Despite the grim and brooding background, Zhivago has a surging buoyant spirit that is unquenchable. Doctor Zhivago is more than a masterful motion picture; it is a life experience.

One of those rare film adaptations which, unless you have already read the book, makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered to make the film at all.

Maurice Jarre's music is as beguiling as ever and Lean squeezes all the pathos that he can out of the romance between Sharif's Yuri Zhivago and Julie Christie's febrile and gorgeous Lara Antipova.

It isn't shoddy (except for the music), it isn't soap opera; it's stately, respectable and dead: the photography static, the comings and goings without rhythm. It's like watching a gigantic task of stone masonry, executed by unmoved movers.