Oscars Retrospective: Lawrence of Arabia (35th Academy Awards Review)
In terms of movies made about the World Wars, Lawrence of Arabia is the only movie I can think of that is specifically about the Far Eastern front of World War I. The vast majority of books, films and other works tend to focus on the Hellish Western front. Every now and then, you might get one based on the Eastern front and the ensuing Bolshevik Revolution. But I cannot think of a single other movie or (fictional) book about the Arab Revolt. For those who don’t know what the Arab Revolt was: the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) used to control almost the entirety of the Middle-East and was one of the Central Powers in World War I. The British and French wanted to get rid of the Ottomans to both knock them out of the war and seize most of their possessions for themselves so they decided to instigate a revolt by the numerous Arab tribes subjugated by the Turks. Most of the boiling pot that is the modern-day Middle-East can be traced back to this decision and the breakdown of the wartime alliances afterwards but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
What we are here to talk about is T. E. Lawrence, a British soldier who united the numerous Arab peoples and tribes and led them to overthrow their Turkish oppressors. To put in perspective what an accomplishment this is, imagine if someone from New York City convinced all the different gangs in south central Los Angeles to put aside their hatreds and join together into one large army that then overthrew the city government. Now multiply the length of these feuds by thousands of years and the area in question by tens of thousands of miles. This is what Lawrence did and he would emerge as one of the preeminent heroes of the war and would go on to write a book about his experiences called The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Both American and British studios had been trying to buy the rights for a film adaptation for a long time but nothing happened until Sam Spiegel and David Lean, the producer-director pair fresh off the incredibly successful The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), managed to acquire the rights. (Fun fact: the Technicolor epic The Four Feathers (1939) emerged out of one of these failed attempts to make a Lawrence movie.) Lean was interested in doing a movie about a real-life figure and at first wanted to make a movie about Mahatma Gandhi but ultimately settled for Lawrence. Though calling Lawrence of Arabia a mere biopic would be massively underselling the film.
Lawrence of Arabia’s co-star, Omar Sharif, once had this to say about the movie: “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?” (This question should put into perspective just how good of a producer and salesman Sam Spiegel was because… yeah, spending $15,000,000 on this movie sounds fiscally asinine.) There is an alternate universe out there where Lawrence of Arabia potentially turned into one of cinema’s greatest disasters and an example of a man with too much money getting too full of his own vision. Instead, it’s often heralded as the greatest film in British history and often considered in the top 10 greatest movies ever made.
It can be very hard to articulate just what actually makes Lawrence of Arabia so magnificent and also why audiences loved it so much and why cinephiles still love it so much. It is a great story about a great man but when you ask most fans of the movie, they’ll very seldom mention the plot. Instead, the movie is more of an experience, a true masterpiece of the visual medium to make us both in awe of and sympathetic with this great man. As pretentious of a sentence as this may sound, believe me, if you’ve ever watched Lawrence of Arabia, you’ll know what I mean.
It is interesting comparing this to Lean’s previous film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, as The Bridge on the River Kwai is a very complicated plot with a lot of moving parts while Lawrence of Arabia is a full hour longer and yet has a much simpler plot. There are a few moving parts but the simple gist is that Lawrence is hired by his superiors in the British Army to rally the Arabs to rebel against the Turks. The rest of the film is then Lawrence’s journey through the desert, meeting numerous new allies and folding them into his army. There is a background level of suspense as it’s established that Lawrence’s superiors look down upon the Arab natives and see them as a means to an end; they have every intention of absorbing the Ottoman Empire into their own. But this is where Lawrence comes in.
The best word to describe this movie is leadership. What made Lawrence a great man was that, unlike his British cohorts, he had a real respect and love for the Arabian people and their culture. He dined with them, talked with them, got to know them, fought in the thick of battle right beside them and even dressed like them. His taking the time to speak to them not as savages but as equals is what made them want to fight for him. Lawrence of Arabia is very methodical in how it shows this, being a masterclass of the phrase “show, don’t tell.” The whole first hour of the movie is Lawrence interacting with the Arab characters he meets. The movie spends the perfect amount of time making his superiors just snooty enough that his empathy comes off as inspirational by comparison.
This ties into Lean’s famous desert cinematography which is what people most remember about Lawrence of Arabia. The desert is a brutal, harsh, unforgiving environment where only the strongest may survive. Much of the cinematography shows the unending sand dunes and big sky that stretches as far out as the sky can see. It takes a tough man to survive out in this environment and an even tougher man to lead the people who survive in this environment. Similar to how The Bridge on the River Kwai made the jungle seem humid and sticky, the desert in Lawrence of Arabia feels brutally hot and unpleasant. Lawrence of Arabia, however, makes you feel the impact of this environment more as much of the plot is a reflection of this environment.
As an example, one of the best sequences in the movie is about an hour or so in. Lawrence is leading a camel train of Arabs to attack the port city of Aqaba but, to get there, they must cross the desert. To make this journey, they map their path from well to well to constantly refill their water supplies and, on one particularly intense stretch, it’s established that they have barely enough water to reach the next well. As they get close to the well, Lawrence realizes that a member of his caravan, Gasim (I. S. Johar), is missing and must have passed out from heat stroke partway through the desert. In this situation, your average ruthless war general would do what most of Lawrence’s advisers encourage and just leave him to die so the rest of the group can survive. A manager who has some empathy for their subordinates would command another member of the tribe to go rescue Gasim. But Lawrence was a leader so he gives command to his right-hand man and personally risks his life to ride back and rescue Gasim, despite being warned that he will be stretching his water supply past its limits. But Lawrence does it, rescues Gasim and returns just in the nick of time to thunderous applause.
In any other movie, this whole sequence could be handled in about 5 minutes. Some other epics of the time period might’ve stretched it to about 15. In Lawrence of Arabia, it feels like it’s almost a full half-hour. Normally, this would sound like a nightmare of pacing that makes the film drag but that’s the amazing thing, it doesn’t. Because most of that running time is spent in the desert environment, really putting into perspective the danger that Lawrence put himself into. You feel that heat, you see the harsh sun beat down and you are aware that it’s been a while that they’ve been in there thus understanding how long it must be until that next well. So when Lawrence doubles back, you are in awe of the bravery that it must have taken for him to go back for Gasim, not knowing where in that desert he passed out or even if he’s still alive. You’re almost shouting at the screen to not do it. And that just makes it feel all the more triumphant when he does return.
If you were to cut Lawrence of Arabia down to just its bare essentials of the story, it would probably only be about 2 hours. But it feels like Lean was engaged in a bizarre scientific experiment where he was trying to see how long and in what ways he could drag out these plot beats without boring the audience. That clip up there you can see the experiment in action (about 4 minutes in). The shot begins with the desert horizon. Then you see a dot on the horizon. Then the dot gets closer and closer until you see that it is Lawrence in all of his glory.
It’s a common praise of movies, especially very big ones and blockbusters, that you should see them on the biggest screen you could find. Hearing “see it on the big screen” has become such a commonplace praise that it can become easy to dismiss and just see any movie on your own terms. Lawrence of Arabia, however, truly is one of those movies that should be seen in a movie theater and will be worse for wear if you don’t. In fact, while theaters are dying in the modern day and age due to the increasingly higher quality of home TV sets, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the few movies to benefit from this trend. Back in the day, the trade-off between TV and movies was that television and especially home video compressed the quality of the films to a degree that made them look terrible. Lawrence of Arabia is notorious for having been borderline unwatchable on VHS since you can’t see the details and majesty of Lean’s cinematography (in other words in that above shot where you can make out the dot slowly coming on the horizon, on VHS, you would’ve just been staring at a still shot for a minute or two before realizing what was happening). Now that we live in the era of 4K 40-inch TVs, Lawrence of Arabia is now finally viable to view at home and still experience its glory though it still isn’t a perfect substitute for seeing it in the theater. Similar to how every Muslim must visit Mecca at some point in their life, every true lover of film must make a pilgrimage to see Lawrence of Arabia in IMAX at least once in their life.
The movie isn’t style over substance but an example of how the style and substance feed into each other. Even if you were to watch the movie on crap quality, it is still a great story. Peter O’Toole was a legendary actor and he nails down the emotions of Lawrence quite well. There’s a lot going on with this character as he is a bit of a loner, torn between his home culture of England and the one that he is enamored with and, in the last third, starts to crack under the pressure of not being able to live up to the legend that he is slowly becoming. And the side-characters are all very likable. While a few of them are clearly white actors wearing brownface, none are obnoxiously stereotyped depictions of Arabians; the movie gives a very fair depiction of Arab culture with all the good and the bad that it entails.
The last thing to talk about with this movie is its historical accuracy in regards to how it tells the story of the real T. E. Lawrence. It is a reoccurring debate in the study of cinema of how historically accurate should movies based on real events be. While movies are clearly meant to be entertainment first and foremost, and there’s the common saying that one shouldn’t let the truth interrupt a good story, there’s also the fact that the average moviegoer is unlikely to do research on their own. Considering how the problems in our current day-and-age revolve around arguments about what is and isn’t truth, and the fact that I’ve met too many people who don't know that Anastasia Romanov didn’t escape the Bolshevik Revolution and don’t know that Antonio Salieri didn’t really hate Wolfgang Mozart, I do consider this a debate in movies that is worth analyzing. Especially since a lot of movies based on real-life events will often fall back on classic Hollywood clichés when the real story is sometimes far more interesting.
Lawrence of Arabia has been critiqued by some scholars of the real-life Lawrence in this regard though after having finally read a biography of Lawrence, I’m inclined to disagree somewhat. There are differences but most of them revolve around streamlining certain aspects of the man's life to try to tell the story as economically as possible (in what is already a 4-hour-long movie).
For example, in real-life, Lawrence worked with several other British officers, many of whom saw action with him; in the movie they truncate this down to just two who just stick around at their home base. (Although the name of his antagonistic superior, General Allenby (Jack Hawkins), was one of Lawrence’s few British commanding officers that he actually got along with so it is somewhat disrespectful to the real man’s memory in that regard.) In real-life, Lawrence had a personal bodyguard of 160 men and several of them were commanders of their various Arab tribes; in the movie, they combine these characters into a couple of men who act as his main companions, whose personalities often combine the personalities of their real-life counterparts. The movie mostly centers around the sieges of Aqaba and Damascus with a couple other guerilla attacks here and there; the Arab Revolt obviously had many more battles. The climactic negotiations between the British and Arab tribes seems to last only a day while in real life, the postwar politics of Arabia lasted for over 2 years. You get the idea. (By the way, if you love the movie and find the protagonist interesting, I would highly recommend reading a biography of T. E. Lawrence if you get a chance. His real-life accomplishments are even more incredible than what is portrayed in the movie.)
And then there’s Lawrence himself. Supposedly Lawrence’s brother said that he barely recognized his personality and I’m sure that Lawrence in his civilian/personal life was much more mercurial and smarmy than his wartime persona though his commanding style is apparently on point as portrayed. One main difference is the height disparity: Peter O’Toole is about 6’2’’ while Lawrence was only 5’5’’. So while O’Toole towers over most of his followers, Lawrence would’ve been dwarfed by them which speaks to just how forceful of a personality he was that he was still able to command a room. Though at the very least O’Toole does look like Lawrence in terms of the face.
If there is one aspect of Lawrence’s life that is sorely missing from the movie, it’s the establishment of how Lawrence knew so much about Arabia. In the movie, it starts with the beginning of the Arab Revolt and makes it seem like he’s another ordinary officer who knows some stuff about Arabia. In real-life, Lawrence spent the pre-war years as an archaeologist touring around the Middle-East looking for ruins while also engaging in espionage to inform his government-backed benefactors about the Ottoman Empire. Thus, hiring him to lead the Arab Revolt seemed like a no-brainer since he was already so intrinsically familiar at gathering information in the area. This seems like a missing component that is important to understand about the man though it’s not like the movie itself is worse for not having it.
As far as historical accuracy in movies go, Lawrence of Arabia is nowhere near the worst offender and does give a good portrayal of its subject even if some of the ancillary characters are combined. More importantly, though, the movie seems to be trying to portray the legend of Lawrence, not necessarily the real person. Another key character is an American photojournalist named Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy) who is the one who takes “candid” pictures of Lawrence leading the Arabs and turns him into a war hero. Much of the movie is about how Lawrence goes from a man to a leader to ultimately an icon and the pressures that each of these changes inflict upon him. This in turn gives Lawrence of Arabia some interesting meta commentary on media and the movie it was turned into. There’s a lot to read into here about the impact of media turning ordinary men into heroes, the pressures of leadership and ultimately how one ordinary man can become an inspiring figure.
In conclusion, Lawrence of Arabia is a masterpiece. It’s engaging all throughout and, as mentioned, is a movie that is all about being experienced rather than telling a 3-act story. In terms of flaws with it, there aren’t many. Granted, it does ask a lot from you as you have to set aside an entire afternoon to watch it but you never notice the time. The only flaw I can think of is that the climax when the different Arabian tribes argue with each other, what they argue about can be a little confusing. I understand that the point is more to show how fractured this coalition is without a common enemy than about trying to educate the viewer on Middle-Eastern politics but, still, it’s a very difficult-to-follow conversation, especially for one of the film’s climaxes. Aside from that, Lawrence of Arabia is pretty close to perfect.
The 60s was one of the high-water marks of analyzing film as a medium and how it can reflect on the world around us. In that time period, Lawrence of Arabia stood head and shoulders above every other film epic of note, with the sole exceptions being Lean’s other films. The shot of Lawrence riding a camel over a sand dune as the music soars remains one of the most easily identifiable images in cinematic history. The characters are fascinating, the acting is on-point, the cinematography isn’t just good but it might be the best cinematography ever in a movie, the pacing is exquisite, the soundtrack is phenomenal, it’s just a great movie from beginning to end. If you ever get the chance to watch this on the big screen, I highly recommend spending the money to do so. Everything from the script to the characters to the music to the cinematography is firing on all cylinders here to create one of the greatest film experiences of all time.
But would all that be enough to call this movie of the year?
In case you missed it:
1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2
2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2
3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2
4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2
5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2
6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2
7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2
8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2
9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2
10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2
11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2
12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2
13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2
14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2
15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2
16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2
17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2
18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2
19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2
20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2
21st Academy Awards (1948): Hamlet: Part 1, Part 2
22nd Academy Awards (1949): All The King's Men: Part 1, Part 2
23rd Academy Awards (1950): All About Eve: Part 1, Part 2
24th Academy Awards (1951): An American in Paris: Part 1, Part 2
25th Academy Awards (1952): The Greatest Show on Earth: Part 1, Part 2
26th Academy Awards (1953): From Here to Eternity: Part 1, Part 2
27th Academy Awards (1954): On the Waterfront: Part 1, Part 2
28th Academy Awards (1955): Marty: Part 1, Part 2
29th Academy Awards (1956): Around the World in 80 Days: Part 1, Part 2
30th Academy Awards (1957): The Bridge on the River Kwai: Part 1, Part 2
31st Academy Awards (1958): Gigi: Part 1, Part 2
32nd Academy Awards (1959): Ben-Hur: Part 1, Part 2
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