I watched Dr. Zhivago last night for the sake of the SRO, who had only vague memories of it. It had been a few years since my last viewing. Released in late ’65 but seen by most audiences the following year, it will never be more than an eye-filling, handsomely composed soap opera, but it works because of Maurice Jarre‘s haunting score along with David Lean‘s incisive editing style.

My favorite character is Klaus Kinski‘s anarchist on the train, but the most interesting developed character is Tom Courtenay‘s Pasha Antipov (aka “Strelnikov”) and he has…what, five or six scenes? This chat with Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is his best moment:

In the film Rod Steiger‘s Komarovsky tells Yuri that Strelnikov, on the run from the Bolsheviks, was captured five miles from Yuriatin while apparently trying to find Lara, his abandoned wife. He refused to answer to any name but Pasha, and then committed suicide en route to his own execution.

In Boris Pasternak’s 1957 book, Pasha finds only Yuri when he arrives in Yuriatin. From a Wikidot summary: “Yuri and Pasha are both walking dead men, having lost what was most vital to them somewhere along the way. They are Russians though, so they drink and talk hours into the night. Then Yuri goes to bed. Pasha takes a walk, and shoots himself in the head. Yuri finds his corpse in the morning.”

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We’re two weeks away from the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rosza, who is currently my favorite classical-styled movie-score composer. I change my allegiance all the time — Bernard Herrmann, Maurice Jarre, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman — but I always come back to Rosza.

A short list of Rozsa’s classic scores — Double Indemnity, Spellbound, The Killers (one of the best noir scores ever), Brute Force, The Naked City, Madame Bovary, Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table, Lust for Life, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, El Cid. Rosza’s scores performed the required duties (augmenting the moods and themes, intensifying the emotion) but they work on their own terms.

I posted the following about Rosza’s King of Kings score on 12.21.10: “Rosza sometimes let his costume-epic scores become slightly over-heated, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rosza really had soul.

“Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch that Nicholas Ray’s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rosza described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and it’s obvious that Rosza came closer to capturing the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than anyone else on the team (Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan, producer Samuel Bronston).”

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Kino Lorber is releasing a Bluray of Andre de Toth‘s The Indian Fighter on 5.9.17. Excerpt from from “Dust to Dust,” posted on 5.30.14. “Have you ever seen The Indian Fighter? I didn’t think so. Have you ever heard of it? There’s no reason you should have. A 1955 Kirk Douglas mediocrity, co-written by Ben Hecht, opened at the Mayfair (later the DeMille) on 12.21.55. Not awful but generic. Why should succeeding generations pay the slightest attention to a film made on auto-pilot? By people who wanted only a commercial success and not much else? Don’t kid yourself — the fate of The Indian Fighter awaits 80% to 90% of the films that have opened in the 21st Century. Deep down producers and directors know it’s not just a matter of dollars and cents, which is why some occasionally try to make films that sink into people’s souls on some level. Because they want future generations (including their own descendants) to speak about them with affection or at least respect. It’s about legacy.”

Laurent Bouzereau and Mark Harris‘s Five Came Back, a brilliant three-hour doc about the transformative experiences of five name-brand Hollywood directors (John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and John Huston) during World War II, premiered last night on Netflix. Please see it, and if at all possible in a single sitting. Here’s my 3.22 review.

That said, I’m obliged to re-irrigate a dispute between Harris, author of the same-titled 2014 book, and Ford biographer Joseph McBride about the doc’s claim that Ford’s service as a WWII documentarian-propagandist basically ended after he went on a three-day bender following the D-Day invasion.

In a 3.23 HE piece called “Ford’s Bravery, Drinking, Sentimentality,” McBride articulated his dispute with Harris based on Harris’ book vs. what McBride had reported in “Searching for John Ford,” a respected 2001 biography.

But yesterday McBride doubled down and then some after seeing the Netflix series [see below] and taking it all in. I naturally passed his complaint along to Harris. Harris came back this morning with a stern and specific reply [also below].

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