‘Zhivago’ Reduced to an Epic

The lights dimmed, the hidden amplifiers blared out the national anthem of Czarist Russia, and the man behind me even stopped chewing popcorn to whistle the tune. I must say I was prepared for the worst. One more epic to cross! Yet for once I was happily surprised. Dr. Zhivago is not only not a bad picture, as epics go it is quite a good one. Parts of it were shot in Finland near the Arctic Circle, parts in the mountains of Spain north of Madrid. In both cases the sweep and stretch of landscape are magnificent, the battle action far more convincing than in most three-hour epics. Such scenes as the opening one where the child Yuri Zhivago walks slowly in his mother’s funeral procession across the almost boundless autumn steppe I found restrained and extremely moving. And for once the child actors throughout the film behave like credible children and not like the nasal, precocious scene-mugging graduates of some Hollywood charm school. American children may or may not be the world’s most offensive, but American screen children certainly are. Less convincing are the Moscow street sets constructed near the Madrid airport. In spite of the Kremlin background and the grind of the antique streetcars, I sensed a cousinship with those Western sets I used to see in the old silent days at Anderson’s Mattapan Theater; and when the Cossacks appeared I was half waiting for William S. Hart to come galloping round the corner, pistols blazing, to disperse them.

Not very inventively the film opens with Zhivago’s half-brother Yevgraf, a Red Army general — played by Alec Guinness—questioning a young girl construction worker (Rita Tushingham) who he thinks may be the dead Zhivago’s missing daughter. It is pleasant to see the ugly charm of Rita Tushingham’s expressive face even if merely sandwiched in as a redundant prelude and postlude to the picture. With the general’s questioning comes the inevitable flashback to what should have been the opening scene—the mother’s funeral. From then on the life history of the student-poet, poet-doctor continues, the humane but apolitical man fumbling his way through the war, the October Revolution, marriage, a mistress, rural escape, and finally death.

FR

About the Author

Francis Russell

Featured Tags

The lights dimmed, the hidden amplifiers blared out the national anthem of Czarist Russia, and the man behind me even stopped chewing popcorn to whistle the tune. I must say I was prepared for the worst. One more epic to cross! Yet for once I was happily surprised. Dr. Zhivago is not only not a bad picture, as epics go it is quite a good one. Parts of it were shot in Finland near the Arctic Circle, parts in the mountains of Spain north of Madrid. In both cases the sweep and stretch of landscape are magnificent, the battle action far more convincing than in most three-hour epics. Such scenes as the opening one where the child Yuri Zhivago walks slowly in his mother’s funeral procession across the almost boundless autumn steppe I found restrained and extremely moving. And for once the child actors throughout the film behave like credible children and not like the nasal, precocious scene-mugging graduates of some Hollywood charm school. American children may or may not be the world’s most offensive, but American screen children certainly are. Less convincing are the Moscow street sets constructed near the Madrid airport. In spite of the Kremlin background and the grind of the antique streetcars, I sensed a cousinship with those Western sets I used to see in the old silent days at Anderson’s Mattapan Theater; and when the Cossacks appeared I was half waiting for William S. Hart to come galloping round the corner, pistols blazing, to disperse them.

Not very inventively the film opens with Zhivago’s half-brother Yevgraf, a Red Army general — played by Alec Guinness—questioning a young girl construction worker (Rita Tushingham) who he thinks may be the dead Zhivago’s missing daughter. It is pleasant to see the ugly charm of Rita Tushingham’s expressive face even if merely sandwiched in as a redundant prelude and postlude to the picture. With the general’s questioning comes the inevitable flashback to what should have been the opening scene—the mother’s funeral. From then on the life history of the student-poet, poet-doctor continues, the humane but apolitical man fumbling his way through the war, the October Revolution, marriage, a mistress, rural escape, and finally death.