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Doctor Zhivago (1965)

If you’re prone to obsessively checking box office stats like I am, then you have probably checked out the list of all-time box office champs when adjusted for inflation. That’s a very necessary list for the stats obsessed, as the dramatic rise in ticket costs (and IMAX tickets and 3-D tickets and IMAX 3-D tickets and…) means that newer movies make way more money than ever before. Seriously, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is, as of right now, at #10 on the domestic all-time box office. Rogue One. I love Star Wars, but, wow.

So the adjusted-for-inflation list is the one you gotta look to for the true all-time culture impacters, the movies that truly define cinema, the movies we turn to time and time again and still quote decades later. That list is absolutely stacked with unquestionably the biggest movies of all time, each one of their titles instantly conjuring up iconic moments, most of which have been turned into Twitter reaction GIFs (that’s how we communicate nowadays). So, let’s take a look at that list:

See? Ten movies woven into the fabric of our day-to-day–wait, Doctor Zhivago? You did a double-take there, right? What is it doing in-between Jaws (the film that created the summer blockbuster!) and The Exorcist (the movie still hailed as the scariest of all time!)? WTF is Doctor Zhivago?!

With the 2002 Doctor Zhivago mini-series remake (starring Kiera Knightley and Sam Neill) now available to stream on Amazon’s Prime Video, I decided now is as good a time as any to finally answer the questions that have plagued me for years: what is Doctor Zhivago, how did the original 1965 movie gross over a billion adjusted-for-inflation dollars domestically, why has it been completely forgotten by pop culture, and could it make a comeback and be at least as big a deal as The Ten Commandments?

Literally the only Doctor Zhivago facts that I have picked up in my 33 years on Earth as a pop culture maniac are that it is very long and very Russian. I was right on both of those counts, as it has a hefty 200 minute runtime (that’s 1.3 Avengers: Infinity Wars or 2.1 Spice Worlds) and kinda requires you to have taken at least one college course on Russian history to understand the plot (having Zhivago’s Wiki entry open in a tab also helps). Before I began my nearly three-and-a-half hour journey through grand Russian misery, I jotted down what I assumed Doctor Zhivago would be about:

Set in 19th century Russia, a fiercely independent woman comes of age against the backdrop of war and falls for the charismatic and enigmatic Doctor Zhivago. Also, maybe there’s some intrigue? Running time: 200 minutes (1992 re-release)

I was… mostly wrong? After watching all 200 minutes of Doctor Zhivago, I can firmly say that it is just a whole lot of movie.

Just, a whole helluva lot of movie.

Doctor Zhivago is epic in the literal sense, not the “skateboarding fail on YouTube” sense. The film spans around six decades, runs through the events of at least three major historical conflicts (a revolution and wars both Civil and World), and includes plenty of romance, action, and dark drama. It’s the Russian Gone with the Wind, the Titanic of the 1960s, The Ten Commandments without yearly reruns tied to a major holiday. One thing’s for sure: none of those movies have a character listed in the credits as, I kid you not, Beef-Faced Colonel.

Here’s an impossibly brief summary of Doctor Zhivago, a movie with enough plot to fill at least three seasons of a Netflix drama. The film’s framing device takes place in post-World War II, as KGB Lieutenant General Yevgraf Zhivago (played by Alec Guinness, which perked this Star Wars fan’s interest) continues his search for his half-brother Yuri’s lost daughter.

Yevgraf believes Tanya, a worker in a truly hellish-looking…mine, I think?… is that daughter, and pulls her into his office to tell her the three-hour story of her possible father’s life. That life starts with the funeral of Yuri Zhivago’s mother, and him being adopted by some family friends. Fast-forward some 20 years and Yuri (Omar Sharif) is now a med student (Doctor Zhivago!) and aspiring poet. That’s when the film’s dual narrative starts, and we meet the 17-year-old Lara (Julie Christie), a teenager that gets routinely sexually harassed and assaulted by a pushy old rich scumbag named Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger). The two lovers finally meet when Yuri is called to save Lara’s mother’s life (she tried to commit suicide when she found out about Komarovsky abusing her daughter). But because an epic means characters need to have decades of hardship, Yuri marries his foster sister (okay…!) and Lara marries a political radical who, in Part 2 (yes, this film has parts) goes all Dr. Evil.

With Yuri and Lara married to other people, the film moves back and forth as their lives get worse and worse, as Yuri’s controversial poetry makes him an enemy of the state and he and his family have to escape via a train ride from hell. Seriously, a hundred people in a train car sleeping around an uncovered, filled-to-the-brim cauldron of boiling water and potatoes! The danger! But Yuri and Lara keep running into each other, usually for stretches of time the film doesn’t feel like showing us, as the political situation in Russia gets more and more intense. Eventually the two say “screw it” and get together, living in the iced-over shell of a remote yet elaborate cabin in the harsh wilderness.

But things keep getting worse, because Dr. Evil and the pushy old rich scumbag keep coming back to screw with their happiness. The film ends just before World War II, with Yuri and Lara separated against their will and both of them getting epic bummer endings.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that I left out a whole lot in that summary, but even the gist goes on and on. Now it’s QUESTION TIME:

Why was Doctor Zhivago a massive hit?

My colleague Meghan O’Keefe, the only person on Team Decider with an opinion on Doctor Zhivago, pointed out to me that the film may have been the Twilight of its time. Not because Omar Sharif plays a tortured vampire (although you could really see him sinking his teeth into a role like that), but because the film was based on a popular and controversial novel. Released in 1957, Doctor Zhivago won author Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for literature. So maybe when the movie hit in 1965, Doctor Zhivago was a name people knew.

There’s also the movie itself, which is still a gag-worthy feat of filmmaking over 60 years later. Knowing that a movie made in the ’60s has zero CGI makes every crowd scene and every elaborate new location even more stunning. Every single thing you see on screen, from gorgeous ice-covered interiors to a woman being pulled aboard a speeding train, actually happened. Seriously, at one point I gasped in awe at the screen, “Wow, that’s a lot of horses.” It was a lot of horses. If this film still wows today, you can totally see why 1965 audiences turned out.

Also let’s not overlook Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, because every epic needs smoking hot leads. Looking at Omar Sharif is, bare minimum, reason enough to give Doctor Zhivago a try. The man looks like the lovechild of Daniel Bruhl and Oscar Isaac and he needs to be celebrated.

Why was Doctor Zhivago forgotten?

Obviously there are film buffs that balk at the idea, but it’s true! It’s not quotable like Jaws or Star Wars or Gone with the Wind. It’s way dark, even darker than when E.T.’s dried out body was found in a riverbank. There are already three omnipresent epics in that top ten (Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Titanic), and maybe we just don’t have room for a fourth. And it’s not a musical or a fairy tale, genres prone to reinterpretation, meaning we get new iterations of Snow White or The Sound of Music every few years. It’s also a film steeped in Russian history, and America’s history with Russia is (understatement alert) still pretty fraught. Plus without ties to American history (which keeps the problematic Gone with the Wind relevant) or a holiday (which keeps The Ten Commandments on air every year) or this generation’s specific nostalgia (everyone born between 1975 and 1985 saw Titanic in the theater), Zhivago seemed destined to disappear.

It’s also just really long. The film starts with four and a half minutes of overture followed by another three minutes of credits, meaning the film does not actually start (as in a human is not seen on screen!) until 7:18 in. Yuri and Lara don’t even talk to each other until 81 minutes in, and they don’t kiss until minute 143! Almost two and a half hours!

Could Doctor Zhivago make a comeback?

Let’s find out! Let’s get some quotes in rotation–howasabout “No doubt they’ll sing in tune after the revolution!” or “Ah, then it’s a gift” or “Me? Fit as a fiddle!”

What about memes? I’m pulling for “Trample the Tuba” to become a thing, referencing the part where a tuba player falls victim to a stampede, a visual that is tragic but also darkly funny. Like when Rosalind Shays fell down an elevator shaft in L.A. Law or when Romano got crushed by a helicopter on ER or that guy that got killed by a propeller in Titanic, you could say those moments “totally trampled the tuba.”

Listen, it’s dumb, but it’s something.

And if you’re looking for a solid reaction image for when you want to tell someone to just give up, does it get more blunt than:

This is all I’ve got, people. The movie is so long and so serious, and it’s lacking a real “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again” fist-pumping moment.

Is Doctor Zhivago worth watching?

If you are thirsty for epics, then yes–Doctor Zhivago is one of the all-time great epics, even if you never had a picture of its leading man taped in your locker. If you find the running time daunting (have I mentioned that it lasts 200 minutes 200 times yet?), then treat it like a Netflix drama and break it up into 50-minute chunks. Doctor Zhivago moves about as fast as Bloodline did, so it’ll work.

And even if you never watch Doctor Zhivago, at least you now know what this billion-dollar earner was about–and you even have some memes to use. You’re welcome.

#TrampleTheTuba

Where to watch Doctor Zhivago