Before Big: The Early Films of David Lean
September 19, 2008 - October 11, 2008
David Lean has a big reputation as the director of upscale epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But before the advent of the immense, Lean directed a host of brilliant dramas notable for their appropriate proportions. You could say Lean learned his craft under fire. His first directorial effort, In Which We Serve (1942), came forth as the blitz of London ebbed. Already evident in this inaugural project were beautifully nuanced settings, lively narrative tempo, and a complicated moral lesson, heightened by the vigorous delivery of top British actors. But Lean was no novice. By the early forties, he had already gained stature as an inspired film editor, with such classic films as One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Pygmalion, and The 49th Parallel bearing his mark. However, it was his association with Noel Coward, the popular playwright, actor, and composer, that distinguished his formative films. Coward wrote and codirected In Which We Serve, and played the lead as a ship’s captain; This Happy Breed, Brief Encounter, and Blithe Spirit soon followed, all sporting Coward’s beautifully realized and sometimes controversial scripts. It was not until Lean jumped ship for another great British writer, Charles Dickens, grandly adapting both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, that he was able to fully free himself from another’s mantle. Before Big presents recently restored prints of ten modestly mounted and crisply crafted films by David Lean, most in glorious black and white.
Steve Seid
Video Curator
Friday, September 19, 2008
6:30 p.m. Brief Encounter
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in a true classic of thwarted passion. “Only those with a heart and brain of stone could fail to be moved.”—Guardian (U.K.)
Saturday, September 20, 2008
3:00 p.m. Great Expectations
Lean vividly renders young Pip’s rise in “the most felicitous adaptation of a Dickens novel ever.”—Village Voice
Saturday, September 20, 2008
6:00 p.m. Blithe Spirit
Noel Coward’s cynical wit takes a supernatural turn as Rex Harrison is haunted by the ghost of his first wife.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
6:30 p.m. In Which We Serve
Noel Coward wrote, codirected, and starred in this stiff-upper-lip saga of a British naval vessel in World War II.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
6:30 p.m. Hobson’s Choice
Charles Laughton as a domineering Victorian father who gets his comeuppance from a determined daughter. “A timeless delight.”—Time Out
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
7:00 p.m. This Happy Breed
In the story of one middle-class family, Lean and Noel Coward create a microcosm of Britain between the wars. “Of all Lean’s early work, it remains one of his most elegant, understated and sincere.”—London Film Festival
Friday, October 3, 2008
6:30 p.m. The Passionate Friends
This gorgeous rediscovery is a fascinating counterpart to Brief Encounter, starring Trevor Howard and Lean’s then wife Ann Todd.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
3:00 p.m. Oliver Twist
Lean’s second Dickens adaptation is “textbook-perfect cinema.”—Village Voice
Sunday, October 5, 2008
3:00 p.m. Madeleine
The enigmatic Ann Todd plays Madeleine Smith, the center of a real-life murder case in 1850s Glasgow, in this moody romantic mystery.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
6:30 p.m. The Sound Barrier
Ralph Richardson is an industrialist driven to create a supersonic plane in this drama that anticipates Lean’s later epics.
Series presented in association with the British Film Institute, and organized at PFA by Steve Seid. The first ten films directed by David Lean have been restored by the BFI National Archive and Granada International, in association with Studio Canal, and with the generous support of the David Lean Foundation.
Archival and restored prints are presented with support from the Packard Humanities Institute.
