Before Big: The Early Films of David Lean

9/19/08 to 10/11/08

David Lean's early films are smaller in scale than his famous epics, but nonetheless “lively, stirring, and an inspiration . . . in love with the screen's power and the combustion in editing” (David Thomson). We present ten of these wonderfully crafted British classics in recently restored prints.

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Brief Encounter, September 19

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Past Films

The Sound Barrier
- Saturday, October 11 6:30 PM
Ralph Richardson is an industrialist driven to create a supersonic plane in this drama that anticipates Lean's later epics.
Madeleine
- Sunday, October 5 3:00 PM
The enigmatic Ann Todd plays Madeleine Smith, the center of a real-life murder case in 1850s Glasgow, in this moody romantic mystery.
Oliver Twist
- Saturday, October 4 3:00 PM
Lean's second Dickens adaptation is “textbook-perfect cinema.”-Village Voice
The Passionate Friends
- Friday, October 3 6:30 PM
This gorgeous rediscovery is a fascinating counterpart to Brief Encounter, starring Trevor Howard and Lean's then wife Ann Todd.
This Happy Breed
- Wednesday, October 1 7:00 PM
In the story of one middle-class family, Lean and Noel Coward create a microcosm of Britain between the wars. “Of all Lean's early work, it remains one of his most elegant, understated and sincere.”-London Film Festival
Hobson's Choice
- Saturday, September 27 6:30 PM
Charles Laughton as a domineering Victorian father who gets his comeuppance from a determined daughter. “A timeless delight.”-Time Out
In Which We Serve
- Thursday, September 25 6:30 PM
Noel Coward wrote, codirected, and starred in this stiff-upper-lip saga of a British naval vessel in World War II.
Blithe Spirit
- Saturday, September 20 6 PM
Noel Coward's cynical wit takes a supernatural turn as Rex Harrison is haunted by the ghost of his first wife.
Great Expectations
- Saturday, September 20 3:00 PM
Lean vividly renders young Pip's rise in “the most felicitous adaptation of a Dickens novel ever.”-Village Voice
Brief Encounter
- Friday, September 19 6:30 PM
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in a true classic of thwarted passion. “Only those with a heart and brain of stone could fail to be moved.”-Guardian (U.K.)

Before Big: The Early Films of David Lean

9/19/08 to 10/11/08

David Lean has a big reputation as the director of upscale epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But before the advent of the immense, Lean directed a host of brilliant dramas notable for their appropriate proportions. You could say Lean learned his craft under fire. His first directorial effort, In Which We Serve (1942), came forth as the blitz of London ebbed. Already evident in this inaugural project were beautifully nuanced settings, lively narrative tempo, and a complicated moral lesson, heightened by the vigorous delivery of top British actors. But Lean was no novice. By the early forties, he had already gained stature as an inspired film editor, with such classic films as One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Pygmalion, and The 49th Parallel bearing his mark. However, it was his association with Noel Coward, the popular playwright, actor, and composer, that distinguished his formative films. Coward wrote and codirected In Which We Serve, and played the lead as a ship's captain; This Happy Breed, Brief Encounter, and Blithe Spirit soon followed, all sporting Coward's beautifully realized and sometimes controversial scripts. It was not until Lean jumped ship for another great British writer, Charles Dickens, grandly adapting both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, that he was able to fully free himself from another's mantle. Before Big presents recently restored prints of ten modestly mounted and crisply crafted films by David Lean, most in glorious black and white.

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Series presented in association with the British Film Institute, and organized at PFA by Steve Seid. The first ten films directed by David Lean have been restored by the BFI National Archive and Granada International, in association with Studio Canal, and with the generous support of the David Lean Foundation.

Archival and restored prints are presented with support from the Packard Humanities Institute.