I’ve always thought of the director David Lean in terms of vastness and Technicolor. The desert scenes in Lawrence of Arabia come to mind—it’s said that thirsty theater patrons mobbed the concession stand for Cokes at the intermission. The most epic entrance in film history, I think—when Omar Sharif kills the Bedouin stealing water from his well—is an example of vastness.

And in Dr. Zhivago—theater patrons were warned to wear sweaters because that film’s cold was so vivid—there’s a set piece, where Lean communicates “cold” as Sharif’s Zhivago and Lara seek refuge from the Revolution in his family’s dacha, far, far away from Moscow or what was no Petrograd. It’s stunning and Dickensian scene, like Miss Haversham’s cobwebbed parlor and wedding cake in Great Expectations.

Dickens’ novels had as their fattest pages richly-depicted English eccentrics, from the delightful Micawber to the lizard-like Uriah Heep to the tragic Sidney Carton. In Bridge on the River Kwai, the Allied POW’s are led by Alec Guinness, who has crossed the line that divides eccentricity from madness. (The film also features one of William Holden’s finest performances.) Alert moviegoers might have spotted something off at the film’s beginning, when Guinness’s Col. Nicolson marches him POW’s into camp while whistling “The Colonel Bogey March.” It’s a little mad.

But long before Lean made grand color films–Ryan’s Daughter, while not among his great films, still made evocative use of the Ring of Kerry, a landscape far different from that of the Arabian desert.

I realized that Lean’s earlier work, in black and white, is just as stunning. I’d long ago seen Great Expectations, with John Mills and Guinness, but I hadn’t seen Oliver Twist in a long time. It’s a film that makes you feels as if you’re inside a Dickens novel (Turner Classic Movies noted that the film’s dialogue was lifted almost verbatim from the novel.

What struck me in yesterday’s viewing was the pathos of Oliver’s mother as she trudges exhausted, to the workhouse where she will give Oliver life and lose her own. Someone had the idea of setting the scene (the original, with its sound effects, is stunning) this one’s set to haunting music from an Australian World Music duo, Dead Can Dance. I don’t know if David Lean would approve. For what it’s worth, I do.