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But, for as much substance as the film has there is at least an equal amount of style and powerful filmmaking technique. Lean's camera (with Freddie Young as D.P.) always leads the eye. Like a great painting, your eyes just seem to move over every aspect of every frame. The photography itself is breathtakingly beautiful, and the actors/actresses themselves are part of that beauty. Watching Zhivago it almost seems that Lean chose every actor/actress for what their eyes could bring the story. Julie Christie's eyes are blue and luminous. Omar Sharif's are brown, brooding, and penetrating. Both are shown often, filled with tears, but not quite weeping. The emotions that both convey, often while saying nothing, is equal parts of the actors' abilities and Lean and Young's ability to capture them in such cinematic fashion. The other actors more than hold up their end of the film with Rod Steiger, Geraldine Chaplin, and Tom Courtenay all turning in brilliant performances. Lean's standby Alec Guiness was his elegant, majestic self.

While it's tempting to say that they don't make movies like this anymore, I'm not so sure anyone besides Lean ever did. My first viewing of this epic came during its 30th anniversary re-release and restoration in 1995, and it was one of the first date movies that I saw with my wife before we were married. Seeing Doctor Zhivago was a moving event for us that night, and resulted in my father in law, a professional musician, playing Lara's theme on the viola during our wedding ceremony. (Editor: Awwwww.) Zhivago moved us again as we watched this breathtaking new DVD. Doctor Zhivago is a treasure and a must-have for any movie fanatic and DVD collector.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Doctor Zhivago is presented at approximately 2.35:1 in anamorphic widescreen. I was not at all prepared for how gorgeous this transfer is, and I couldn't have expected such a flawless presentation. The black levels and colors are deep and mesmerizing. The picture is crisp and detailed, but still natural and film-like. Depth and dimensionality are superb, capturing Lean's dense and rich compositions to a startling degree. Doctor Zhivago simply doesn't look its age (nearly 40 now), and the print has been wonderfully restored with nary a blemish to be found, which is fitting for this timeless masterpiece. I'm happy to write a review with no conditions such as "this is the best its ever looked on video," or any other such reservations. This is just a spectacular transfer, period, with no distracting artifacts of any kind.

Warner also deserves additional credit for dedicating a whole DVD-14 of this two-disc set to the movie itself, along with some of the movie-related features, such as the commentary and isolated score. The disc must be flipped at the intermission, which didn't bother me in the slightest. This film runs 200 minutes, so I didn't mind this appropriately placed break. This additional expense undoubtedly pays off, as the video here is nothing short of extraordinary.

Audio: How Does the Disc Sound?

Doctor Zhivago features a remastered Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack (presented in dubbed French and English, which is not as spectacular as the video presentation but is solid nonetheless. The most striking feature of this soundtrack is the heavily directionalized dialog that moves to far right and left of the soundstage with the actors. There is some debate about this as some earlier restorations of older movie soundtracks steered the dialog into the center channel to match the fashion in which mixes are created today. I've always been a proponent of leaving the directionalized dialog alone, as the filmmakers unquestionably intended. To me different techniques are part of the novelty of watching classic films from a bygone era, and the goal of any "restoration" should be to preserve these efforts, not to turn them into modern films.

The fidelity is reasonably good, with some effects sounding a little on the shrill side at times. Dynamics are surprisingly good at times. The surrounds are not aggressive, being primarily used for envelopment, and often wrapping the film's score around the listener. Dialog is often poorly integrated with the rest of the soundtrack, but overall this is a fine effort that probably sounds as good as possible.

An alternate French 5.1 dub is provided, along with English Closed Captions and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Presented as a two disc set with the feature on disc one and the majority of extras on disc two. And hopefully in what is a sign of things to come, Warner has again gone with the Citizen Kane-esque packaging, which is a relatively durable fold-out, only this time with a solid white finish. Thank god it ain't a snapper case...

Disc one boasts some new features that I don't recall being on MGM's 30th anniversary laserdisc box set from a few years back. These include an introduction by Omar Sharif (which was on the LD box set), as well as a separate audio track with Maurice Jarre's legendary score isolated in Dolby Digital 5.1, and a screen-specific audio commentary track with Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger, and Sandra Lean, director David Lean's wife during the last years of his life. Sharif and Lean recorded the track together, and their interaction adds a lot to this fine track. Both offer many amusing and enlightening anecdotes about the film itself and its director (although many are repetitions of what's in the documentary referred to below.)Steiger appears intermittently and doesn't appear to be with Sharif and Lean. But he's a pistol and he has a unique perspective on the film and its characters (particularly the interaction between the English crew and himself as an American, and the relationship between his Kamarovsky and Christie's Lara - Steiger speaks of it as a straightforward romance, while I see it as abuse of authority by an older man.) Nevertheless, I enjoyed this commentary very, very much. The isolated score is a nice idea as this music is such an integral part of the film, but being a compressed Dolby Digital track encoded at 384kbps, its sound quality pales in comparison to my redbook CD of this marvelous score.

Much of the extras on disc two are ported over from MGM's 30th anniversary laserdisc box set. This is not a poor reflection on Warner at all, as that box set represented a comprehensive look at the making of this classic. (No need to reinvent the wheel.) The star of the disc two supplements has to be the hour-long documentary Doctor Zhivago: The Making of a Russian Epic. This documentary is narrated with wit and passion by the film's star, Omar Sharif. Since I had already seen this piece on the laserdisc, I planned on watching it only long enough to refresh my memory, but it's so good I watched it again in its entirety. The interviews are terrific, especially those with Rod Steiger, who relished his role as the fiendish Kamarovsky and appears to be unaware that if the film does have a villain, it's Kamarovsky!

Other important and interesting interviews are with Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin, production designer John Box, and screenwriter Robert Bolt. The material covers the pre-production of the film and some great stories about who was cast in the film, and who wasn't (Sophia Loren, for one.) The production itself was immense, as the scale of the film dictates, and at the time Zhivago was one of the most expensive movies ever made at $15 million. Moscow, and much of the Russia seen in the film, was actually created by Lean's gifted team in Spain. How many movies have you seen in which the changing of the seasons is affected by painting every leaf in every tree to match the appropriate season's turning leaves? There's a lot to learn about this great film, and this documentary does a great job of teaching.

Although the packaging touts 10 vintage documentaries about Zhivago, there are actually 11! These are short pieces that are essentially the 1965 equivalent of the EPK (Electronic Press Kit) pieces that are prevalent today. Zhivago: Behind the Camera with David Lean is probably my favorite of these. All of them are interesting, but all pale in comparison with the long documentary described in the preceding paragraph.

Rounding out the extras is the film's theatrical trailer and a list of awards and nominations won by the film, in addition to cast and crew filmographies.

Parting Thoughts