Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Official trailer

Lawrence of Arabia is one of the four or five best films ever made. David Lean directed it. Peter O’Toole plays T.E. Lawrence in his first major film role. The film runs three hours and forty-seven minutes. It was shot in 70mm Super Panavision in Jordan, Spain, and Morocco. It won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. It’s the rare film that justifies every minute of its length.

The story follows Lawrence from his desk job at British headquarters in Cairo through his rise as a leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, his capture and probable rape at Deraa, and his eventual disillusionment when the British and French carve up the Middle East at the end of the war without honoring the promises made to the Arabs. It’s a war film, a desert adventure, a political tragedy, and a character study of a man who couldn’t decide who he was.

Nothing else in cinema looks like this film, and I don’t expect anything ever will.

Lawrence of Arabia is the picture I think of when somebody asks what a movie screen is for. It runs three hours and forty-seven minutes, and I’d resent losing any of it. O’Toole gives me a hero I admire, distrust and pity all at once, and Lean frames him against a desert so vast it seems to swallow the war.

What Works

Almost everything. Freddie Young’s cinematography is the most beautiful work in any film of the 1960s. The famous shot of Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali emerging from a desert mirage on a black camel, slowly approaching from impossible distance until he resolves into a human figure, is sustained for several minutes and is one of the great entrances in cinema. The match cut from Lawrence blowing out a match in Cairo to the sun rising over the Arabian desert is the most-imitated edit in film history.

Lean knows what to point the camera at and how long to hold it there.

O’Toole is astonishing, and he’s also six foot three, when the real Lawrence was five foot five. The film simply never addresses it. O’Toole plays Lawrence as a man whose body is the wrong size for his interior life, and that reading feels so right to me that the historical inaccuracy stops mattering within minutes.

The Man

The real T.E. Lawrence was a complicated man and the film doesn’t simplify him. He’s a self-aggrandizing show-off.

He’s a brilliant tactician. He’s a man who loves the desert and the Arabs and who uses them for his own legend. He’s in love with violence and disturbed by what that says about him. The Deraa sequence, where he’s captured by Turkish soldiers and almost certainly sexually assaulted, breaks something in him that the film doesn’t try to repair.

The scene where he kills Gasim, having earlier saved him from the desert, is the hinge of the story.

He realizes he enjoyed the execution. The film doesn’t editorialize, and O’Toole’s face does all the work. That moment chills me more than any battle in the picture, because I’m watching a man learn something about himself he’ll never be able to unlearn.

The Politics

The third act is the political collapse. The British and French have already decided what they’ll do with the Middle East regardless of what Lawrence promised the Arabs at Akaba and Damascus. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed in 1916. The film treats this as the inevitable conclusion of how empires work, with no twist about it. Faisal, played by Alec Guinness, understands the situation immediately. Lawrence is the last one to figure it out. That’s part of his tragedy.

The Damascus sequence, in which Lawrence tries to run a functioning Arab government in the captured city and fails within a week, is the most devastating depiction of political defeat I know of in cinema. The film blames the situation more than any one man. Empires do what empires do, and the men who serve them are tools. Watching that government fall apart depresses me more than any of the fighting does.

Does Lawrence of Arabia still hold up?

10/10. I’d call it a masterpiece without hesitating. The length is the form, the desert is a character and the politics drive it. O’Toole’s Lawrence is the greatest screen performance I can name, a man falling apart in full daylight while everyone around him calls him a hero, and the Sherif Ali mirage entrance alone would put this film in my top five. Watch it on the largest screen you can find, in one sitting if you can.

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