The best films of consummate craftsman David Lean are the product of a creative tension between romantic style and realistic content.Working his way up from clapper-boy to editor's apprentice in the 1930s, Lean edited newsreels and then features. His first outing as a director, with Noel Coward, "In Which We Serve" (1942), was a moving study of wartime England that contrasted the duty to fight with the human sacrifice required to win. Lean's next three films came from Coward's pen: "This Happy Breed" (1944), the story of a London family from 1919 to 1939; the rousingly entertaining "Blithe
