Movie Review: 'Lawrence of Arabia'

I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers Connections, a British TV import hosted by the congenial writer and commentator James Burke that was broadcast here in the U.S. by the Public Broadcasting System in the early 1980s.

This 10-part miniseries explored the intricate and seemingly strange connections between individual scientific discoveries and simple inventions.  It also showed how those links forged the chain of our modern technological society.   Considering its theme and scope, Connections could have been about as exciting as watching paint dry, but Burke’s wit and effervescence made it both fascinating and indelible.

I mention this seemingly irrelevant tidbit because after I watched that series while I was in high school, I became more aware that history and historical events don’t just “happen” and leave no lasting legacy.  After all, if this were the case, there would have been no Second World War 21 years after the end of the First World War.

However, as George Santayana famously observed, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and no modern conundrum can rival the Middle East conflict in its “doomed to eternal repetition” state of perpetuity.

 Because I first watched David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia several years before the turn of the century on Turner Classic Movies, I never really grasped the interconnectivity of the First World War and its messy aftermath to the Arab-Israeli conflicts and their impact on Western history.

Nevertheless, when I bought the one-disc, no-frills DVD of the restored version a few years ago, I watched Lawrence of Arabia and saw a definite causality between the Arab Revolt it depicts and the horrible events of September 11, 2001.

Sherif Ali: Does it surprise you, Mr. Bentley? Surely, you know the Arabs are a barbarous people. Barbarous and cruel.  Who but they!  Who but they!

Based in part on T.E. Lawrence’s posthumously published The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and other writings, Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s two-act screen adaptation is neither a conventional “biopic” nor a war movie nor a monumental epic.  Rather, Lawrence of Arabia combines elements of all three genres.  Directed by David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Passage to India), Lawrence of Arabia is a riveting exercise in storytelling through moving pictures, one that takes a hard – if somewhat sanitized – look at a complex and controversial man who is clearly torn between two cultures.

Because Lawrence of Arabia begins with the fatal motorcycle accident which ended Lieut. Col. Lawrence’s life in 1935, the film is essentially one huge flashback that begins after Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), the fictitious stand-in for American journalist Lowell Thomas, is approached by a British reporter to say a few words after Lawrence’s memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

[Asked by reporter if he knew Lawrence]
Jackson Bentley: Yes, it was my privilege to know him and to make him known to the world. He was a poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior.
[After reporter leaves]
Jackson Bentley: He was also the most shameless exhibitionist since Barnum & Bailey.    

After this, we first meet Lieutenant Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) in an office in the British Army’s headquarters in Cairo – a “nasty, dirty little room,” he calls it – where he and his aides are relegated to making maps of the Middle East.  The illegitimate son of a British noble who bears his mother’s last name, Lawrence is brilliant but unorthodox, and his insolent attitude rubs most of his superiors the wrong way.

Nevertheless, his knowledge of the Middle East and his intellectual gifts make him a good candidate for a mission planned by Gen. Lord Allenby (Jack Hawkins) and a certain Mr. Dryden (Claude Rains) of the Foreign Office’s Arab Bureau.  His assignment: to cross the Suez Canal – then a strategic waterway vital to British interests and the war effort against Germany and her allies – and into the deserts of Arabia.  

Once there, he is to quietly assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various Arab tribes and if they can actually prevail in an ongoing revolt against the Turks’ Ottoman Empire, which is Germany’s ally and poses a threat to the Suez Canal and Britain’s post-war agenda in the region.

Lawrence accepts, and after a long and dangerous journey, he makes his way to the Bedu tribe led by Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness), who is being advised by the militarily conservative Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle).

However, Lawrence being Lawrence, is not content to simply sit in war councils and “observe and report” back to Allenby and Mr. Dryden.  On impulse, the young officer injects himself into the Arab revolt and proposes to lead a daring cross-desert attack on the Red Sea port of Aquaba, where Turkish batteries are preventing the British Navy from providing supplies and – more Important to the success of the revolt – artillery to their Arab “allies.”

The skeptical and obviously reluctant British generals – as well as some of the Arabs themselves – find Lawrence’s ideas to be rather implausible, yet they are surprised when he and his Bedu riders do capture Aquaba after a grueling cross-desert ride on camels.

Soon, Lawrence’s exploits make their way to the ears of American journalist Jackson Bentley, who is determined to sell the eccentric and charismatic scholar-turned-warrior’s story to a public which is still resisting the idea of America’ s entry into the Great War.

Of course, there is a lot more to the story, and anyone who reads a newspaper these days knows the result of the British-sponsored Arab Revolt.   The Ottoman Empire is no more, and the cold-eyed diplomats personified by Claude Rains’ Mr. Dryden divided its former holdings between Britain and France by drawing up borders without considering the nature of the peoples they were so casually “uniting” into European-created nations.

General Murray: [on the Arab Revolt] It's a storm in a teacup, Mr. Dryden - a sideshow. If you want my own opinion, this whole theater of operations is a sideshow! The real war's not being fought against the Turks, but the Germans. And not here, but on the Western front in the trenches! Your Bedouin Army - or whatever it calls itself - would be a sideshow OF a sideshow!
Mr. Dryden: Big things have small beginnings, sir.
General Murray: Does the Arab Bureau want a "big thing" in Arabia? If we get them to rise against the Turks, does the Bureau think they'll sit down quietly under us when this war's over?
Mr. Dryden: The Arab Bureau thinks the job of the moment, sir, is to win the war.
General Murray: Don't tell me my duty, Mr. Dryden!

With a running time that approaches the four-hour mark and with scenes so deliberately paced that the viewer feels as though he or she is in the desert, Lawrence of Arabia is not intended to be a rousing crowd pleaser the way Raiders of the Lost Ark or even the lesser Battle of Britain are.  Lean’s intent here is similar to Stanley Kubrick’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey – to tell a story not so much with dialogue or trite Hollywood conventions but through the power of the visual image and Maurice Jarre’s musical score.

True, Bolt and Wilson have written far more spoken lines for Lawrence of Arabia than Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke did for their 1968 space epic, but Lean also has long, spectacularly photographed (by Freddy Young) sequences where we only see Lawrence and a Bedu rider – and sometimes Lawrence alone – crossing the harsh wastelands of the desert.

Because Lean was more interested in telling his story visually rather than adhere to studio-imposed limits on length and pacing, some younger viewers who have grown up watching fast-paced and flashily edited films may not have the patience to watch Lawrence of Arabia.  The “official restoration” now available has a run time of 216 minutes, which is twice as long as, say, Live Free or Die Hard.

Though the film is unflinching in its examination of Lawrence and his clearly divided loyalties between his native Britain and his Arab warriors and their political aspiration, it does – as any film of its time would – sanitize some of the more controversial aspects of his life.

Yes, it makes no effort to hide Lawrence’s illegitimate origins; indeed, he honestly tells Ali (Omar Sharif) that he doesn’t know his father and that he bears his mother’s surname.

However, in a scene where Lawrence is captured and tortured by the Turkish Bey (Jose Ferrer), Lawrence of Arabia only has him being beaten rather than being raped.  No problem for this viewer, but some more modern critics say that this reflects a denial of Lawrence’s disputable penchant for homosexuality.  

Still, sanitized or not, deliberately paced or not, Lawrence of Arabia has everything anyone who loves movies could want except, strangely enough, female characters.  It has a compelling if imperfect central character, equally interesting supporting characters, a great cast, fantastic cinematography, a lush score, exciting battle scenes, political intrigue and, yes, epic sweep and grandeur.

It also, if one thinks about it, offers an insightful window back to an era where nattily dressed diplomats greedily and coldly drew lines on maps with casual ease, not knowing – or caring – that they were helping set the stage for a conflict that touches our 21st Century lives.