Amazon.com essential video: David Lean focused all his talent as an epic-maker on Boris Pasternak's sweeping novel about a doctor-poet in revolutionary Russia. The results may sometimes veer toward soap opera, especially with the screen frequently filled with adoring close-ups of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, but Lean's gift for cramming the screen with spectacle is not to be denied. The streets of Moscow, the snowy steppes of Russia, the house in the country taken over by ice; these are re-created with Lean's unerring sense of grandness. The movie is so lush and so long that it becomes an irresistible wallow, even when logic suffers--like Gone with the Wind before it and Titanic after. Sharif, who achieved stardom in Lean's previous film, Lawrence of Arabia, mostly looks noble, but the supporting cast is spiky: Rod Steiger as a fat-cat monster, Tom Courtenay as a self-righteous revolutionary, and Klaus Kinski and Alec Guinness in smaller roles. Geraldine Chaplin, in her adult debut, plays the doctor's compliant wife. Robert Bolt's screenplay won one of the film's five Oscars, with another going to perhaps the most immediately recognizable element of the movie: Maurice Jarre's romantic music, with its hugely popular "Lara's Theme" weaving in and out of a swooning score. --Robert Horton
A masterpiece! What am I suppose to say? words cannot describe the delicacy of its squeamish characters.
Great Film After All These Years... Dr. Zhivago is still a great film after more than 40 years since its original release. My greatest moment is the very end, where Dr. Z. suffers a heart attack and collapses just after he spots a woman he thinks is Lara.
Doctor Zhivago I love this movie and watch it over and over. Thank you for sending it to me so quickly.
Dr. Zhivago ALL TIME BEST Dr. Zhivago IS one of the BEST movies of ALL TIME. A CLASSIC in drama, and the haunting "Lara's Theme" is ever popular music. Acting is superb, and movie should have won OSCAR for best film.
Didn't enjoy it Dr Zhivago, does any film have a more "classic" reputation? I saw this last night and to my surprise, really didn't enjoy it at all.
Granted, the cinematography is amazing. The scenes of snowy night-time Russian streets are incredibly atmospheric even on a TV- it must have been enthralling on a big screen. The music score too is very good, albeit a bit repetitive.
The problem I really had with this movie is that I found the characters so fundamentally unlikeable that getting immersed into the movie impossible. From a greasy goateed mumbling Rod Steiger calling Julie Christie a slut, to the doctor assuring Dr Zhivago that he'll "put the b*tch in hospital" (nice), to the young idealist who says he loves Marxism more than Lara (who said romance is dead?) to the expressionless policeman Alec Guiness who seems to be a perambulatory window dummy. Then Dr Zhivago himself, a young man who marries his stepsister and then makes it quite clear that he fancies Lara. Marrying your stepsister? That's pretty sleazy.
Apart from that the film is so obviously a product of the 1960s, both visually and stylistically that the kitsch factor is hard to ignore.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
