“Dr. Zhivago” Film ‘Soap Opera’

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30943, 27 December 1965, Page 6

“Dr. Zhivago” Film ‘Soap Opera’

(N.Z P.A. Reuter —Copyright!

NEW YORK, December 23

“Dr. Zhivago,” a film based on the modern Russian classic of the same name by Boris Pasternak, the late Russian Nobel prizewinner, had a mixed reception from the critics in New York.

Judith Christ in the New York “Herald Tribune,” said the film is “merely a spectacular soap opera, declaring that love and revolution make gloomy bed-fellows.” It was “arduous, relatively run-of-the-spectacular mill and Ultimately tedious,” she said, although Geraldine Chaplin’s Tonya “sparkles into non-monumental-type emotions.” Kate Cameron, in the New York “Daily News,” said the film had been brought to the screen in as faithful a fashion as possible within its running time.

She added: "Tom Courtenay, Sir Alec Guinness, Sir Ralph Richardson, Siobhan McKenna, Rita Tushingham and Adrienne Cori, all of Britain, perform their parts

with distinction and with fidelity to the characters they represent on the screen.” Referring to Robert Bolt’s screenplay. Bosley Crowther of the “New York Times” said: “Mr Bolt has reduced the vast upheaval of the Russian revolution to the banalities of a doomed romance.”