Barnaby Thompson‘s Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, a 105-minute doc about the mythical British auteur. will have a special Cannes Classic screening sometime next weekend.
Honestly? I feel a tad more excited over the Lean doc than catching the restored, full-length The Devils, which is the other Cannes Classics headliner. The Lean will deliver pure comfort vibes. I’ve seen Ken Russell‘s 1971 classic too many times, plus I can catch the 114-minute version in theatres next October.
Lean is one of HE’s pantheon directors — certainly topping anyone’s list of the finest British directors of the 20th century, side by side with Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson.
Lean burst into prominence with a distinctive, well-honed stamp from the early to mid ’40s (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist) to his gloriously and untouchably peak from the mid ’50s to early ’60s (Summertime, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia).
Lean’s artistic instincts softened somewhat with the popular, visually rapturous Dr. Zhivago (’65). He suffered a crisis of confidence in the wake of critical pans aimed at Ryan’s Daughter (’70), attempted this and that, returned to form with A Passage to India (’84) and then spent several years developing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s “Nostromo” before passing from cancer in 1991.
The more I think about it, the more I’m persuaded that Summertime, altogether, is Lean’s finest, most lyrical film. It was his personal favorite.
To what extent, if any, will Thompson delve into Lean’s somewhat unruly personal life? Creative collaborator Norman Spencer, who passed in ’24, claimed that Lean was a major, Warren Beatty-level hound.
Sight unseen I have a slight beef with Thompson’s doc, and that’s his unfortunate decision to feature director Brady Corbet as an observational talking head. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that the oddball, over-praised Corbet can tell me about Lean…nothing at all.
