David Lean began his career carrying tea to filmmakers and doing other menial tasks. He then graduated to film cutter, demonstrating he had a good eye and helping out directors who could not master the Moviola, a contraption that synchronized picture and sound. And before long Lean had become a superb editor. In principle, this should have qualified him to be a commanding director: Visuals, not the words, are what predominate in cinema. Get the montage right — as he did in “Pygmalion” (1938) — and you have a rush of nearly wordless scenes that reveal all you need to know about Eliza Doolittle and her professor. This technique of cutting to decisive moments nearly equals that epitome of editing, the sequence of scenes that shows the deterioration of Charles Foster Kane’s marriage in Orson Welles’s masterpiece.

But Gene Phillips does not share Lean’s editorial gifts. In “Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean” (University of Kentucky Press, 535 pages, $39.95), he spares a paragraph or two for how Lean put “Pygmalion” together, and then he rattles on for page after page explaining how George Bernard Shaw, Gabriel Pascal (the rapscallion producer), and the rest of the universe reacted to the film.

Because Lean is awarded genius status, everything connected to him has to appear on Mr. Phillips’s screen. Lean had six wives and behaved sort of like Henry VIII, so that the wives often appear somewhere in this celluloid life as outtakes, so to speak — ancillary to the true drama of the director’s career.

Lean did his best work as a director early on when he had scripts like “Great Expectations” (1946) and “Oliver Twist” (1948) to discipline his infatuation with the panoramic screen. Did he see himself in service of a genius like Dickens and then later regard himself as belonging in the same category? When that happens, the director becomes a law unto himself.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Lean greeted the advent of sound with dismay. As the astringent David Thomson observes: “Lean became lost in the sense of his own pictorial grandeur.” Alec Guinness, who had his share of battles with the lordly Lean, was surely right: It was a mercy that Lean did not live long enough to do his film of Conrad’s “Nostromo.”

After recently viewing Lean’s putative masterpiece, “Lawrence of Arabia,” I could not fathom the point of the film other than to produce stunning visuals and provide footage for the God-like Peter O’Toole. In search of relief from the turgid Mr. Phillips, I took another peek at the Lean entry in Mr. Thomson’s inimitable “Biographical Dictionary of Film”: “It is hard to discern what ‘Lawrence’ is about — it seems afflicted with very English intimations that the desert is a place for miracles.”

I’m not sure why Mr. Phillips decided to do this biography. To be sure, certain critics faulted his predecessor, Kevin Brownlow, for not including more film criticism in his biography of Lean. And Mr. Phillips, professor of film history and modern literature at Loyola University, does right by this aspect of Lean’s achievement.

But Mr. Brownlow had extraordinary access to Lean and is certainly the better writer. At crucial points, Mr. Phillips has to rely on Mr. Brownlow, who is generously acknowledged in “Beyond the Epic” as Lean’s “definitive biographer.”

Mr. Phillips’s elephantine effort is certainly worth close attention for film scholars — many of whom, including Mr. Brownlow, have praised his book. What they seem to be applauding, however, is primarily the scholar’s energy and comprehensiveness. Of course, they also grant Lean his genius, which I am loath to do.

At his best, in the magnificent “Oliver Twist,” dominated by the incomparable Alec Guinness, Lean had the sense to meld his superb editing with a world-class performance of one of literature’s great characters.

“Oliver Twist” has pace and wit — the very qualities that later grandiose pictures like “Dr. Zhivago” lack. It ought to be the purpose of biography to explain what happened to Lean. Or as David Thomson concludes, “I challenge anyone to see ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and not admit the loss. It will take a very good biography to explain that process.” Well, I am still waiting.

crollyson@nysun.com