With Star Wars: The Force Awakens breaking box office records daily we thought we'd look back at another colossal hit, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this week. Though it places in the the ten all-time biggest movie blockbusters, David Lean's adaptation of the best seller Doctor Zhivago is oddly among the least celebrated/remembered of those record-shattering successes. But it wasn't always so. Drop it right between 1939's Gone With the Wind and 1997's Titanic and you have the complete trilogy box set of 3 hour plus epic doomed romances that movie audiences obsessed over and obsessed over and obsessed over. (Binge screen them all now and you'll be done in about 11 hours!)
Though Omar Sharif (who plays the title character Yuri Zhivago) recently passed away, the other three members of Zhivago's political/romantic quartet are still very much with us: Julie Christie is, of course, one of the all time greats and though she's resistant to working much since her last triumph in Away From Her (2007), Lara is just one of many standouts in her great filmography; Oscar nominated Tom Courtenay co-stars as Pasha, Lara's idealogue husband (and you can and should see Courtenay in theaters now as Charlotte Rampling's confused husband in 45 Years); and Geraldine Chaplin (who did fine work recently in the Dominican Republic Oscar submission Sand Dollars) completes the romantic quartet as Zhivago's wife Tonya.
For the 50th Anniversary, four members of Team Experience agreed to share their favorite scenes after the jump...
That Doctor Zhivago works, under the threat of being weighed down by so many arcs and so many simultaneous things happening, is half the pleasure itself of it. Love story it may be, it’s interested in more than just its romantic central pair. The moment I went from merely liking it to loving it is about an hour in. It’s that moment when divergent arcs begin hurtling together – catastrophic for the characters, but exciting for the audience as the after effects will ripple through the entire film. Lara, recently wronged by Komarovsky races off to confront him at his house and is directed to a Christmas party where an engagement between Yuri and Tonya is about to be announced. On the way she’s intercepted by (soon-to-be) jilted lover Pasha. It’s hard to say where the scene ends and begins, locations change from Komarovsky’s house to the streets to the dancefloor a single forward movement makes it feel like one “scene”. The moment peaks when Lara enters the hall, though to “confront” Komarovsky. There’s a gorgeous moment when Lara emerges furtively from behind a statue and crosses Tonya as Yuri enters the scene and Lara drifts off. It’s such a brief, but striking, encapsulation of the way the film is always juggling with who is at the centre of the story. And, it’s a key moment of Geraldine Chaplin in the forefront of the shot. As the film continues and poor Pasha grows bitter the film persists above traditional romance by actually granting Tonya dignity as someone more than incidental.
-Andrew Kendall
You don't have to be an expert in body language to see that Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Tonya Gromeko (Geraldine Chaplin) aren't the happiest couple. But what also comes through in my favorite moment is not so much unhappiness with each other, but with the circumstances they find themselves in... and I don’t just mean the Christmas Party at the Sventitskys.
Yuri’s first love may always be Julie Christie’s Lara, but he does truly love Tonya, too. When they eventually separate it is not by choice but fate that keeps them apart, just like it did Yuri and Lara before. The image of Sharif and Chaplin sitting on those steps encapsulates, for me, Doctor Zhivago‘s approach to love and relationships. They’re grand and romantic, at times, but they’re also complicated, full of hard work and compromises. Doesn’t mean they’re not worth it.
-Sebastian Nebel
Tom Courtenay's Pasha/Strelnikov was the film's sole acting nomination
When the idealistic, but meek, Pasha (Tom Courtenay) is “last” seen in Doctor Zhivago, he’s off to join the Revolution, leaving behind his beautiful new wife Lara to fend for herself, after all the Revolution means more than anything as petty as love. Then one day Lara finds herself a “war widow”, which helps her accept the title doctor’s love. Therefore it’s completely unexpected to discover that Pasha isn’t only alive, but has become someone else! Not physically, but spiritually and emotionally. As we listen to horrendous stories of a certain Strelnikov who burns villages down to the ground without thinking twice, poor Pasha never crosses our head, and yet all of a sudden there he is. David Lean mercilessly cuts away to show a woman’s tragic face, followed by a severe shot of the new Pasha. It’s so chilling, that we’re deservedly sent to our intermission afterwards.
-Jose Solis
When I think of Doctor Zhivago, I always see their eyes first. It's not just that the wintry fur costume designs are constantly framing Sharif and Christie's eyes but how striking their juxtaposed beauty actually is. It's a study in contrasts with Omar Sharif's warm honey and Julie Christie's cool blue locked in longing and what-might-have-been fascination. My favorite scene comes late in the film when they enter Zhivago's abandoned Varykino estate which is equally contradictory. It's so crystalline that it looks weirdly fragile and diorama-like though its not breaking anytime soon, all sheathed in snow and ice. This ice palace, like their love affair, is breathtakingly beautiful to imagine but in the end impossible to inhabit.
-Nathaniel R
Have you ever seen Doctor Zhivago? If you have what do you remember most clearly about it?