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Created Dec 08, 2009 11:32PM PST • Edited Jan 16, 2022 10:05AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. The sugar: a terrific love story. The medicine: the wanton cruelty and dehumanization endemic to the nascent Soviet Union. Director David Lean – King of the Epics – reunited with Omar Sharif and several essential crew members from Lawrence of Arabia for this powerful concoction, adding in the sublimely talented young beauty Julie Christie as “Lara,” the muse.

   Mix in Lara’s Theme, one of the most successful leitmotifs in movie history, and this 3¼ hour classic is a must-see for romance lovers and history buffs alike.

   Two words: five Oscars.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Omar Sharif & Julie Christie are a classic movie couple, distinctive and touching.

   Christie proved herself a stellar actor in the scene where she discovers Zhivago’s poetry about her character: Idly curious at first, her face slowly registers profound emotional impact even as she raises an arm to deflect her poet-lover’s interruption of her reverie. Wow.

   Sharif’s Zhivago has come to personify the heroically sensitive leading man.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

   Geraldine Chaplin (yes, Charlie’s daughter) is rather wan as Zhivago’s wife.

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

   Alec Guinness brings his trademark understated intelligence to the role of Communist enforcer.

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    David Lean knew how to put historical epics on screen in grand fashion. Reuniting with his Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter (Robert Bolt), cinematographer (Freddie Young) and composer (Maurice Jarre), it seems he could have hardly missed.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

    The framing scenes at the beginning and end of the movie are a bit difficult to comprehend and more than a bit stilted.

12. Play Great 4.0

    Boris Pasternak’s autobiographical novel won him the Nobel prize and brought the ire of the Soviet authorities down on his head, hardly a fair deal.

    According to Wikipedia, Bill Mauldin won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1959 for a cartoon that showed Pasternak in Siberia, splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says to another prisoner, “I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?”

13. Music Great 4.0

    Maurice Jarre’s Lara’s Theme lifts the heart to this day.

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.7

    Mild of language, but pretty strong in its violence, especially for a 60s movie. Beware especially a chastely filmed rape scene.

17. Sex Titillating 1.8

18. Violence Fierce 2.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.4

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Revolutionary Communist regimes … claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands in the remarkable expectation that their attitudes, values, and goals will ‘fit’ better in a foreign country than in their native land.

    So wrote former US Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick in her classic Commentary article Dictatorships & Double Standards. Doctor Zhivago illuminates this truth in moving fashion.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.7

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0