Posted on 03/01/2025 2:21:23 PM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
GREAT CAST:
Omar Sharif - Yuri
Julie Christie - Lara
Geraldine Chaplin - Tonya
Rod Steiger - Komarovsky
Alec Guinness - Yevgraf
Tom Courtenay - Pasha
Tarek Sharif - 8 tear old Yuri (Omar Sharif’s son)
It was just on TCM today & I think Tubi is streaming it.
I was twelve, and REALLY wanted to go see Dr. Zhivago. Mom said No, as the review she read indicated that it wasn’t appropriate for children.
I lied about my age, paid the full price and LOVED the movie. I hid under the seat at the end, and watched it again. That meant I was missing for six hours.
When I got home, Mom was furious, until I reminded her that she used to do the same thing with John Wayne movies when she was a kid.
“Ok,” she said, “but the movie was too adult for you! It showed two people in bed together who weren’t married.”
“They were too married,” I replied, “just not to each other.”
I still love that movie and quote lines from it all the time. (The book is a lot different, with more charachters and dialogue, but I loved that too).
Anyway, that’s my own personal story about Dr. Zhivago.
I liked Yevgraf, Zhivago’s half brother.
I took Russian as my foreign language in high school we had a Yugoslavian classmate we could not study this awful language at her house if her grandparents were at home they hated the Russians with a passion
I’ll watch it on demand from TCM. Thanks.
One of the greatest movies all time. Thanks for posting.
“Loved the movie so much that I read the book and took a Russian History course that was most enlightening.”
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4301407/posts?page=31#31
Wow! That is absolutely incredible.
That is why I like to combine movies with homeschool lessons being taught.
None will disappoint:
1. BEN HUR- betrayal & Judah learns forgiveness is better than revenge
2. 10 COMMANDMENTS- story of the life of Moses from Book of Exodus
3. THE ROBE- Fictional story of Marcellus, Roman military tribune, finds and admits to being a follower of Jesus denying that Christians are plotting against Rome.
4. HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY- Welsh mining family life in the late Victorian era
5. FRIENDLY PERSUASION- Quaker family living thru our Civil War
6. STORY OF RUTH- forgiving God
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4301407/posts?page=27#27
I love Dr. Zivago, great love story but as a teenager it was the movie that taught me the stark difference between Communism and Capitalism.
Sorry. One of the most overrated films ever. Wake me when it’s over....
BKMK!!!
Ancestral Lands is another good movie (series actually).
bttt
My mom’s favorite movie. I enjoyed the music so much I bought the soundtrack
I was twelve when it came out and I loved it. Was haunted by Laura’s theme.
I haven’t seen the movie in 50 years, but at 12 I was horrified by the violence in the beginning. For some reason, though, the violence in Bonnie and Clyde didn’t bother me at the time. Go figure.
Pasternak spent almost half a century writing Zhivago but when he finally finished it the Soviet state publisher refused to print it because it rejected “socialist realism.”
For a time the novel was something of a “Maltese Falcon” (not the movie but the statue at its center) because everyone had heard of it but no one had ever seen it. The CIA managed to get a copy, read it, and thought it gave such a bleak portrayal of the USSR that it would serve US interests for it to receive wide distribution in the USSR. They used a print shop in Holland to have copies printed in Russian and smuggled those back into the USSR to be placed in a few strategically selected hands. One of those copies was given to Sergio D’Angelo, a reporter for the Italian Communist Party who was posted to Moscow.
D’Angelo smuggled the copy back to Italy where he personally gave it to publisher Giangiacomo (zhan-ZHAK-a-mo) Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli was one of many who knew of the book existence, and of its potential importance, knew that it was political kryptonite, and when D’Angelo put it in his hands he allegedly said, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”
Feltrinelli was born rich and grew up thinking he should do something to cure the inherent unfairness of life. At the time he received the Zhivago manuscript, he was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and when he published the book (in 18 languages) the party expelled him. In time Feltrinelli would reject both communism and anarchism because neither was radical enough to suit him, and he spent the rest of his life in search of a group extreme enough to hate his entitled upbringing as much as he did.
In 1972, the corpse of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was found on the ground beneath a high voltage electrical tower outside the Italian industrial city of Milan. Best guess is he was climbing the tower with a bomb in his knapsack, intending to promote his radical cause of the week by disrupting basic services to the Milanese, and it detonated unexpectedly.
In a 1979 terrorism crackdown trial, a whole passel of alleged terrorists were tried for Feltrinelli’s murder and 11 were convicted, but Italian law is funny like that. More political theater than jurisprudence. Whenever someone important or famous dies by accident or misadventure, they’re always looking to jam somebody up for it. When legendary F1 driver Ayrton Senna died in a racing mishap in 1994, several members of the Williams F1 racing team were charged with homicide. Charges were dropped, then reinstated, until all six finally were acquitted in 1997. So the fact that 11 were convicted proves little about Feltrinelli’s death.
He was a waste of human protoplasm but at least he was responsible for getting one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century published. But the CIA was behind it all.
Rod Steiger had a way of being the most interesting character in any movie he was in. A brilliant but underrated actor.
I became fluent in German after taking it in high school and studied Russian in college. Although Russian seems to have been deliberately designed so that outsiders could never master it, I still find it to be a fun language.
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