Laurence Olivier & David Lean

Laurence Olivier & David Lean
& British Cinema

1)The British industry passed a quota law in 1927 to insure that British cinemas
    were showing a certain number of British films.
2)Many British directors left the UK for Hollywood
3)Most notably Alfred Hitchcock
4)Also successful actors: Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier & Charlie Chaplin

British industry - Post WWII 15 years, produced 4 types per M&K (?)
1)There were the polished, fluently acted adaptations of literary classics
2)David Lean’s adaptations of Charles Dickens and Laurence Olivier’s later
    adaptions of Shakespeare created much of the momentum for this genre.

Hamlet clip
Analysis of camera movement  by Terrence Rafferty:

"The restless but oddly serene camera movement is unnerving because it feels subjective yet we can’t quite identify the subject. Something—as implacable as a monster in a horror movie—is stalking these people, observing them from impossible heights and across great distances, while itself remaining out of sight. In Olivier’s Hamlet, we seem to be watching human behavior, in all its awful futility, through the cold, unblinking eyes of God."

Clip for Class - Hamlet
1) Laurence Olivier delivers Shakespeare's "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy.
Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, 1948):

Clip from class - click here

Great Expectations - essay by Adrian Turner (Criterion)

"Lean’s previous film was Brief Encounter—a romantic fantasy disguised as a realistic drama. Great Expectations reveals a director free of any stage conventions and relishing his craft. The opening of the film has been studied for years and is held up as an exemplar of film editing. But it is also a brilliant synthesis of location shooting (the pan across the marshes with their lonely gibbets) with a studio set (graves with a back-projected church and looming sky), in which the hero, Pip, has his first fateful meeting with the fearsome Magwitch.

Straight from the first two pages of Dickens, Pip’s narration and his description of the graveyard is so thick with detail that the shock of the criminal is diminished. It takes a movie, and a visual stylist like Lean, to translate this into pictures. From the very start, Lean brings Great Expectations close to the horror film—and the scene has been copied in horror films ever since."

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946):
 

Clip we saw - opening sequence Click Here

Film Review Click here

Top 100 British Films from BFI Click Here