Somewhere, a movie
What if Stanley Kubrick had made the film Doctor Zhivago?
Before David Lean created his epic, much-loved adaptation of Doctor Zhivago in 1965, two other revered Hollywood icons had tried to buy the rights from author Boris Pasternak: Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick.
In a letter to Pasternak, discovered by film historian James Fenwick and dated Jan. 8, 1959, Kubrick, the director of Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey, listed the awards he and Douglas had won for their previous collaboration, the 1957 war film Paths of Glory, and said: “We would now like to buy the motion picture rights to Doctor Zhivago.”
Fenwick also notes a passage in Kubrick's notebooks, unseen until now, which details exactly how Kubrick envisaged Doctor Zhivago slotting into his career plan, at a time when he was still best known for gritty pulp like The Killing (1956).
“The precise moment of absolute success for a director,” he wrote, “is when he is allowed to film a great literary classic of over 600 pages, which he does not understand too well, and which is anyway impossible to film properly due to the complexity of the plot or the elusiveness of its form or content.”
At a chunky 592 pages, Doctor Zhivago — first published in Italy in 1957, helping win its author the Nobel Prize in 1958 — just about qualifies for this somewhat cynical accolade.
But the whole idea sparks the question: What would a Kubrick Doctor Zhivago have looked like?
It's a bewildering vision to conjure. Doctor Zhivago is freighted with history, personalities and politics, and, aside from the snow, it lacks so many of the chilly components key to Kubrick's sensibility. It isn't sparse or dehumanized. It doesn't have an alienated, amoral hero (see A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining) but instead a passionate, idealistic poet. One would fear for Doctor Zhivago's very soul if Kubrick had really got his say on the script.
Besides, Lean's version is better remembered for the swooning romance than the politics — it's hard to conjure a memory of his film without Julie Christie's iconic fur hat and Lara's Theme. Romance? Kubrick?
Feasibly, Douglas could have ramped up the heroism in Omar Sharif's shoes. Douglas's left-wing sympathies and diplomatic efforts to rid Hollywood of the stain of Mccarthyism were growing in force, eventually to culminate with him producing and starring as the slave-rebel-champion in Spartacus, and ensuring that blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo received his credit.
But Christie? It's hard to imagine a less Kubrickian actress, or one who would have had less time for his notorious perfectionism. The point is moot — Christie didn't become a star until Billy Liar (1963) — and so one has to wonder which nervous ingenue would have had to coat up to play Lara Antipova for Kubrick, and what she might have suffered. None of his early films gave women much more than decorative functions, except for the one scene that stands out in Paths of Glory — the German tavern singer who brings all the soldiers to tears, played by Kubrick's future wife, Christiane.