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It is a whale (2 hr. 41 min.) of a story, and in the telling of it, British Director David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations) does a whale of a job. He shows a dazzlingly musical sense and control of the many and involving rhythms of a vast composition. He shows a rare sense of humor and a feeling for the poetry of situation; and he shows the even rarer ability to express these things, not in lines but in lives. Most important of all, he understands the real nature of the story he is telling. The film cries from the depths of personal disaster and impersonal fate that man is not the measure of all things, that life is bigger than the things that live it, that there is a meaning, for those who have eyes to read it, even in the gospel of chaos.