Sir David Lean CBE (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor, widely considered one of the most important figures of British cinema.

Lean was a half-hearted schoolboy with a dreamy nature who was labelled a "dud" of a student;[11] he left school in the Christmas Term of 1926, at the age of 18,[12] and entered his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice.

[11] Bored by his work, Lean spent every evening in the cinema, and in 1927, after an aunt had advised him to find a job he enjoyed, he visited Gaumont Studios where his obvious enthusiasm earned him a month's trial without pay.

As Tony Sloman wrote in 1999, "As the varied likes of David Lean, Robert Wise, Terence Fisher and Dorothy Arzner have proved, the cutting rooms are easily the finest grounding for film direction.

These films are This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945) with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as quietly understated clandestine lovers, torn between their unpredictable passion and their respective orderly middle-class marriages in suburban England.

It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness, who had battled with Lean to give more depth to his role as an obsessively correct British commander who is determined to build the best possible bridge for his Japanese captors in Burma.

This was the first project of Lean's with a screenplay by playwright Robert Bolt, rewriting an original script by Michael Wilson (one of the two blacklisted writers of Bridge on the River Kwai).

It recounts the life of T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who is depicted in the film as uniting the squabbling Bedouin peoples of the Arab peninsula to fight in World War I and then push on for independence.

After some hesitation, Alec Guinness appeared here in his fourth David Lean film as the Arab leader Prince Faisal, despite his misgivings from their conflicts on Bridge on the River Kwai.

Starring the aging Hollywood 'bad boy' Robert Mitchum in an uncharacteristic role as a long-suffering Irish husband and British actress Sarah Miles as his faithless young wife, the film received far fewer positive reviews than the director's previous work, being particularly savaged by the New York critics.

Some critics felt the film's massive visual scale on gorgeous Irish beaches and extended running time did not suit its small-scale romantic narrative.

Time critic Richard Schickel asked Lean point blank how he, the director of Brief Encounter, could have made "a piece of bullshit" like Ryan's Daughter.

His female star, in the complex role of a confused young British woman who falsely accuses an Indian man of attempted rape, gained Australian actress Judy Davis her first Academy nomination.

He assembled an all-star cast, including Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lambert, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Quaid, with Georges Corraface as the title character.

"[37] According to David Ehrenstein, "What all [his] brilliant, seemingly disparate works have in common is the clarity and precision of Lean's filmmaking technique, as well as his steely resolve in using it to attain poetic grandeur.

His ability to combine factual filigree and larger-than-life characters in a sometimes hallucinatory atmosphere has inspired generations of filmmakers to try to fuse the most ruthless documentation with the most elaborate myth-making."

The people may look like ants when first glimpsed against the vast sand dunes of an exacting Lean composition, or the icy Russian mountains, or the concrete façade of a dam, but we are soon invited to alight on individuals, and through the use of simple, visual clues, wonder about them and care about them.

The narrative itself may be literally bracketed by being presented as a flashback from either the central character (Brief Encounter, The Passionate Friends), a subordinate one (Doctor Zhivago), or a combination (In Which We Serve and, implicitly, Lawrence of Arabia).

Simple instances would be the hanging in Great Expectations (1946) or the Cossack charge in Doctor Zhivago, where there is no point-of-view shot of the terrible event but merely a slow move in to reveal the horror on the actors' faces.

[42]Steven Ross has written that Lean's films "reveal a consistently tragic vision of the romantic sensibility attempting to reach beyond the constraints and restrictions of everyday life", and that they tend to feature "intimate stories of a closely-knit group of characters [whose] fates are indirectly but powerfully shaped by history-shaking events going on around them."

"[43] Similarly, Lean biographer Gene D. Phillips writes that the director "saw in his style an attraction to characters who refuse to accept defeat, even when their most cherished hopes go unfulfilled.

"[45] In Sragow's view, Lean has "depicted the need for constricted modern men and women either to act out their dreams or preserve the life they have by making a scene or putting on a show―indulging in the histrionic to renew their sense of self and purpose.

So Lean's work contains an interesting paradox: the strong visual and literary legacy of British culture, which he loved and understood so well, combined with biting insights into the ludicrous aspects of a nation being forced to accept a less important role in the world.

The man is both a hero and a fool – a remarkable device to illustrate the state of Britain as she clung to meaningless tradition in a futile attempt to save her identity in the face of declining power.

John Orr, author of Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema, examines Lean in terms of "the stylised oscillation of romance and restraint that shapes so much of his work", as well as of "the intersection of culture and nature, where a story's momentous events are not only framed against landscape settings but also integrated into the very texture of the image that his camera produces."

He argues that "Lean could have given us kitsch, syrupy imitations of landscape photography, but his staging and cutting blend so fluently that his evocation of the romantic sublime is linked, inextricably, to his découpage and sense of place.

Several of the many other later directors who have acknowledged significant influence by Lean include Stanley Kubrick,[51] Francis Ford Coppola,[52] George Lucas,[39] Spike Lee,[53] Sergio Leone,[54] Sir John Boorman,[55] Paul Thomas Anderson,[56] Lawrence Kasdan[57] and Guillermo del Toro.

For example, David Thomson, writing about Lean in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, comments:From 1952 to 1991, he made eight films—and in only one of them, I suggest —Lawrence—is the spectacle sufficient to mask the hollow rhetoric of the scripts.

"[62]The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther dismissed Lawrence of Arabia as "a huge, thundering camel-opera that tends to run down rather badly as it rolls on into its third hour and gets involved with sullen disillusion and political deceit".

[63] Writing in The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris remarked that Lawrence was "simply another expensive mirage, dull, overlong, and coldly impersonal ... on the whole I find it hatefully calculating and condescending".