Sat, Jan 27 at 12:45pm: Introduction from Nancy McGuire Roche, Assistant Professor of Motion Pictures at Belmont University | BUY TICKETS
Part of Winter Classics
During the Russian Revolution, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), is a young doctor who has been raised by his aunt and uncle following his father’s suicide. Yuri falls in love with beautiful Lara Guishar (Julie Christie), who has been having an affair with her mother’s lover, Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), an unscrupulous businessman. Yuri, however, ends up marrying his cousin, Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin). But when he and Lara meet again years later, the spark of love reignites. Based on the classic novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Boris Pasternak, David Lean’s 1965 epic is pure spectacle, tailor-made for the cinemascope screen in our 1925 Hall.
“DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is the first comprehensive attempt by the west to tell the story of the most convulsive event of the century, one of the most important in man’s history, with its still unfolding results and residue — the Russian Revolution. David Lean’s film does it in human terms and in the broad and flashing pageantry of historical inevitability.” —James Powers, Hollywood Reporter (Dec 23, 1965) “Stories about love in a world gone mad don't come any more gorgeous, or any more sweepingly epic, than this…. It requires effort, stamina through its long hours, but Lean creates moments of cinema for history (if not quite the vice versa).... And if Maurice Jarre’s soaring score, a landscape in itself, doesn’t move you then you have ice in your veins as cold as a Siberian winter.” —Ian Nathan, Empire Magazine (Jan 1, 2020) “Lean did nothing less than recreate Moscow and its countryside at the time of the Russian revolution, using locations in Spain and Canada (which supplied the vast landscape with the tiny train making its way across it). He accepted the challenge of setting most of the key scenes in winter, with all the attendant difficulties of photographing snow (both artificial and real). There is a moment when Zhivago and Lara enter the abandoned dacha, and the snow and frost have preceded them, turning everything into a winter fairyland. It is a scene where you simultaneously think about the skilled set decoration, and catch your breath at the beauty.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Apr 7, 1995)
