Films Lawrence of Arabia at the Astor

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is a work of beauty, excitement, and some complexity. For a film of its length, it is impressively mounted and well-knit (by the pre- Zhivago David Lean). However, once we become used to the breathtaking landscapes and come to recognize nuances of plot and characterization, the film fails to achieve the goal which justified its Super-Panavision scale: the creation of a paradigmatic tale recounting the fall of the twentieth-century Westerner before self-sufficient, tribal communities. Though David Lean's and screenwriter Robert Bolt's goal may seem portentously abstract, that goal is not achieved precisely because the creators exclude too vast a body of particular information.

Believing in the Great Man interpretation of history, they attempt to find the reasons for their title character's famed ambiguity in his own recognition of contemporary political and literary themes. This is, after all, the main reason that T.E. Lawrence has always been an intellectual's darling: he was rather intellectual himself, and was conscious of the choices he made during his career, if not of their effects. But within the film's own limits, there is no way to verify Lean's, Bolt's, or Lawrence's ideals and interpretations. The filmmakers haven't backed Lawrence with the history he participated in and grew out of. I'm not sure that this would have proved feasible for a conventional 'story' film; Tony Richardson tried to rectify his narrative limitations in Charge of the Light Brigade with cartoon interludes illustrating historic conflicts, but these only disrupted whatever mood or atmosphere the rest of the film had been building. Lawrence of Arabia is the best attempt yet at depicting a spectacular event through an influential individual's viewpoint, but I fear that to his film's misfortune, director David Lean ended up falling in love with the desert much as T. E. Lawrence did.

TO BOLT and Lean, mapmaker Lawrence is a brilliant and self-confident innocent who undertook a personal assizement of the importance of the Arab Revolt of 1916 merely as a chance to escape from General Murray's stifling Cairo staff and indulge in colorful heroics. Lawrence is gradually seduced by the life-style of an Arab warrior, and by the possibility of playing an epic role in the formation of a new democracy-a task which would offer him visionary fulfillment. A bastard, without any inherited identity but possessed of an irrepressible free will, Lawrence welcomes the opportunity to create a myth out of his own clay.

This concurs with the Arabs' own needs. Affected by centuries of tribal infighting and repressive philosophic traditions, they are unable to sustain the revolt they launched because they do not comprehend the extent of their power and virtue. Lawrence serves as their catalyst; recognizing British colonial interests, he dares Prince Feisal to take a battle initiative on his own, without the Allied artillery and 'discipline' which could blunt the Arab guerrillas' effectiveness. With the mercenary Howeitat tribe, Lawrence crosses the Nehfu Desert to take the Gulf of Aqaba. (This is, of course, a convenient fiction; Aqaba was taken only after the destruction of the Hejaz railway.)

But after the arduous trek to Aqaba and its swift conquest, the film's Lawrence loses heart in the desert campaign. He sees himself as unfit for military command-not out of military considerations, but because of his failure to live up to his own personal vision. He is part Arab and part English, and only a superman would be able to bridge that cultural gap. Lawrence, with a fear of bloodshed which does not control his erratic sadism, and a masochism which is brought to the surface when he is tortured at the hands of a homosexual Turkish Boy at Deraa, is not the one to fulfill his dreams. When he finally frees Damascus, he and the Arab tribes fail to establish an effective governing federation. Longing for the life of the ordinary, he returns to England.

Two important scenes-and twenty minutes of screen time-were cut from Lawrence of Arabia after its initial roadshow presentation. It is the cut print which is being exhibited in the current re-release. The first scene mutilated was an addition to Lawrence's second interview with General Allenby, when, upon begging permission to leave the desert, Lawrence is persuaded by his commanding officer that he is an "extraordinary" man-which explains Lawrence's subsequent hysterical tone during the drive to Damascus and the massacre of Turkish troops at Tafas. The second scene, set in a Turkish hospital in Damascus, displayed Lawrence's sense of his own wrong-doing, and of pacifist and democratic leanings now obscured by the current print's false emphasis on neurosis.

THE YEARNINGS expressed in the film-both in its original and cut versions-are romantic, and constitute today's collective, updated white man's burden, which is probably why the film is presented as a flashback told by nobody in particular. The film supports Lawrence, and does not drown his military or political achievements for the sake of bombast. But there is still a credibility gap-without cutting a broader swath of history and defining its themes more clearly in that context, we cannot accept them. Lean's claim that he only worked to advance the story rather than concentrate on its atmosphere merely attests to the story's limitations.

Lean did, however, provide compensations. He constructed his picture fastidiously: each scene attains its own symmetry, and is skillfully cantilevered with narrative thrust to the next scene. The film rarely lags. One of the more obvious examples of Lean's technical prowess is the sequence depicting Lawrence's initial desert journey and his growing friendship with his Bedouin guide. It is composed of strict horizontal pans flatly cut by two-shots or close-ups of the camel-mounted pair. When panning with them. Lean cuts both on movement and desert shapes so that not only is the motion shown, but the traveling feeling expressed. When he cuts into portraiture, his character's positions and the bent of their heads tells us much about their relationship. The transition into the next sequence is provided by a fast dissolve from a skyscape to the bottom of another tribesman's well. The image is shocking and apt; if the foregoing scenes emphasized brotherhood, the following ones will depict the narrow hatreds of a divided race.

Lean also exacted precise performances, with Peter O 'Toole's Lawrence-both sensitive and hateful, frolicsome and brutal-one of the most convincing portrayals of a man of eccentric genius in all film. Anthony Quinn and (surprisingly) Omar Sharif effectively project the vigor and broad coloration of their tribal chieftains; only Alec Guinness as Feisal and Arthur Kennedy as a caricatured Lowell Thomas struggle with roles which are too obviously vehicles for thematic development.

Above all, there is Fred Young's photography. To describe a single instance is to do the man injustice. It is too bad that his desert must stand for Maurice Jarre's atonal Oriental ghoulash. But the film survives Jarre; with its mammoth views of sights not seen since Lawrence's time, it rides roughshod over its own flaws.