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Favorite David Lean Films

Movie list created by kathy

Sort by: Showing 17 items

Decade: Rating: List Type:

1609

8.2

8.3

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean
Based on the writings of T.E. Lawrence
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit and Omar Sharif

A flamboyant and controversial British military figure and his conflicted loyalties during his World War I service in the Middle East.

kathy's rating:

927

7.6

7.9

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Director: David Lean
Based on the novel by Boris Pasternak
Starring: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness, Siobhan McKenna, Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham and Tom Courtenay

The life of a Russian doctor/poet who, although married, falls for a political activist's wife and experiences hardships during the Bolshevik Revolution.

kathy's rating:

1124

8.1

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Director: David Lean
Starring: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins and Sessue Hayakawa

After settling his differences with a Japanese PoW camp commander, a British colonel co-operates to oversee his men's construction of a railway bridge for their captors - while oblivious to a plan by the Allies to destroy it.

kathy's rating:

105

7.2

7.4

Ryan's Daughter

Director: David Lean
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Christopher Jones, Leo McKern and Barry Foster

Set in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, a married woman in a small Irish village has an affair with a troubled British officer.

kathy's rating:

247

7.2

7.3

A Passage to India (1985)

Director: David Lean
Starring: Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee, Peggy Ashcroft, James Fox, Alec Guinness, Nigel Havers and Richard Wilson

Cultural mistrust and false accusations doom a friendship in British colonial India between an Indian doctor, an Englishwoman engaged to marry a city magistrate, and an English educator.

kathy's rating:

194

7.4

7.8

Oliver Twist (1948) (2002)

Director: David Lean
Based on the novel by Charles Dickens
Starring: Robert Newton, Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh, Francis L. Sullivan, Anthony Newley, John Howard Davies and Kathleen Harrison

Orphan Oliver Twist is expelled from the work house where he lives by the miserly Mr Bumble for daring to ask for more. After an unhappy apprenticeship to an undertaker, Oliver escapes to the foggy streets of London where he falls in with a group of thieves headed by the mercurial Fagin and the Artful Dodger.

kathy's rating:

7.6

7.7

Hobson's Choice

Director: David Lean
Based on the play by Harold Brighouse
Starring: Charles Laughton, John Mills, Brenda de Banzie, Daphne Anderson and Prunella Scales

Henry Hobson runs a successful bootmaker's shop in nineteenth-century Salford. A widower with a weakness for the pub opposite, he tries forcefully to run the lives of his three unruly daughters. When he decrees 'no marriages' to avoid the expensive matter of settlements, eldest daughter Maggie rebels and sets her sights on Will Mossop, Hobson's star bootmaker. Maggie and Will leave to start up in competition, and she then turns her mind to helping her sisters marry their chosen partners.

kathy's rating:

Blithe Spirit

Director: David Lean
Based on the play by Noel Coward
Starring: Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford

Charles and his second wife Ruth are haunted by the ghost of his first wife, Elvira. Medium Madame Arcati tries to help things out by contacting the ghost.

kathy's rating:

362

7.7

7.8

Great Expectations (1946)

Director: David Lean
Based on the novel by Charles Dickens
Starring: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Tony Wager, Jean Simmons, Francis L. Sullivan, Finlay Currie, Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness

Pip, a poor orphan, befriends an escaped convict and who grows up in the company of a bitter old woman, Miss Havisham, and her haughty young ward, Estella. Pip learns the rewards of both vindictiveness and gratitude as a result of these events.

kathy's rating:

525

Brief Encounter (1945)

Director: David Lean
Based on the play 'Still Life' by Noel Coward
Starring: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey

At a railway station café, housewife Laura Jesson meets doctor Alec Harvey. Although they are both already married to other partners, they gradually fall in love with each other. They continue to meet every Thursday at the small café, although they know that their love is impossible.

kathy's rating:

7.2

In Which We Serve (1942)

Directors: Noel Coward and David Lean
Screenplay: Noel Coward
Starring: Noel Coward, Derek Elphinstone, Michael Wilding, Ballard Berkeley, James Donald, Bernard Miles and John Mills

This "story of a ship," the British destroyer HMS Torrin, is told in flash backs by survivors as they cling to a life raft.

kathy's rating:

6.2

6.8

The Sound Barrier

[also known as 'Breaking The Sound Barrier']
Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Terence Rattigan
Starring: Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd, Nigel Patrick, Dinah Sheridan, Denholm Elliott and John Justin

Fictionalized story of British aerospace engineers solving the problem of supersonic flight.

kathy's rating:

7.1

7.3

This Happy Breed (1944)

Director: David Lean
Based on the play by Noel Coward
Starring: Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, Amy Veness, Alison Leggat, Stanley Holloway, John Mills and Kay Walsh

Just after World War I, the Gibbons family moves to a nice house in the suburbs. An ordinary sort of life is led by the family through the years, with average number of triumphs and disasters, until the outbreak of World War II.

kathy's rating:

7.2

Major Barbara (1941)

Directors: Gabriel Pascal, Harold French and David Lean
Based on the play by George Bernard Shaw
Starring: Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley and Robert Newton

A young and idealistic woman, who has adopted the Salvation Army and whose father is an armament industrialist, will save more souls directing her father's business. A comedy with social commentary.

kathy's rating:

7.5

7.2

Summertime (1955) (1985)

Director: David Lean
Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Isa Miranda and Darren McGavin

A lonely American woman's dream of romance finally becomes a bittersweet reality when she meets a handsome — but married - Italian man while vacationing in Venice, Italy.

kathy's rating:

7.2

6.9

Madeleine

Director: David Lean
Starring: Ann Todd, Norman Wooland, Ivan Desny and Leslie Banks

The middle-class family of a young woman cannot understand why she delays in marrying a respectable young man. They know nothing about her long-standing affair with a Frenchman.

kathy's rating:

7.4

7.3

The Passionate Friends

Director: David Lean
Based on the novel by H.G. Wells
Starring: Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, Claude Rains and Betty Ann Davies

The Passionate Friends were in love when young, but separated, and she married an older man. Then Mary Justin meets Steven Stratton again and they have one last fling together in the Alps.

kathy's rating: