March 17, 1989 | This is the way God, and director David Lean, intended you to see Lawrence of Arabia — in a pristine-condition, fully restored 70mm print, edited to the original specifications of its director, projected on a screen large enough to encompass its larger-than-life spectacle.
Some movies should never — repeat, never — be reduced to the puny dimensions of television. Lawrence is such a film, as anyone who sees it during its much-ballyhooed re-release can testify. It opens today in Houston on a suitably large auditorium of the Spectrum 9 Theater. Don’t bother reading the rest of this review. Just go.
But be forewarned: Just as contemporary theatergoers weaned on Neil Simon or David Mamet must prepare themselves for the marathon stretch of a Eugene O’Neill revival, contemporary moviegoers used to Woody Allen miniatures or even Francis Coppola frescoes should prepare themselves for the sheer length and breadth of Lean’s mammoth panorama.
At the running time Lean originally intended, Lawrence of Arabia clocks in at 216 minutes, plus overture and intermission. It would be an overstatement, I suppose, to say not a moment is wasted. But it should be a criminal offense to edit even a frame.
Just about everything you remember, or have heard, about the movie’s unparalleled visual majesty is true. Brilliantly photographed by F.A. Young, Lawrence of Arabia fully immerses you in Super-Panavision landscapes of desert splendor, allowing you to not merely watch the film so much as experience it.
At times, the rocky, wind-blasted wilderness resembles some angry red landscape of Mars. At other moments, the bleached-yellow sands are shifting seas, ever ready to ensnare with a hidden whirlpool.
And, in one of the film’s most indelible images, the desert is a shimmering silver plane, above which floats an approaching rider who could very well be a mirage until he demonstrates his corporeal reality by firing a fatal gunshot.
The battle scenes, though not quite as stirring as those of John Ford or Akira Kurosawa, are nonetheless powerful, terrifying, and horrifyingly beautiful. Teeming masses have been choreographed into quarrelsome clashes, fearsome charges, exultant dances and, perhaps most impressively, still and foreboding threats.
Steven Spielberg has said Lawrence of Arabia is ”the movie that made me want to become a filmmaker,” and that’s easy to believe. (Very easy, as a matter of fact, if you recall how Spielberg lifted several images from this Oscar-winning classic for his own Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Lawrence of Arabia is a work that fully realizes film’s unique capacity for sweeping epic gestures. And now that it has been restored to its full glory, it will continue to be one of the yardsticks by which all movie epics are measured.
But there is more to this masterwork than eye-filling spectacle. Freely adapted from T.E. Lawrence’s autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the most literate epics in the history of Anglo-American cinema. Robert Bolt’s screenplay is at once a thrilling adventure story and a serious, albeit ambiguous, psychological portrait.
After establishing the legendary status of his hero in a short prologue, Bolt reaches back in time to find the man behind the legend. Lawrence, played with an almost giddy anxiety by an incredibly young Peter O’Toole, is introduced as an obscure, somewhat effete officer posted to the British General Headquarters in 1917 Cairo.
Partly through luck, and partly through the strength of his own self-dramatizing drive, Lawrence is ordered to report on the feuding Bedouin tribesmen who are revolting, ineffectually, against the Ottoman Empire.
Lawrence enters the desert as an eager observer, fortuitously earns the respect of a revered Arab leader (Alec Guinness), and transforms himself into a warrior god through sheer force of his own masochistically obsessive will. As a leader, he unites and inspires the Bedouin tribes, driving them to victory against the Turks. As a man, however, Lawrence is horrified by the pleasure he takes in killing, and traumatized by a brutal flogging (and, though this is never made explicit, an equally brutal sexual assault) while held prisoner by Turkish soldiers.
Worse, as a British soldier, Lawrence plays an unwilling role in the post-World War I takeover of Arab lands under the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Arab unity collapses after the common enemy, the Turkish army, is driven from Damascus. (Some things never change: The Middle East seems as torn by internecine warfare here as it is today.)
Lawrence of Arabia may be the only epic ever made, that anyone has dared to make, in which the hero is last seen as defeated and disillusioned, as a humbled giant who wishes for nothing more than anonymity.
In the role originally offered to Marlon Brando and later to Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, then 29 and relatively unknown, gives a star-making performance of startling range, diversity and sharply focused intensity. One moment as fey as a virgin bride, the next moment as mesmerizing as a charismatic visionary, he actually seems more at ease in his flowing Arab robes than in his spit-and-polish army uniform. It’s almost as though going native liberates him.
O’Toole plays Lawrence as a man who invents himself, then finds his handiwork wanting. He runs the risk of going over the edge, and once or twice tumbles into flamboyance that seems excessive even for Lawrence. Much more often, however, he is wonderfully, painfully persuasive as a tragic hero with a touch of the poet, condemned to gallop across the blindingly bright desert until he reaches his own heart of darkness.
The supporting cast, for the most part, is excellent. Guinness as the wise Prince Feisel, Omar Sharif (never better) as the impulsive Sherif Ali, Anthony Quinn as the boisterous Auda Abu Tayi, Anthony Quayle as the skeptical Colonel Brighton, Arthur Kennedy as reporter Jackson Bentley (a slightly fictionalized stand-in for Lowell Thomas), Jack Hawkins as the crudely conniving General Allenby and Claude Rains as the much more elegantly duplicitous diplomat known as Mr. Dryden.
The only false note is sounded by Jose Ferrer, who, while hamming it up as a Turkish officer, looks like he’s getting ready for the lead role in The Salvador Dali Story. But never mind. The virtues of Lawrence of Arabia are large enough, grand enough, to overshadow any minor flaw.
