Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade's Gone By. . ., brings to Lean's biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry. One learns about the making of movies as realized by a master, but also of the highly personal costs of genius. The troubled Quaker family from which Lean came influenced his relationship with his son, his brother, and his six wives. Yet he showed in his work a deep understanding of humanity. The vastness of this scholarly and entertaining enterprise is augmented by sixteen pages of scenes from Lean's color films, thirty-two pages from his black-and-white movies, and throughout the text a vast number of photographs from his life and location work.
"For my money, this is quite simply the best biography of a filmmaker I’ve ever read. It’s an entirely – all 750 pages – enthralling account of a man enraptured by cinema, written by another man enraptured by cinema. The information in it is staggering – Lean’s own story, with the history of British cinema interwoven. Kevin Brownlow, it seems to me, has talked to everybody who ever worked with Lean and the groundbreaking aspect of the book is in its astonishing reliance on written testimony. The result is the most wonderful sense of an endless series of close-ups of the man in action. This is not hagiography either. Brownlow clearly admires the films and he knows exactly how much to give us about them, and he does deal with the man’s limitations and unattractive qualities. Personally, I don’t care if I never see any Lean film after 1958 again. I haven’t got enough life left to spend trudging through snow or sand or sea spray. Brownlow makes me wonder if I haven’t been a bit impetuous in my dismissal of these later films. I don’t care for the epics, but he makes me feel I need to think again about them. It is, without a shred of doubt, the very greatest biography of anyone ever in film. Quite a large claim, isn’t it?"
