It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘Doctor Zhivago’
February 16, 1966
Doctor Zhivago
#1 film at the US box office, Jan 2-8; Jan 30-Feb 5; Feb 13-20; Mar 20-Apr 2; Apr 17-May 28, 1966
When Doctor Zhivago opened in theatres in late 1965, it looked suspiciously like an expensive flop. Critics accused it of running too long (over three hours), prioritizing gorgeous visuals over a briskly moving plot, and whittling Boris Pasternak’s political and poetic novel into a sentimental love story. It topped the US box office on its second weekend of release (it had the misfortune of opening against James Bond in Thunderball), but threatened to drift away into obscurity. It wasn’t long, however, before Doctor Zhivago found an eager audience who fell in love with its romance, beauty, and glamorous stars Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.
As filmed, the story centers on one Dr. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago (Sharif), a general practitioner better known to the public for his poetry. Against a backdrop of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War, Yuri marries his childhood sweetheart Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin) and has a son, only to discover he’s truly in love with the mysterious Lara (Christie). Yuri’s “subversive” poetry and middle-class origins force him and his family to flee Moscow for a lower profile life in the Russian countryside. The gambit fails: Yuri is pressed into service for the Communist regime, and his family is deported to Paris.
After escaping the Communists, Yuri reunites with Lara, who inspires his finest poetry yet. Their happiness together is short lived, however; the government perceives Yuri as a deserter and counter revolutionary, and Lara faces execution through her connection with her estranged husband Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an army commandant persecuted by his own party. To save Lara’s life, Yuri convinces her to escape with the villainous Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), while Zhivago stays behind, refusing to accept help from a man he despises. The lovers never reunite, although Lara secretly gives birth to their daughter (Rita Tushingham), whom Yuri’s half-brother Yevgraf (Alec Guinness) discovers years later working in a labor camp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvIL_A0UsJk
Doctor Zhivago reflects the Western mindset during the Cold War, portraying Soviet Russia as a land drained of freedom and happiness, where love is illicit and cannot flourish. Yet the film never crosses the line into anti-Soviet propaganda either; it doesn’t need to exaggerate the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution and the cruelty of a system designed to squash individual freedom. The film’s depiction of Russian society of the early Twentieth Century is drawn directly from Pasternak’s 1957 novel, which was banned in Russia for decades and had to be smuggled into Italy to get published. Yet as much as Pasternak disagreed with the Soviet regime — and despite the punishment and intimidation he suffered at the hands of the government — especially once Doctor Zhivago won him international recognition — he also never left the USSR, declining his 1959 Nobel Prize for Literature out of fear that he would be banned from re-entering the country after the ceremony.
The film’s screenwriter, Robert Bolt, was a onetime member of the British Communist Party, and continued to be active in left-wing causes afterward. Nevertheless, Bolt’s screenplay betrays no Soviet sympathies, portraying the Reds as favoring the political over the personal, the state over the individual, and war over family unity. Yuri recognizes the need for social reform, but is appalled by the distorted manner in which it is applied. Pasha, who begins the film as its moral conscience, attending peaceful protests and defending the rights of the people, finds his idealistic populism mutate into brutal authoritarianism.
Director David Lean had little interest in politics, and he, like Bolt, believed that the film adaptation should focus on the love story. The success of Lean’s two prior features, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), recast the long-working director as a maker of epics. Lean wanted to blend those movies’ monumental sweep, breathtaking visuals, and sense of grandeur with the quieter, doomed romances that he made earlier in his career, notably Brief Encounter (1945) and Summertime (1955). It was a smart move: in a 1989 interview, Lean claimed that Doctor Zhivago earned him more money than all his other movies put together.
Fifty years on, removed from the context of the Cold War, the film is not as politically indifferent as contemporary critics claimed. The difference is that, while neither Doctor Zhivago the film nor Dr. Zhivago the character take any blatant stand for or against Communism, both are clearly in favor of peace. Yuri is willing to sacrifice many of the comforts of his middle-class existence in favor of greater equality among his fellow people, but he is appalled by the Bolsheviks’ slaughtering of innocents and attacks on individual freedom. On a personal level, the turmoil of wartime prevents him both from settling into a stable life with his wife and child, and from pursuing an enduring relationship with Lara. (In fact, had it not been for the war, Yuri would probably never have had the chance to fall in love with Lara, and would have remained happily married to Tonya.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCeUenKq_Q
Politics of the film aside, Lean and Bolt’s choice to focus on the romantic side of Doctor Zhivago made the movie a runaway hit. After its initial slow performance, the film ended up ruling the US box office an astonishing 11 non-consecutive weeks. In late May, five months after its initial release, the movie was still doing top business. (It was replaced at at number-one by another emblem of the Cold War: the comedy The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, which hypothesizes a Soviet submarine running ashore on the New England coast.) Doctor Zhivago was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning five, including one for Bolt’s screenplay, one for Freddie Young’s striking cinematography, and one for the score by Maurice Jarre, whose indelible “Lara’s Theme” (a music box favorite) had as much a hand in the film’s success as its stars or Lean’s direction. Adjusted for inflation, Doctor Zhivago is the eighth highest-grossing film of all time, and the second-highest of the ’60s, after The Sound of Music. Doctor Zhivago has outlasted both the Cold War and its initial critical reputation to endure as one of the most beloved romances ever made.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
