10 / 10
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 earns 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.
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 brilliant. He’s also six foot three. That was a problem because the real Lawrence was five foot five. The film handles this by simply not addressing it. O’Toole plays Lawrence as a man whose body is the wrong size for his interior life. That turns out to be a useful interpretation regardless of the historical inaccuracy.
For Writers
Long films and long books carry the prejudice that they need to justify their length scene by scene. Lawrence of Arabia does the opposite. It uses length to allow events their actual duration. The desert crossing takes the time it would take to cross a desert. The conversations take the time the conversations would take. The lesson is that pace isn’t the same as efficiency. Some stories require time to mean what they mean. Cutting them shorter doesn’t make them better. It just makes them shorter.
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 structural turning point. He realizes he enjoyed the execution. The film doesn’t editorialize. O’Toole’s face does the work.
For Writers
The most important character moment in Lawrence of Arabia is the one where Lawrence realizes he liked killing Gasim. The film doesn’t tell you this. It shows you his face. The lesson is that the most important emotional beats in a story shouldn’t be narrated. Show the moment. Let the reader read it. If you explain it, you’ve collapsed the meaning into commentary and lost what the image could have done.
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 not as a twist but as the inevitable conclusion of how empires work. 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 one of the most devastating depictions of political defeat in cinema. The film doesn’t blame anyone in particular. It blames the situation. Empires do what empires do. The men who serve them are tools.
For Writers
A political tragedy works when the audience understands the system, not just the individuals trapped in it. Lawrence of Arabia teaches the audience about Sykes-Picot, about Bedouin tribal structure, about Ottoman dynastic politics, about British colonial bureaucracy, all of it through scenes that look like character drama. The system is the antagonist. The men are the casualties. The lesson is that if you want to write political fiction, you have to do the work of building the political world. Skip that work and your conflict collapses into individual psychology.
Craft Note
David Lean directed. Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson wrote the screenplay. Peter O’Toole played T.E. Lawrence. Omar Sharif played Sherif Ali. Alec Guinness played Prince Faisal. Anthony Quinn played Auda abu Tayi. Jack Hawkins played General Allenby. Anthony Quayle played Colonel Brighton. Claude Rains played Dryden. Freddie Young won the Oscar for Cinematography. Maurice Jarre composed the score. Seven Academy Awards from ten nominations including Best Picture and Director. Released December 1962. Runtime 228 minutes plus intermission. 70mm Super Panavision.
Does Lawrence of Arabia still hold up?
10/10. One of the few films that justifies the word masterpiece. The length is the form. The desert is a character. The politics are the engine. O’Toole’s performance is one of the greatest in the history of the medium. Watch it on the largest screen you can find and watch it in one sitting if you can.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists