What if Stanley Kubrick had made ‘Doctor Zhivago’…

News came to light this week that surprised film historians. Before David Lean created his epic, much-loved adaptation of Doctor Zhivago in 1965, two other revered Hollywood filmmakers tried to buy the rights from author Boris Pasternak: Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick.

In a letter to Pasternak, discovered by Dr James Fenwick, a film historian, and dated January 8 1959, the director of Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey listed the awards he and Douglas had won for their previous collaboration, the 1957 war film Paths of Glory, and added: “We would now like to buy the motion picture rights to Doctor Zhivago.”

Dr Fenwick has also given details of a passage in Kubrick’s notebooks, unseen until now, which details exactly how Kubrick envisaged Doctor Zhivago slotting into his career plan, at a time when he was still best known for gritty pulp like The Killing (1956). “The precise moment of absolute success for a director,” he wrote, “is when he is allowed to film a great literary classic of over 600 pages, which he does not understand too well, and which is anyway impossible to film properly due to the complexity of the plot or the elusiveness of its form or content.”

At a chunky 592 pages, Doctor Zhivago – which was first published in Italy in 1957 and helped win its author the Nobel Prize in 1958 – just about qualifies for this somewhat cynical accolade. But the whole idea begs the question: what would a Kubrick Doctor Zhivago have looked like? It’s a bewildering vision to conjure. Doctor Zhivago is freighted with history, personalities, and politics, and, aside from the snow, it lacks so many of the chilly components key to Kubrick’s sensibility. It isn’t sparse or dehumanised. It doesn’t have an alienated, amoral hero (see A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining) but instead a passionate, idealistic poet. One would fear for Doctor Zhivago’s very soul if Kubrick had really got his say on the script.

Besides, Lean’s version is better remembered for the swooning romance than the politics – it’s hard to conjure a memory of his film without Julie Christie’s iconic fur hat and Lara’s Theme. Romance? Kubrick? Feasibly, Douglas could have ramped up the heroism in Omar Sharif’s shoes. The actor’s Left-wing sympathies and diplomatic efforts to rid Hollywood of the stain of McCarthyism were growing in force, eventually to culminate with him producing and starring as the slave-rebel-champion in Spartacus, and ensuring that blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo received his credit.

Julie Christie, though? It’s hard to imagine a less Kubrickian actress, or one who would have had less time for his notorious perfectionism. The point is moot – Christie didn’t become a star until Billy Liar (1963) – and so one has to wonder which nervous ingénue would have had to coat up to play Lara Antipova for Kubrick, and what she might have suffered. None of his early films gave women much more than decorative functions, except for the one scene that stands out in Paths of Glory – the German tavern singer who brings all the soldiers to tears, played by Kubrick’s future wife, Christiane.

No one gave much attention to the role of Varinia (I had to look her name up) in the very phallocentric Spartacus, a part originally given to the German actress Sabine Bethmann, who lasted two days before Anthony Mann resigned from directing. The story goes that Kubrick wanted to test Bethmann’s ability to cry, so fired her, but still wasn’t satisfied, so the overqualified Jean Simmons took over. Varinia gets thrown into a grotty prison cell and raped off-screen as a form of psychological torture for her lover Spartacus – a female fate that’s as Kubricky as they come. Lara herself doesn’t get out of Doctor Zhivago unscathed. Her rapist is the devious lawyer Komarovsky, the part Rod Steiger played for Lean after Marlon Brando and James Mason turned it down.

Kubrick has connections with all three actors – he used Mason for Lolita (1962), of course, and worked with Brando on early drafts of the Western One-Eyed Jacks (1961).  He was also approached to direct Steiger as a Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker (1964), but demurred on the simple basis that he didn’t find the actor “that exciting”.  Steiger got his own back: he wound up playing Napoleon in Dino De Laurentiis’s epic flop Waterloo (1970), a rival project to the aborted Bonaparte biopic Kubrick spent years researching.

The bounteous supporting cast of Lean’s Doctor Zhivago make it particularly tantalising to imagine the on-set electricity if Kubrick had been given equivalent star power. Perhaps Alec Guinness, Tom Courtenay and Ralph Richardson were mainly lured in by the Lean factor, but it’s hard to resist the idea of a young Klaus Kinski doing his bit for Kubrick. The controversial actor, who was famous for his on-set tantrums, made a brief but brilliant impression as the anarchist Kosteyed Amoursky, spewing counter-revolutionary invective at everyone in his forced labour platoon. Knowing Kubrick, who’d have loved this weirdo, he’d probably have been tempted to ditch the entire central romance and promote Amoursky as the main character, baffling everyone who’d read Pasternak in the process. I’m imagining a key role, too, for Timothy Carey, the Nicolas-Cage-a-like, 6ft 4in bruiser who stole his scenes in Kubrick’s two previous films. Perhaps he could have had (the Oscar-nominated) Courtenay’s part, as the student-turned-extremist Strelnikov, with a few extra facial scars and those haunting eyes telling of every massacre he’s seen.

A Kubrick Doctor Zhivago in 1960 is a very different hypothesis from the one he might have mounted in 1975, after the accrued prestige of his most productive period. Back then, he was still proving himself. After Lean turned down Spartacus to make Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and then Mann and Douglas fell out, the 32-year-old Kubrick took that on as journeywork. He didn’t have script control and would later disown it – you get the impression he’d much rather have focused on the moral decadence of the Romans than the boring old slave revolt.

He’d have been just as impatient, surely, with Pasternak’s complex themes and the need to tread a politically cautious path through his story. Right in the thick of the Cold War, Lean got away with Doctor Zhivago because it was a British production, and so full of anguished doubt about the bloody birth pangs of communism.  Maybe Kubrick failed to launch his version because Pasternak had misgivings: what if he ran amok with the whole enterprise? No one was ready to swallow Dr Zhivago: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bolsheviks.