Roger Ebert Review:


What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, or even think that it could be made. In the words twenty-seven years later of one of its stars, Omar Sharif: "If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that's four hours long, with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert—what would you say?" The impulse to make this movie was based, above all, on imagination. The story of Lawrence is not founded on violent battle scenes or cheap melodrama, but on David Lean's ability to imagine what it would look like to see a speck appear on the horizon of the desert, and slowly grow into a human being. He had to know how that would feel before he could convince himself that the project had a chance of being successful.


There is a moment in the film when the hero, a British eccentric named T.E. Lawrence, has survived a suicidal trek across the desert and is within reach of shelter and water—and he turns around and goes back to find a friend who has fallen behind. This sequence builds up to the shot in which the shimmering heat of the desert reluctantly yields the speck that becomes a man—a shot that is held for a long time before we can even begin to see the tiny figure. On television, this shot doesn't work at all—nothing can be seen. In a movie theater, looking at the stark clarity of 70mm print, we lean forward and strain to bring a detail out of the waves of heat, and for a moment we experience some of the actual vastness of the desert and its unforgiving harshness.


By being able to imagine the sequence, the filmmakers were able to see why the movie would work. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is not a simple biography or an adventure movie—although it contains both elements—but a movie that uses the desert as a stage for the flamboyance of a driven, quirky man. Although it is true that Lawrence was instrumental in enlisting the desert tribes on the British side in the 1914-17 campaign against the Turks, the movie suggests that he acted less out of patriotism than out of a need to reject conventional British society and identify with the wildness and theatricality of the Arabs.


T.E. Lawrence must be the strangest hero to ever stand at the center of an epic. To play him, Lean cast one of the strangest actors in recent movie history, Peter O'Toole, a lanky, almost clumsy man with a sculptured face and a speaking manner that hesitates between amusement and insolence. O'Toole's assignment was a delicate one. Although it was widely believed that Lawrence was a homosexual, a multimillion-dollar epic filmed in 1962 could not possibly be frank about that. And yet Lean and his writer, Robert Bolt, didn't simply cave in and rewrite Lawrence into a routine action hero.


Using O'Toole's peculiar speech and manner as their instrument, they created a character who combined charisma and craziness, who was so different from conventional military heroes that he could inspire the Arabs to follow him in that mad march across the desert. There is a moment in the movie when O'Toole, dressed in flowing white robes of a desert sheik, does a victory dance on top of a captured Turkish train, and almost seems to be posing for fashion photos. This is a curious scene because it seems to flaunt gay stereotypes, and yet none of the other characters in the movie seem to notice—nor do they take much notice of the two young desert urchins that Lawrence takes under his protection.


What Lean, Bolt, and O'Toole create is a sexually and socially unconventional man who is simply presented as what he is, without labels or comment. Could such a man rally the splintered desert tribes and win a war against the Turks? Lawrence did. But he did it partially with mirrors, the movie suggests; one of the key characters is an American journalist (Arthur Kennedy), obviously inspired by Lowell Thomas, who single-handedly retailed the Lawrence myth to the English-language press. The journalist admits he is looking for a hero to write about. Lawrence is happy to play the role. And only role-playing would have done the job; an ordinary military hero would have been too small-scale for this canvas.


For a movie that runs 216 minutes, plus intermission, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is not dense with plot details. It is a spare movie with clean, uncluttered lines, and there is never a moment when we're in doubt about the logistical details of the various campaigns. Lawrence is able to unite various desert factions, the movie argues, because (1) he is so obviously an outsider that he cannot even understand, let alone take sides with, the various ancient rivalries; and (2) because he is able to show the Arabs that it is in their self-interest to join the war against the Turks. Along the way he makes allies of such desert leaders as Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness), and Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) both by winning their respect and by appealing to their logic. The dialogue in these scenes is not complex, and sometimes Bolt makes it so spare it sounds like poetry.


I've noticed that when people remember LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, they don't talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eyes, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words. Although it seems to be a traditional narrative film—like THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, which Lean made just before it, or DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, which he made just after—it actually has more in common with essentially visual epics as Kubrick's 2001 or Eisenstein's ALEXANDER NEVSKY. It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it does not contain a complex story with a lot of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passage, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand.


Although it won the Academy Award as the year's best picture in 1962, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA would have soon been a lost memory if it had not been for two film restorers named Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten. They discovered the original negative in Columbia's vault, inside crushed and rusting film cans, and they also discovered about 35 minutes of footage that had been trimmed by distributors from Lean's final cut. To see it is to appreciate the subtlety of F.A. Young's desert cinematography—achieved despite blinding heat and the blowing sand, which worked its way into every camera. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was one of the last films to be photographed in 70mm (as opposed to being blown up to 70mm from a 35mm negative). It is a great experience to see it as Lean intended it in 1962—and also a humbling one, to realize how the motion picture industry is losing the vision to make epic films like this, and settling for safe narrative formulas instead.



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