David Lean @ 100.

David Lean would be 100 today and the New Yorker's Anthony Lane assumes that, thanks to "the British reserve that Lean both typified and struggled to escape," the only "fanfare or fuss" the Brits will bother themselves with is a two-month-long retrospective at BFI Southbank in June and July - but that's simply not the case. As the Telegraph's David Gritten notes, the "Carnforth railway station in Lancashire will be the centre of celebrations, with tributes, screenings and an exhibition about his life."

And as Kathryn Flett reports in the Observer, "There is now something of a Brief Encounter mini-industry at Carnforth, what with the famous clock, the visitors' centre and the delightful refreshment room - a replica of the set, which was itself a copy of the original."

Updated through 3/30.

"My own favorite Lean films are Great Expectations, still one of the most watchable film adaptations of Charles Dickens, and Brief Encounter, a story of unfulfilled love that generates more heat than its description would indicate," writes Peter Nellhaus at Edward Copeland on Film.

Back to Lane: "The glory of Lean was that, with [Lawrence of Arabia], he summoned his earliest memory of awe and, perhaps for the last time, restored our illusion that a mass medium could be a miracle. And the sadness of Lean is that he went on clinging to that belief while the rest of us watched it drift away. He died in 1991. Thank heaven he was not around for the iPhone."

More in German: Marc Hairapetian (film-dienst) and Verena Leuken (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).

Update, 3/30: FilmInFocus runs a chapter from Kevin Brownlow's David Lean.

Posted by dwhudson at March 25, 2008 5:40 AM