I can think of a handful of movies the average moviegoer will never get around to seeing, no matter how good or critically acclaimed they are: “Schindler’s List,” “Shoah,” “The Decalogue,” “Birth of a Nation,” certain Kurosawa epics, and “Lawrence of Arabia.” All of those titles have length in common, but “Lawrence of Arabia” is a curious inclusion, because at no point is that film difficult to watch.
However, I can think of reasons why certain people may avoid it, however misguided they may be. The film is pushing four hours in length, has no women in its cast, very little “action,” a peculiar male lead that hints at homosexuality and every critic who praises it agrees that the only proper way to actually see it is to see it projected in 70mm film.
I have seen the film twice now, once on TCM, and at time of writing, I’ve now seen it projected on 70mm film as is recommended. The film is a masterpiece no matter how you see it, but seeing it on the big screen will certainly make the film much more tolerable or manageable to watch for the average viewer.
And it is the way to see it. People come out of “Lawrence of Arabia” having been to the desert and back, but only if you’ve actually “felt the desert” first. There are brilliantly desolate scenes in this movie where the image is nothing more than pristine sand and a perfectly crystal clear horizon in every direction.
And despite being inspired by John Ford’s “The Searchers” and similar images in Monument Valley, Lean had the nerve to go to the deserts of Jordan and back, where no one had ever shot anything like this before, to capture what only he imagined could be great.
The problems on this set were insurmountable, only to be topped by Coppola shooting “Apocalypse Now” in the jungle. Assistant directors left, screenwriters quit and were arrested, extras were impatient, Peter O’Toole was almost trampled and killed, and ultimately every Arab nation except Egypt, Omar Sharif’s native country, banned the film for being offensive to Arabs.
And this was filming. In pre-production, Lean was riding the success of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” without which he could not have made this film. But still, he switched between ideas of a biopic on Gandhi and a more historical account of T.E. Lawrence’s life. In O’Toole and Sharif, amongst others, he cast virtually no stars. Guinness was the only character actor with some notoriety, and he was done up in makeup to appear Arab for his portrayal of Prince Faisal.
There was no woman with a speaking role, no love story, no egregious special effects and not even giant bridges exploding over a river.
No, Lean’s main character is the legend of Lawrence himself. Scholars have critiqued the historical accuracy of the film, but how close it was to real events was hardly the point. Through Lawrence and his rise and fall as a hero, Lean crafts a myth and a legend about the man equal to the myth created in “Citizen Kane.”
The film’s prologue in Britain at Lawrence’s funeral is the obvious similarity to Orson Welles’s film. None of the people there knew him, but they “knew” he was great.
It’s then broken up into two parts. The first before the intermission is a legend’s rise to fame and the question between whether a person can write their own destiny. The second half is about the fall of a legend and how the rest of the world will shape it. And this is partially accurate, as the journalist Jackson Bentley portrayed in the film is an obvious reference to Lowell Thomas, a real journalist who reported on Lawrence’s life.
And this story is told simply without much ambiguity or complication. It makes the whole film easy to digest, and it’s worth it to savor the luscious desert cinematography of Freddie Young. He fought swirling winds and extreme distance to capture the subtle images of a miniscule, lone figure on a horse, approaching slowly from the horizon until it appears fully as a man.
One of my favorite sequences is when a man has fallen off his horse and is stranded in the desert. Lawrence fights all odds to rescue him, and as he wanders, Young places his camera literally in the sand to get the most vivid of low angle shots that illustrate the vastness of the desert like no other.
It’s also a treat to enjoy Peter O’Toole’s witty and suggestive performance as “Law-rence.” He exerts such confidence in his character, and he loses himself so fully in it. Watch just how empty his face becomes when he’s coming up with “the miracle” of getting to Aqaba, or when he comes across the bombed village just off the Suez Canal, or when he is being tortured by Turkish soldiers.
O’Toole was a fresh face back when the film was released in 1962, no longer true now, but we still watch him in “Lawrence of Arabia” and constantly ask, “Who is this guy?”
It’s also said that O’Toole was uncomfortable when riding a camel during filming. He took a piece of foam and placed it on the saddle, and it’s rumored that this has become the custom amongst Arabs even today.
That’s a peculiar legend, but so is David Lean’s entire film. It’s the film that, on paper, should be impossible to watch. Instead, it’s a masterpiece; the kind of film that makes us feel as though we were there, that made us believe in a legendary figure and made us believe miracles could happen even in film.