The movie that sent David Lean into Hollywood exile: “It had such an awful effect on me”
David Lean is one of the most seminal directors in Hollywood history. His name became synonymous with the large-scale epics that attracted droves of people to cinemas in the 1950s and 1960s, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, and, most famously, Lawrence of Arabia. However, after nearly 30 years of helming some of the most iconic films ever made, Lean experienced a devastating failure that prompted him to swear off moviemaking for 14 long years. Interestingly, though, his exile can be attributed to one fateful day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.
Lean began his career working in his native Britain. He made four films with famed playwright Noël Coward, including 1945’s Brief Encounter, which landed him his first Academy Award nominations. Lean followed this up with two adaptations of Charles Dickens’ novels—Great Expectations and Oliver Twist—in 1946 and 1948, respectively. It would take until 1957 for him to make his breakthrough on an international scale, though, with The Bridge on the River Kwai winning seven Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director.’
Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago followed in 1962 and 1965, with Zhivago being Lean’s most significant box office hit yet. He was on top of the Hollywood mountain and had his pick of the best projects – but when he finally returned to screens with Ryan’s Daughter in 1970, his fall from the top of that mountain was precipitous.
You see, even though Ryan’s Daughter – a doomed romance set in Ireland in 1916 – was a box office success and won two Oscars, its critical reception was downright vicious. Lean hadn’t experienced the critical community tearing one of his pictures to shreds before, and it prompted a meeting with the National Society of Film Critics at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. Lean wanted to find out first-hand where the country’s most esteemed critics felt he had gone wrong, but after two hours of career assassination, he wished he hadn’t bothered.
“I sensed trouble from the moment I sat down,” Lean admitted in an interview many years later. He revealed that Time magazine critic Richard Schickel started off proceedings by bluntly asking, “Mr Lean, could you please explain to us how the man who directed Brief Encounter could produce a piece of bullshit like Ryan’s Daughter?”
This knocked the 62-year-old helmer for six, but worse was yet to come. “It carried on from there,” Lean confessed. “They’re very good with their tongues. I was there for about two hours and Pauline Kael got pretty sharp-tongued. They just took me to bits. In the end, I remember saying, ‘I don’t think you ladies and gentlemen will be satisfied until I do a film in 16mm in black and white, and Pauline Kael said, ‘No, you can have colour.’ That was the end of it. Horrible.”
Despite being one of the most successful directors in history, this public excoriation had a profound effect on Lean, who truly began to question his worth in Hollywood. “It really had quite an awful effect on me for several years,” he admitted. “In fact, I didn’t want to do a film again. You begin to think that maybe they’re right. Why on earth am I making films if I don’t have to? It shakes one’s confidence terribly.”
Ultimately, it took Lean seven years before he even considered mounting another film, a two-part epic entitled The Lawbreakers and The Long Arm. That project eventually died when Lean couldn’t secure financing from Warner Bros., though it was later retrofitted into becoming Mel Gibson’s The Bounty.
In the end, Lean finally returned in 1984 with A Passage to India, a triumphant return to form that once again saw him nominated for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ at the Oscars. His exile had ended – but he would never forget the chastening afternoon that caused him to walk away for over a decade in the first place.
