Posted on Sunday, 5.17, roughly 2 pm: I’ve just snagged a last-minute ticket to tonight’s (7 pm) screening of Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean! I’d tried reserving a seat days ago at the proper time but the system said no.
11:25 pm update: Barnaby Thompson’s Maverick is a purely pleasurable, right-down-the-middle, devotional movie-buff documentary about the life and legend of the late, great David Lean.
I felt constantly wowed, massaged, comforted, reminded, elevated, amused. The doc does everything you want it to do. It takes care of the flock. And that final Lawrence of Arabia smash cut to the closing credits? Perfect.
There was a block of at least 45 or 50 unfilled seats when the doc began…curious.
Romantic-sexual sidenote: By any measure Lean’s romantic life was episodic, fitful and even turbulent — never quite stable or settled. Thompson doesn’t shrink from the fact that Lean was a serious hound (the sexual conquests were allegedly in the hundreds) and that he wasn’t much of a stayer.
Lean apparently lived for those first-bloom hormonal highs, but once the relationship settled into the usual humdrum, up-and-down, we-need-to-put-in-the-work phase, he was always sniffing around for the next one. Or so it seemed.
This didn’t go down too well with some women in the seats.
Narrator Kenneth Branagh reads two or three love letters that Lean wrote over the decades, and the last one (a heartfelt confession, penned in the early ‘80s to the much-younger Sandra Holtz) suggested that Lean was something of a serial cad, crooning the same old sentiments decade after decade.
This prodded an audible reaction inside the Salle Bunuel — women coughing, groaning, clearing their throats, chuckling. You shoulda been there.
