Doctor Zhivago at 60: David Lean’s sweeping romantic relic endures

Julie Christie remains as magnetic as ever in the mammoth big screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s once dangerous novelThere’s no more perfect illustration of the cinematic crossroads of the mid-1960s than the year Julie Christie had in 1965. First, she starred as an amoral model in John Schlesinger’s Darling, a snapshot of Swinging London that reflected the trendy, flashy, forward-thinking culture that had seduced young adults. Then she starred as an elusive Russian beauty in Doctor Zhivago, a three-hour-plus historical epic from David Lean that was as stodgy and old-fashioned as Darling was suggestive of the future. There was an appetite for both that year – credit Christie’s astonishing magnetism for that, at least in part – but a sense that one era was crashing into another and times were about to change.It seems fitting, then, that Doctor Zhivago is about what happens when history takes a turn and a band of insurgents make a once-stable and familiar place seem completely unrecognizable. It’s easy to imagine a master like Lean, who’d just made Lawrence of Arabia a few years earlier, feeling a bit like his hero, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), a celebrated poet whose work suddenly falls out of favor after the Russian Revolution. Though Doctor Zhivago was honored with a raft of Oscar nominations – and five wins, mostly in technical categories – many contemporary reviews had dismissed it as an ossified romance, disengaged with the harsh realities of early-to-mid-1900s Russia. Even 60 years later, it feels like a relic of an earlier era. Continue reading...