#641: Lawrence of Arabia
David Lean’s epic embodies prioritizing a damn good story over accuracy
Initial release: December 10, 1962
Director: David Lean
It’s funny, the stories we tell. We want to have an audience, to keep them entertained. So we make our stories big and bold; we add detail where there was none, we drop detail where it won’t serve. T. E. Lawrence, British Army officer, archeologist and adventurer, knew this better than most. His time in the Arab world was marked by war, with his personal involvement in several battles in the Arab revolt against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. He would tell his own story in the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom; but it’s been rather extensively argued that much of what he claimed both in official reports and his own book was less than the facts. But who lets facts in the way of a good story? So let’s talk about David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
Released in the heyday of the movie epic, Lawrence of Arabia is a nearly four-hour journey through Lawrence’s time in the Middle East. It’s the definition of an “epic film,” the kind of megabudget event that dominated the late 1950s and the 1960s. And epic it is: there’s battle scenes, there’s hundreds of extras, there’s ups and downs throughout the story, and it all revolves around T. E. Lawrence, played masterfully by Peter O’Toole opposite the irreplaceable Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali, an amalgamation of the many tribal leaders the real Lawrence worked with. While the film is about the former, it’s really his connection with the latter that drives the film, which throughout its lifetime borders on queer (and certainly Lawrence has That Vibe — not for nothing but there are almost no women in this film, certainly none with speaking parts.)
Make no mistake, this isn’t really a film about the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. While it’s certainly the backdrop, it plays fast and loose with the proceedings; the film instead centers on Lawrence, who is portrayed as insubordinate and certainly more than a little egotistical, who swoops in to aid the struggling Arab tribes in their fight against the Ottomans, helping Prince Faisal navigate the political vagaries of getting aid from the British while not submitting to British rule, and serving as a mediator among the tribes who up to this point have been fighting each other as much as they have the Ottomans. The result is a complicated character: Lawrence isn’t your typical hypermasculine white savior here to save the savage brown people from themselves — he’s vain, spindly, a bit mincing, and possessed of a taste for violence, a fact he discovers to his dismay during his first trip to the desert, only to give in to his desire for bloodlust in a climactic massacre scene towards the end of the film.
As much as it’s a character study for Lawrence, it’s also a triumph of filmmaking. Filmed largely in the more arid parts of Eurasia, from Spain to Jordan and Morocco in between, Lean makes use of the broad expanses of the desert, the sheer size of it, in a way that recalls the cinema of John Ford and his beloved shooting location of Monument Valley. To shoot Ali’s entrance into the film through what was likely the first genuine mirage captured on film, Lean makes use of a massive 482mm lens from Panavision developed for the production that has never been used since. Omar Sharif himself approached the scene from a quarter mile away, allowing himself to be seen as little more than a shimmering dot on the horizon, making for a dramatic, yet understated, entrance that defined his character.
Of course, like the real Lawrence’s penchant for exaggeration, so too does the film play a little loose with the truth. Drawing heavily from a rather savage rebuke of Lawrence written in 1955, it characterizes Lawrence as egotistical and vaguely queer (though this latter facet is considered with more nuance than you’d expect for 1962.) There are of course other issues, mostly to do with the way the many different players of the Arab revolt were combined or excised for the sake of storytelling, but also glossing over questions about how much Lawrence really knew about the political machinations behind the scenes, such as the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement. But really that’s what film is for, right? To tell a story, to thrill an audience. If you want education, go watch a documentary. Personally, I think it’s an interesting choice, to depict Lawrence this way; we watch him go from self-assured, slightly insufferable genius, to a broken-down, bitter man, whose dream of seeing the Arabs reach their independence is dashed by imperial dishonesty and petty greed, and who has debased himself, given over to his worst instincts.
Lawrence of Arabia is the kind of film they don’t make anymore. Oh sure, there have been more recent attempts — I’m thinking particularly of Alexander, or perhaps Gladiator — but the golden age of the Epic is long past. On some level, that’s perhaps for the best: the stories these films tell is often the peak of Hollywood mythmaking, hokey and contrived. But on another level, it’s a shame, because these were the films that were Hollywood, that were what movies should be about as a medium.
But in the end nothing lasts forever: not revolutions, not reputations, not film genres. In the end, like the desert, all will be dust.
