MGM insisted that the Doctor in Doctor Zhivago be spelled out rather than abbreviated to Dr. in all advertising, a tip-off that the studio wanted the film to be considered an intellectual thinking man's epic like Lawrence of Arabia rather than a mere entertainment like The Sound of Music.

After Lawrence of Arabia went scorchio at the box office and David Lean was heralded as the master of all things sweeping, he turned his attention to this sprawling Russian romance about a poetic doctor caught between the love of two women while his homeland hit the revolutionary blues. It was big, complex historical stuff, and what with all those landscapes and that seething passion, was perfect material for the flamboyant Brit.

And so he launched on another of his epic, exhaustive shoots with regular cohorts Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Robert Bolt (screenwriter) and Freddie Young providing his majestic camerawork. But it was to be the casting of the pivotal, young seamstress Lara that transformed Zhivago from splendid period drama into something, for all its overt sentiment and overblown style, spellbinding and unforgettable. Lean discovered, and fell in love with, Julie Christie, and knew straightaway that his audience would too.

While condensing the vast, pragmatic tome into something far more straightforward (although it still boasts countless strands of story stretching through its three hours) and deliberately romantic, Bolt delivered a mature treatise on the political upheaval (for non-students of the revolution it makes some kind of sense). Today, the film's slow, assured pace makes it seem swollen and old-fashioned, even rambling, but there is no doubting the richness of character - not just Omar Sharif's wistfully poetic doctor and divine but troubled love Lara, but particularly two resonant performances in Rod Steiger's corrupt but brilliant Komarovsky and Tom Courtenay's icy Strelnikov.

Strictly Communist in 1965, the Soviet state was inaccessible to the shoot, so surprisingly but effectively Lean chose Spain as a stand-in, coating sweltering fields in imitation snow and roasting his cast in thick Eastern overcoats. Only location work in Finland (for Zhivago's frozen train journey) was anywhere near the icy world in question.

There is something inordinately substantial about David Lean's cinemascope period. His films are big, glorious celebrations of what cinema can do: realism be damned, be transported to fabulous, dangerous widescreen worlds. And when Christie's heart-stopping beauty is your epicentre, no amount of bombast can stifle the impression.

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