LEAN

DAVID LEAN, the film director, you might say is the highest expression of commercial him-making the highest express Bo emmera liver kial, 'Lawrence of Arabia', 'Doctor Zhivago' and now •Ryan's Daughter', showing at the Empire, Leicester Square.

His last three films, as the current extensive publicity informs us, have won an 'incredible 20 Academy Awards'. Zhivago has earned at this stage £30 million.

In an industry which has created more myths out of the simple appropriation of cash than any other, Lean is almost a myth in himself.

In the words of the trade 'he can write his own ticket', or, more simply, because his films have grossed so much money and he is subsequently so much in demand, the financiers allow him a 'freedom' that few other film-makers have and production money for one project that would be sufficient to finance at least 12 other medium-sized budget films.

It is interesting therefore to see how this freedom' ex-' presses itself in his work. ... Spectre :

1o. recognize commercial reedom is to understand the knife edge that it rests on, for again in the words of the trade, 'you are only as good as your last picture', which means that freedom realways commed ba commercial failure.

If the last picture dies at the box office, the next one is harder to finance. Some people don't work for years afterwards.

rson Welles, for exampl fter the 'failure' of the 'Mas seveldi This is the inescapable conradiction that all film-maker: work under, however 'free' they are. In fact the 'freer' they are the sharper is the contradiction and the more the spectre hangs over them. They are prisoners of their own 'freedom'.

Lean's first giant commercial success was 'Bridge over the River Kwai, followed after Lawrence of Arabal en this last film Robert Bolt wrote the screenplay and Lean has New Park Publications 186a Clapham High St, SW4.

YOU LINA AASK RYAN'S DAUGHTER directed worked with him on every picture since, How has this collaboration developed and has the work progressed? In 'Lawrence' the script drew heavily on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence's own acount of the Arab struggle for independence.

It is the highly subjective view of a man who remained an enigmatic and contradictory representative of the British ruling class.

Deepen

The film itself tried to deepen an understanding of the man, but could offer little more than a crude psychoanalytical, approach to the subject..

It focused on the sadomasochistic aspects of... "his. character, seeing the historical conflict he was involved in as something little more than a kind of backdrop, or expression of his own neurosis.

It is true that references were made to the kind of carve-up of Arabia perpetrated by the British, but attention of the film was elsewhere.

I am not saying that the film was wrong to centre on Lawrence, or that the man's inner neurotic tensions are not of importance. But in distorting the historical conflict they distorted also the man.

Lawrence was therefore cast in the 'heoric' mould and the style of the film reflected that interpretation. Hence the long, shimmering entrances on horseback, the magnificent panorama of the desert, the almost mystical meditations of Lawrence when deliberating over battle, the choice of music, in a word the 'epic' treatment of the subject.

But having opted for this interpretation however, there was no real disjuncture between • style and content. The film had its internal completeness though a distorted one.

Three films later we see in BOOKS FOR XMAS MISS OUR 'Ryan's Daughter' Lean and Bolt clanking their chains of freedom; the box office has to exert a pressure on the requirements of the 'epic' style. David Lean has got to make a 'David Lean' film, which now predominates over the requirements of the content itself.

By this I mean that Bolt has written an original script which has as its theme the restlessness of a young woman who is trying to find something more out of life, something in it that will correspond to her fantasies of it, and inappropriately subordinated to the epic style. We have here a story struggling to get out of the tyranny of the epic form.

Rather than an intimate exploration of the girl's inner life, her longings, her sense of oppression, her changes mood, her despair, all this is treated in a broad sweep..

The camera shows us panoramic spectacular views of the countryside, the sea, a brooding sky, which are • Just crude and obvious images reflecting her inner conflict, and primarily are introduced for the visual content itself.

In every sense the content DESPITE a ban on cigaretti US television in the new yi industry remains confident that will only be temporary.

With the lessons from several European countries to lean on, the tobacco magnates can afford to remain cheerful, despite the legislation which has been passed in response to the increasing evidence of the smoking-cancer link.

Cigarette packets must carry warnings of the danger to health of smoking and various heart and cancer societies use television advertising to portray its grim potentialities.

Yet the industry is buoyant and this year has reversed a downward trend in cigarette consumption.

Last date for orders December 24. is subordinated to style. For example the local policeman— the film is set in a small West that trish village just after that, like the mountains, is merely another backdrop - is established as a definite character in the community, one who fraternizes with the English soldiers, and one who has the contempt of the unemployed Villagers.

Indifference

Yet when he is shot by a rebel commandant from Dublin and his body thrown down a mine, no one, not the army, nor the villagers ever mention or are aware of his disappearance.

Obviously a whole sequence was cut out of the film and lies on some editor's floor. But the point is that this demonstrates an absolute and unforgiveable indifference to content.

Why? Because the style predominates.

Better a long view of the sea than the exigencies of Again locations are chosen not for their appropriateness but for their visual effect.

advertising on ar, the tobacco any drop in sales NO WEED KILLER The new legislation will certainly not be popular with the TV networks. The tobacco industry allocated $225 million (£93 million) for TV this year -about three-quarters of its total advertising budget.

As a result of the ban, tobacco companies are expected to divert most of this money to other media, while some plan to cut their advertising costs.

However, TV commercials for pipe tobacco and cigars will still be permitted and there will undoubtedly be increased spending on these.

Fears have also been expressed that evasion of the ban may take place by the simple method of giving new lines of pipe tobacco or cigars the names of popular brands of cigarettes.

Evasion

This has worked very well in Britain for the makers of the 'Embassy' brands, a fact which will not have escaped the attention of their US counterparts.

The US surgeon-general's report on the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was published in 1964.

In Britain, TV advertising was, banned in 1965 and yet sales have increased by 2.7 per cent per year since then.

In Italy, Switzerland and France even bigger increases have been recorded.

So the US weed merchants are optimistic. They know that whatever gestures the Administration may make, there is no likelihood of a complete ban on advertising.

With the massive financial resources at their disposal, they are therefore in a position God knows why the priest should find Ryan's daughter on the sea shore, or what he's doing there in the first place. It's the effect that counts.

The Irish rebellion is yet another 'spectacular' background which affords some superimposed action.

The list is long and there is no sense continuing it, but this film reveals only too clearly the insuperable contradictions within the present system of film-making and its actual distorting and imprisoning effect on creative work itself.

For the illusory freedom forces the maker to return to a trięd form and prohibits any creative development.

This is the work of fear, of a slave.

The £8 million budget is strapped across Lean's back. • From this flows the shallowness desadoul range of its thinking.

the reliance on stereotyped characterization, the predictability of the situations.

It's a work of decadence without vigour or passion, a glossy package with dead meat inside. 'What price to completely swamp any poorly - financed and half-hearted attempts that are made to counter their flood of propaganda.

Next year they hope to surpass their 1967 record sales of 528 million cigarettes — an average of 24 packets of 20 per person per week ! behind THE NEWS Breakthrough in genetics THE CURING of inherited disease through genetic engineering was the subject matter of a recent Washington conference..

The conference was the first in a planned series to gain as much knowledge and provide as many safeguards as possible before the advent of the practice of genetic medicine, which may become a practical alternative to human. transplant surgery.

Inherent in the achievement of genetic control disease is the ability to manipulate genes and to eliminate the development of diseases which can lead to serious organ failure. Such diseases affect one quarter of the human race.

The conference's six 'workshops' attempted to define more sharply the number of genetic diseases (1,500 have been identified), the extent of chael (JOHN MILLS) throws infetti. Below: The marriage.

Rosy (SARAH MILES) and Charles Shaughnessy (ROBERT MITCHUM).

Lung diseases are most common in the industrialized city