A Daring Life in Film : An appreciation: Director David Lean brought an enduring, masterful vision to the screen that was unique in its craftsmanship.

He was, when most of us in Los Angeles last saw him, in a wheelchair, lamed--temporarily, he insisted--by a savagely bad reaction to a chemical with which he’d been treated. But Sir David Lean, who died Tuesday at the age of 83, had been mentally as agile and feisty as ever, commenting on his work and answering questions at a retrospective tribute tendered him here by the Hollywood chapter of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Wheelchair-bound or not, Lean was forging ahead with his last dream, to film Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo,” a prophetically timely (or perhaps simply timeless) novel about the exploiters and the exploited in a fictional, ore-laden Latin American country.

Lean and his friend and frequent collaborator, Robert Bolt, with whom he had done “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago” and “Ryan’s Daughter,” had the script well in hand. While he was still ambulatory, Lean had scouted locations on the coast of Spain and he had most of his cast, including, he felt sure, a commitment from Marlon Brando. He had an expert and loyal producer, Serge Silberman, who had produced all of Luis Bunuel’s last films and who evidently had the money in hand for “Nostromo.”

Because of Lean’s leg problems, it had been necessary to recruit a backup director, and the word was that it was one of the best, Arthur Penn, whom Lean had not met but whose meticulous and thoughtful approach to filmmaking mirrored Lean’s own.

But Lean developed respiratory problems, and earlier this year Silberman issued a bulletin that “Nostromo” had had to be postponed. There seemed no doubt that the postponement was likely to be permanent. It was a melancholy coda to a life of filmmaking that was unique in its daring, its craftsmanship, its sure command of the full resources of the medium.

For all those who have admired Lean’s work from “In Which We Serve,” the wartime patriotic drama he co-directed with Noel Coward, to “A Passage to India,” his last film, there is the peculiarly haunting disappointment of a last bold film it is possible to imagine but that will never be seen. (It might be made and it might be wonderful, but it would not be Lean’s.)

There were fine consolations for Lean in his last years. Above all, there was the popular success of the reconstituted version of his “Lawrence of Arabia,” a print reassembled from hundreds of oddments of film chopped out from his own final cut to meet the needs of exhibitors and television.

The film as he made it, with its breathtaking images of the desert and its subtle and shaded rendering of the complex character of Lawrence himself, looked even more impressive a quarter-century after its first release. Lean was lionized again by his old admirers, and by a new generation seeing “Lawrence” for the first time and being overwhelmed by the true possibilities of the wide cinema screen in the hands of a master.

Lean himself was a leonine figure, British to the core but somehow Lincolnesque in his craggy intensity. In his last years he lived in a house he had adapted from three wharves beside the Thames on the East Side of London, hard by the Limehouse area of song and story.

It is a glorious house, brick and beamy and masculine, with a quiet garden on one side where one of the wharves stood, the whole complex sheltered from the street by what had been the brick rear wall of the wharves. The street itself is appropriately called Narrow Street. From his second-story sitting room he could watch the endless boat traffic up and down the river, with the morning and afternoon sun throwing rippling reflections around him.

He had lately married a longtime love--he was a much-married man, I suspect because his successive wives found that his ultimate marriage was to his work. The consolations of the lovely setting and a new happiness may or may not have assuaged the frustrations of health and the unachieved dream, but one could have done worse, and I hope that Lean found it possible to feel so too.

In a tradition that is probably already harder if not impossible to reenact, Lean had started at the bottom, as a tea-boy at a small studio. He had worked his way into editing, which is the best of all postures for understanding the language, structure and rhythms of film (the perfection of which is the hallmark of Lean’s work).

By now, the reticence and finally the inability of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson to consummate their would-have-been adulterous affair in Lean’s “Brief Encounter,” the film which established his early reputation, is refreshing in its innocence. The film is charming for that reason, but, nearly half a century later, it is still thrilling to watch for the beauty of its black-and-white images (by Robert Krasker) and the intimacy of the telling.

The photograph of Lean, wind-whipped and rain-soaked, beside the camera, facing into the gales for a scene for “Ryan’s Daughter,” is indelible, conveying as it does something of the patient passion with which he made all his films, from the drawing-room fancies of “Blithe Spirit” to the epics on which his later reputation (and probably his most enduring memory) will rest.

He was one of that small breed of creators who have helped to define the possibilities of the motion picture, and if other creators with the same expansive vision come along, as they will, they will continue to be in David Lean’s debt, building on his foundations.