Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

This evening's film is the epic historical romance "Doctor Zhivago," based on the 1956 novel by Boris Pasternak.

The movie was directed by David Lean from a screenplay by Robert Bolt, and released by MGM Studios in 1965.

"Doctor Zhivago" stars Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness, and Geraldine Chaplin, with support from Tom Courtenay, Ralph Richardson, Siobhan McKenna, Rita Tushingham, and a proverbial cast of thousands.

"Doctor Zhivago" begins in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union when General Yevgraf Zhivago of the Interior Ministry interviews a young woman he believes might be the lost daughter of his late half-brother Yuri and Yuri's lover, Lara Antipova.

Yevgraf tells the young woman his half-brother's story, beginning with the death of his mother in 1902.

Young Yuri goes to live with Alexander and Anna Gromeko, who have a young daughter of their own, Tanya.

She later goes off to school in Paris while Yuri studies medicine, although his first love is poetry.

Yuri and Tanya are reunited in 1913 and soon become engaged.

Meanwhile, the young Lara, whose mother Amelia owns a dress store, is groomed and seduced by Amelia's patron and lover, the well-connected but unscrupulous Victor Komarovsky.

Lara's friend, Pasha Antipov, is wounded by mounted Cossack police during a peaceful workers demonstration.

He comes to Lara for help.

She tends to his wounds and he asks her to hide a pistol he found in the street.

When Amelia learns Komarovsky is having an affair with Lara, she attempts suicide.

Komarovsky discovers her and summons his doctor, who brings Yuri Zhivago with him to assist.

Once Amelia's out of danger, Yuri sees Lara arguing with Komarovsky, who later rapes her.

Enraged, Lara follows him to a Christmas party where Yuri and Tanya are in attendance and shoots Komarovsky.

Yuri treats his wound while Lara is escorted out by Pasha, and those two later marry.

But the fates of Yuri, Lara, Tanya, and Pasha continue to intertwine over the coming years, through the ravages of the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the civil war that followed.

The only constants for Yuri Zhivago are his dedication to his patients and his poetry and to his love for both Tanya and Lara.

Boris Pasternak was born in 1890 into an artistic family whose circle included novelist Leo Tolstoy and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Pasternak first became famous as a poet with the publication of "My Sister, Life" in 1922.

Unlike many of the Russian intelligentsia, he remained in Moscow during the civil war that followed the October Revolution in 1917 and was generally supportive of the revolution's goals.

But when it became apparent that the communist regime would not tolerate art or literature that was considered personal or sentimental, Pasternak turned his attention to translating classic works into Russian, including plays by Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare.

He began working on what was to become "Doctor Zhivago" as early as the 1910s and '20s, and parts were circulated in samizdat, underground publications, in the wake of the Second World War.

Pasternak finished the novel in 1956, but it was not allowed to be published in the Soviet Union because it focused on the welfare of individuals rather than that of collective society.

There was also implied criticism to Stalinism, collectivization, and the Great Purge of 1937, as well as the Soviet Gulag.

"Doctor Zhivago" was first published in 1957 in an Italian translation.

The indignant response of Soviet officials made it a sensation among non-communist nations, and the novel spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times' best-seller list.

Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

But under pressure from the Soviet authorities, he declined to accept it.

Although the Nobel Prize took note of his poetry and the full range of his literary work, it was widely understood as recognition of the importance and renown of "Doctor Zhivago."

Before the studios decided the best length for a motion picture was somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours, feature films could be considerably longer.

D.W. Griffith's 1950 historical epic "The Birth of a Nation," the first real feature film, ran three hours and 15 minutes.

His next film, the episodic historical drama "Intolerance," released in 1916, ran a full 3 1/2 hours.

Erich von Stroheim's original cut of his 1924 silent psychological drama "Greed" ran nine hours and 11 minutes, although it was never shown at that length.

Later, a few special films might go over the two-hour limit.

MGM's "Gone with the Wind," like "The Birth of a Nation," a story about the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, ran just short of four hours.

The speed of film spectacles in the mid '50s was part of the reaction to the rise of television and the decline in motion picture audiences.

Studios had to give audiences something more than what they could get for free with a television set in their own living rooms, so they offered new, bigger cinematography with Cinerama in 1952, Cinemascope in 1953, and 3D films in the early '50s and again in the '60s.

They produced epic technicolor historical dramas with all-start casts and thousands of extras.

And unlike 90-minute television dramas, these movies could be longer, sometimes much longer.

"Ben-Hur," built as a tale of the Christ and released by MGM in 1959, ran over 3 1/2 hours, more than an hour longer than its silent 1925 predecessor.

The following year, the Roman epic "Spartacus" clocked in at three hours and 17 minutes.

"Lawrence of Arabia" hit three hours and 38 minutes in 1962, with "Cleopatra" the following year only three hours and 12 minutes.

In 1965, the same year "Doctor Zhivago" was released at three hours and 17 minutes, George Stevens brought in his version of the Gospels, "The Greatest Story Ever Told," at a whopping four hours and 20 minutes.

But the trend couldn't last.

These films were not only expensive to produce, but they cut down on the number of showings a single theater could provide on a given night.

Worse, they were no guarantee of a big box office or favorable reviews.

So there were fewer and fewer, except for epic tales of ancient heroes and B-movies made overseas.

By 1975, Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, stood out as a very long film at just a little over three hours.

When it was released, "Doctor Zhivago" was not criticized for its length, but for the way director David Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt decided to use the time.

Richard Roud, critic for The Guardian in the United Kingdom, wrote, "In the film, the Russian Revolution is reduced to a series of rather annoying occurrences.

Getting firewood, finding a seat on a train, and a lot of nasty proles being tiresome.

Whatever one thinks of the Russian Revolution, it was certainly more than a series of consumer problems.

At least, it was to Zhivago himself.

The whole point of the book was that even though Zhivago disapproved of the course the revolution took, he had approved of it in principle.

Had he not, there would have been no tragedy."

A critic in Variety found more to applaud.

"The sweet and scope of the Russian Revolution as reflected through the personalities of those who either adapted or were crushed has been captured by David Lean in 'Doctor Zhivago', frequently with soaring dramatic intensity.

He has accomplished one of the most meticulously-designed and executed films, superior in several visual respects to his 'Lawrence of Arabia.'"

Philip K. Scheuer of The Los Angeles Times told audiences, "If you will brace yourself for an inordinately lengthy session, intermission notwithstanding, in a theater seat, I can promise you some fine filmmaking."

There had been several dramatic adaptions of "Doctor Zhivago" since David Lean's film in 1965.

The first actually appeared six years earlier in 1959 on Brazilian television.

A two-part British television version debuted in November 2002 and was shown in the United States on Masterpiece Theater a year later.

There have also been musical versions in the United States, Sweden, and Japan.

An 8-and-1/2-minute series was presented on Russian television in 2006.

This was only appropriate.

Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," once banned by the Soviet government, has been a part of the Russian high school curriculum since 2003.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.