suggested that he play Zhivago himself. Peter O'Toole, star of Lawrence of Arabia, was Lean's original choice for Zhivago, but turned the part down; Max von Sydow and Paul Newman were also considered. Michael Caine tells in his autobiography that he also read for Zhivago, but (after watching the results with David Lean) was the one who suggested Omar Sharif.^[2] Rod Steiger was cast as Komarovsky after Marlon Brando and James Mason turned the part down. Audrey Hepburn was considered for Tonya, while Robert Bolt lobbied for Albert Finney to play Pasha. Lean, however, was able to convince Ponti that Loren was not right for the role of Lara, saying she was "too tall" (and confiding in screenwriter Robert Bolt that he could not accept Loren as a virgin for the early parts of the film), and Yvette Mimieux, Sarah Miles and Jane Fonda were considered for the role. Ultimately, Julie Christie was cast based on her appearance in Billy Liar (1963), and the recommendation of John Ford, who directed her in Young Cassidy.

The initial and final scenes were shot at the Aldeadávila Dam between Spain and Portugal.

Since the book was banned in the Soviet Union, the movie was filmed largely in Spain over ten months,^[3] with the entire Moscow set being built from scratch outside of Madrid. Most of the scenes covering Zhivago and Lara's service in World War I were filmed in Soria, as was the Varykino estate. Some of the winter sequences were filmed in Spain, Finland, mostly landscape scenes, and Yuri's escape from the Partisans. Winter scenes of the family travelling to Yuriatin by rail were filmed in Canada. All the trains used in the film were Spanish trains like RENFE 240 ex 1400 MZA and Strelnikov's armoured train towed by the Renfe 2-8-2 class Mikado. The "ice-palace" at Varykino was filmed in Soria as well, a house filled with frozen beeswax. The charge of the Partisans across the frozen lake was filmed in Spain, too; a cast iron sheet was placed over a dried river-bed, and fake snow (mostly marble dust) was added on top. Some of the winter scenes were filmed in summer with warm temperatures, sometimes of up to 25 °C (86 °F).Other locations include the Estación de Madrid-Delicias in Madrid and El Moncayo. The initial and final scenes were shot at the Aldeadávila Dam between Spain and Portugal. Although uncredited, most of the scenes were actually shot on the Portugal side of the river, overlooking the Spanish side.