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David Lean (1908–91)

NORIMASA MORITA

INTRODUCTION In his sixty years’ career as a , David Lean made sixteen features between his debut film, InWhichWe Serve (1942), and his last work, (1984).Sixteen films does not seem very many for one of the world’s greatest film makers over such a long period of time. His speed in completing a film slowed down considerably after he began to make high-budget and high-concept epic blockbusters, spending three to five years on each project. Lean did not direct a film for well over ten years; this hiatus followed the savage attacks on his penultimate film, Ryan’s Daughter, by film reviewers and critics in 1970, although it made a good profit. David Lean was utterly devas- tated by the severity of the onslaught. , one of the most influential American reviewers of that time, was particularly scath- ing about the film, berating Lean and Robert Bold, the screenwriter: ‘They don’t have it in them to create Irish characters; there isn’t a joke in [it] except maybe the idea that an Irish girl needs a half-dead Englishman to arouse her,’ and denounced it as ‘an awe-inspiringly

458 DAVID LEAN (1908–91) tedious lump of soggy romanticism’.1 Nevertheless, according to the most recent poll carried out in the ’s journal, Sight and Sound, Lean is the tenth greatest director of all time.2 Lean started his film making career from being a tea boy and then a clapper boy, but he gradually made his name first in Great Britain with gems such as (1945) and (1946), and then internationally with his epic-scale films such as Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).All of these four films come within the first eleven places of BFI’s Top 100 British Films. David Lean’s contacts with Japan were mainly through two film projects. The Wind Cannot Read and The Bridge on the River Kwai.

THE WIND CANNOT READ David Lean’s interest in Japan began when he read Richard Mason’s novel,TheWind Cannot Read.It is about an intense love affair between a RAF pilot and a Japanese language instructor in wartime Bombay. A young British pilot, Michael Quinn, is trained to learn the Japanese language, so that he can work as an interrogator for Japanese prison- ers of war. One day a beautiful, but desperately shy Japanese, Hanako Suzuki arrives as a new language instructor and soon both fall in love with each other. She is nicknamed Sabby as she looks sabishii - dole- ful and melancholic. When the language training comes to an end and Quinn is posted to Burma to serve as interrogator, they marry secretly, expecting objections from the authorities, their families and friends.Their countries are at war after all. Quinn is captured by the Japanese, but discovering that Sabby is critically ill, he escapes from his captivity and reunites with her just in time before she dies of a brain tumour.3 Before the FirstWorldWar Richard Mason, the author of TheWind Cannot Read worked for a film journal and then for the British Council. Like the novel’s main character Mason interrogated Japanese prisoners of war using his ability in Japanese, which he had acquired during the war. Mason who held a commission in the RAF and is said to have attended a joint services Japanese language course at Simla in India, had lived for a time with a pretty young Japanese lady, who worked for the BBC’s Japanese language service during and immediately after the war called Aiko Clark.4 She has accordingly been considered as the model for the heroine in his book although from all accounts her character was very different from that of the novel’s heroine. He com- pleted The Wind Cannot Read while serving in the Burma Campaign and the book was first published after the war in 1947. The novel antedated all other stories and films that deal with a love affair or marriage between an exotic and feminine Japanese woman and a masculine and heroicWestern man and became very popular in

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