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Yuri Zhivago, orphaned as a boy, is brought up in the family of Alexander Gromeko, whose daughter Tonya he later marries after qualifying as a doctor. During his years in Moscow as a student, Yuri several times comes across Lara, the beautiful daughter of a dressmaker, Amelia, most dramatically at a Christmas party where Lara shoots her mother's protector Komarovsky, a political opportunist who has seduced her. Lara is led away from the party by Pasha, a revolutionary idealist whom she later marries. Moscow is caught up in the Great War; Yuri works as a doctor at the front where he again comes across Lara, now working as a nurse. Returning to Moscow, Yuri finds the city transformed by the revolution, his family's house requisitioned, and himself under suspicion for the poetry he has published. Yevgraf, his half-brother and a Bolshevik police commissar, urges Yuri to take his family away from Moscow to their country estate at Yuryatin in the Urals. Meanwhile Pasha, now styled Strelnikov, is waging a ruthless war against surviving White Army units. Discovering that Lara is living in a nearby town, Yuri visits her; but as he is returning one day, he is captured by the Red Army partisans and forced into service as a doctor. Yuri deserts the unit and struggles back across the snow-bound steppes until he reaches Lara's house. Meanwhile Yuri's family have been deported to France. Komarovsky reappears to persuade Yuri to flee Russia, but Yuri refuses and is separated from Lara. Years later, still searching for Lara, Yuri dies on a Moscow street. Lara disappears into a labour camp, but their daughter lives on to be found by Yevgraf.

The best one can say of Doctor Zhivago is that it is an honest failure. Boris Pasternak's sprawling, complex, elusive novel is held together by its unity of style, by the driving force of its narrative, by the passionate voice of a poet who weaves a mass of diverse characters into a single tapestry. And this is precisely what David Lean's film lacks. Somewhere in the two years of the film's making the spirit of the novel has been lost. Perhaps the root cause of the trouble is that Lean and his scriptwriter, Robert Bolt, have attempted to recreate the novel's episodic narrative style. But if the book is episodic, its narrative is guided by Pasternak's belief that humanity is controlled by the sweep of destiny; in the film destiny figures not at all. The film begins in fits and starts, with snatches of characterisation and important figures arbitrarily picked out for emphasis and just as arbitrarily abandoned to take their place in the story. The opening, like the opening of Lawrence of Arabia a flash forward into the future, is surprisingly dull: under the great arch of a hydro-electric dam walks a line of workers, looking most un-Russian; one of them is singled out by Alec Guinness, the kindly commissar, who asks her if the book of poems he shows her stirs any memories. And so into flashback, and the pageant of Zhivago, narrated by Guinness. Tsarist Moscow, its fin de siecle elegance, its restless stirrings of the dream of a new Russia, its affected French gaiety, is brilliantly recreated in visual terms (though the vast set of a long Moscow street, built in Spain, gives the impression that the entire action takes place in the high street of a small town), but handled in a way that suggests that Pasternak's massive characters are little more than anaemic old maids and angry young men who should know better. And this charade-like interpretation of the rumblings of a new age is echoed in the film's treatment of the revolution, which appears not as the tragic catharsis of the novel, the raison d'etre of years of suffering, but as merely a series of irritating interruptions of daily life ("Oh Lord, not another purge", mutters Ralph Richardson wearily, as though commenting on the weather). The film fares better when it gets out into the country, the endless sweep of plains on the long train journey to the Urals, the partisan brigade shooting down a band of white-smocked boys in a field of golden corn, the charge across the ice, the snow-packed trenches. But even here one feels faintly cheated by this series of stunning visuals, and Freddie Young's photography stays in the mind only as a book of picture postcards, never really capturing the essence of the "boundless, dazed, scented silence" of the Russia of the steppes. The impression of ephemeral prettiness is underlined by Maurice Jarre's jangling music score and by several irritating, and really rather banal, editing devices: Zhivago stands in the ice-palace of the country estate at Yuryatin and the frost crystals on the window-pane dissolve into yellow flower petals, and from there into a close-up of Julie Christie's face. Nor is the film redeemed by its acting, which is thoroughly undistinguished - though this is hardly the fault of the actors, since for the most part all they are required to do is to register the appropriate expression. Omar Sharif comes across as a full-blown romantic without ever suggesting that there is any depth to Zhivago (the fact of his poetry conveyed by a long sequence of him in the throes of composition); Julie Christie struggles conscientiously as Lara, but the part is too big for her or anyone else; Geraldine Chaplin looks pretty; Ralph Richardson is the most English of Russians; and only Rod Steiger as the opportunist Komarovsky, and Tom Courtenay as Strelnikov, cruel, scarred and menacing as he stands silent on the platform of his armoured train, inject any life into their performances. David Lean's film is a long haul along the road of synthetic lyricism, a clean-limbed exercise totally devoid of any evocation of feeling and without an echo of the Russian people's "cursed capacity for suffering".

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