WHAT: Doctor Zhivago (1965, DCP)
WHEN: February 13, 2019 1 PM & 7 PM
WHERE: Pickwick Theatre, Park Ridge, IL
WHAT ELSE: Organist Jay Warren performs prelude music at 6:30 PM.
HOW MUCH: $12/$10 advance or $8 for the 1 PM matinee. Click Here for advance tickets!
NOTE: There will be a 10-minute intermission.
The balalaikas are playing and the Cossacks are riding. The snow is falling and love is in the air! Is there a better time than Valentine’s Day Eve to present this sweeping spectacle of romance and revolution?
When Theatre 1 was renovated this season into the “MEGATHEATRE,” one of the first directors we thought of showcasing was David Lean, who is best-known for his large-scale productions that featured vast landscapes. Few directors created a stronger sense of environment, whether it was in the jungle, the desert, or in the frozen countryside. But Lean’s films were more than spectacle. They’ve been described as intimate epics, and though the screen is often filled with beautiful images and exquisite details, we never lose sight of the personal story. Seeing a David Lean film is an event– the kind we strive to recreate at the Pickwick Theatre. His old-school style of filmmaking is something that is sorely missed these days in our age of excess and visual overload.
This Valentine’s Day, we proudly present one of the great romantic epics (and one of our most requested titles)– a film that can only be seen in a theatre. Based on Boris Pasternak’s highly-acclaimed novel (which was banned in Soviet Russia), this is the story of a poet and doctor, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), whose life is forever changed after meeting the beautiful Lara (Julie Christie). Though their lives together are disrupted by circumstance, not even the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War can keep them apart. Doctor Zhivago (1965) is a popular and entertaining epic that received five Oscars, including Freddie Young’s breath-taking cinematography and Maurice Jarre’s memorable film score. Geraldine Chaplin (as Zhivago’s wife), Rod Steiger, and Alec Guinness (as the half-brother who frames the story) also star.
On a personal note, Doctor Zhivago is a film I had not seen in its entirety until only recently. One of the reasons was that I knew this was a film that should only be seen in a theatre, so I deliberately avoided it on that basis alone. Secondly, I assumed it would be a Gone With the Wind-type melodrama, only set in Russia. Like the 1939 Hollywood film, it’s the love story that people remember. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but get wrapped up in the drama, too. The film holds audiences and wields this power because Lean, with his writer Robert Bolt, instilled the film with some of the complexity of a great Russian novel (which, in fact, is what the film is based on). In just over three hours, Lean tells the history of a people, and against the Communist backdrop, we follow a burning love that no ideology can extinguish.
~MCH
