Vital Viewing (First Things First Edition)

British filmmaker David Lean was born on this day in 1908. A year before his death in 1991, Lean returned to Leighton Park, his old boarding school where he spent his teen years, to help the present-day students shoot a movie about that institution's founding a century earlier: 

Lean is best known these days for such cinemathon epics as Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984), but since the above clip involved a return to beginnings of sorts, I've decided to go to the beginning of Lean's film career, his first two movies. Or, if you will, his first movie-and-a-half. So what do I mean by that? Well, you see, it's all a bit complicated thanks to this dude:

In 1942, playwright, actor, director, composer, singer, and, arguably, standup comedian Noel Coward decided to do his bit for Britain's war effort, so he wrote a movie about a British warship that, um, sinks at sea. Trust me, it's more patriotic than it sounds. You know, stiff upper lip and all that. To star in this drama--he was just as adept in that format as he was in his signature drawing room comedies--Coward successfully cast himself against type as an unaffected, stoical Naval captain, said to be based on Lord Mountbatten (though in it he looks more like a skinny Dwight D. Eisenhower.)  Coward also decided that this would be the film in which he made his motion picture directing debut. Or part of a debut. He knew he could direct the actors, as he had done on the stage, but was less confident about the film's action scenes, of which there were several, so he enlisted the effort of...

...David Lean, at the time a highly regarded film editor. Coward soon became so bored with the technical aspects of filmmaking that he only directed the scenes that he himself appeared in and left the rest to Lean. The result of this collaboration was one of the finest (and least histrionic) movies to come out of World War II, 1942's In Which We Serve:

   
Coward never directed another film, but must have liked Lean's contribution, for he let him helm three other works of his, the railway romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945) and the supernatural drawing room comedy Blithe Spirit (1945). But before either of those movies, Lean made his solo filmmaking debut in 1944's This Happy Breed, based on Coward's stage drama about a British working-class family between the years 1919 and 1939. This might seem like surprising subject matter for a man whose self-styled image was that of an aristocratic bon vivant, but in reality, Coward was born into the lower-middle class and might have spent his life there had the theater not provided a nice little escape hatch. As for Lean, he had a somewhat more upscale upbringing, but as the son of Quakers probably wasn't spoiled too much, and was able to present a largely sympathetic view of Britain's proletariat:

 

So even if you're more familiar with Lean's later films, you may enjoy this early effort. And you won't have to get up to go to the bathroom as much. After all, it's two decades in 115 minutes. Lawrence of Arabia is almost twice as long, and only covers two years!