Warm AFI Tribute to David Lean : Movies: Creator of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and ‘Dr. Zhivago’ mixes humor with criticism of commercialism.

Lectures, like loin of lamb, are best served warm, and those people at the American Film Institute’s tribute to David Lean at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Thursday night got both.

The 81-year-old Lean, whose wide-screen masterpieces include “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Doctor Zhivago,” mixed wry British humor with the stern tone of a schoolmaster in lecturing his high-powered and captive Hollywood audience for its cautious, commercially homogenized films.

Lean, asking to be forgiven his presumption, said that he got the green light for his long-planned adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” just two hours before arriving at the hotel, and it was high time, indeed.

“After months and months of talk,” he said, “(it’s) sort of asinine (to get the go-ahead for a film) only two hours before receiving this great honor.”

Lean--taking the podium after a parade of tributes from old friends and such contemporary film makers as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Lawrence Kasdan--tempered his scorn for the greed that he says governs Hollywood with his own passion for the medium. “I speak from the heart and because I love movies,” he said, before delivering his apparently off-the-cuff lecture.

Lean quoted Noel Coward, with whom he made his directorial debut in the 1942 wartime drama, “In Which We Serve,” as telling him to “always come out of another hole,” to be surprising and daring. “We don’t come out of any more new holes,” Lean said. “We come out with Parts One, Two, Three and Four, and I think it’s terribly sad.”

Lean said a staple diet of repeated themes “will sink us” and urged the studios to take risks, especially with young talent.

“I don’t mind for old birds like me--we can take it--but we have to protect our young. Please, you chaps in the money department, look out for the young ones. . . . This business lives on creative pathfinders.”

Coming from Lean, especially in the wake of clips from such films as “Kwai,” “Lawrence,” “Brief Encounter,” “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist,” the blunt criticism of current film making was taken enthusiastically. Lean had made similar comments during a tribute at Cannes last year and left that audience aghast.

Thursday night’s industry crowd was treated to one of the briskest and most seriously reverent tributes in the award’s 18-year history. John Mills, whose David Lean films included “Ryan’s Daughter” and “Great Expectations,” flew 22 hours “with no pay at the end of it” to honor Lean in person. Also on hand was composer Maurice Jarre (“Dr. Zhivago,” “Lawrence of Arabia”), who spoke of Lean’s lessons in “humility, tenacity and perfectionism.”

One of the evening’s highlights was the appearance--live via satellite from London, where it was 4 a.m.--of Omar Sharif, who portrayed Zhivago, and Peter O’Toole, who co-starred with Sharif in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Steven Spielberg told Lean and the audience that “Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia” were the two films “that most made me want to be a film maker.” Lawrence Kasdan told of how he and his brother had arrived seven minutes late for a showing of “Lawrence” and decided to wait six hours for it to begin again rather than go in late because “every moment” of a David Lean movie mattered. Martin Scorsese spoke of Lean’s “landscapes of the spirit--there’s no such thing as an empty landscape in a David Lean film.”