Old Yorker

David Lean (1962)

I went to see it once before, at the York Odeon, around 1973.   All I can remember is dismay that what I thought was the end turned out to be the intermission.   It was a more entertaining evening 35 years on but I still think Lawrence is a masterpiece of logistics rather than a work of art – and that a main reason for its inordinate length (222 minutes plus overture, intermission and exit music on its original release) is that Field Marshal David Lean, having assembled his materiel in the desert, has to make the most of it:  moving all the troops and equipment around takes time.  Lean was perhaps at the peak of his powers when he made the picture – which means, given his strengths and weaknesses, that he was able to exercise control and create an enduring work through purely technical means.  It’s not only the physical qualities of the desert itself that are amazing (the film was mainly shot in Jordan, Morocco and Spain):  the orchestration of the men-and-camels action sequences is remarkable too.   (The movement and cutting of these looked all the more impressive after we’d seen the relatively sloppy Doctor Zhivago a few days later.)  And even if the imperatives for Lean’s desert campaign aren’t primarily artistic, the different and unaccountable tempo exerted by the place is powerfully expressive.  The director’s command of the narrative never feels quite as sure when he moves into the city for any length of time – especially in the last main sequence in Damascus.  In spite of the huge developments in film technology that have occurred in the half century since it was made, Lawrence is undiminished as a spectacle.  The scale and authority of the desert sequences are epic:  because their vastness is so awesome and stirring – and with the considerable assistance of Maurice Jarre’s music – they convince you emotionally that the deeds that will take place in this landscape will be commensurately heroic.

In retrospect, the juxtaposition of the first two sequences in the picture is an early clue to the limitations of the picture – and the screenplay, by Robert Bolt and his (unoriginally uncredited) co-writer Michael Wilson).  The opening passage – in which T E Lawrence rides his motorbike down an English country lane, swerves to avoid a collision and crashes in the process – is superb.   The glinting, glancing sunlight through the dark luxuriance of overhanging trees, the goggled figure on the bike, the blend of safeness and threat in the images give this wordless sequence a distinctive and memorable texture.  The fatal accident with which it ends is followed by different kinds of thud in the immediately following scene, at Lawrence’s memorial service on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral:  members of the establishment spout clumsily aphoristic opinions of the man (what a rum sort he was, and so on).  This is the start of our nearly four-hour exposure to the crudeness of Bolt’s dialogue – at its crudest in what’s put in the mouths of the military top brass.  The congealed readings of the British film and theatre luminaries who deliver it delighted much of the audience in NFT1 – as if the actors’ playing was stiletto-sharp satire of Empire; their playing seemed to me to say as much about a moribund theatrical tradition as about the rottenness of imperialism.  This is unkind but I think the best that can be said for actors like Jack Hawkins (General Allenby), Anthony Quayle (a colonel), and Donald Wolfit (another general) – as screen actors anyway – is that they were well cast here as pillars of an establishment in decay.

Robert Bolt’s simplistic approach to historical drama is a much larger liability when it comes to the complex character of Lawrence himself.  T E Lawrence is not susceptible to the treatment Bolt gives Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons – a dramatised hagiography, in which the hero not only shows himself the only honourable person on stage (though Fred Zinnemann’s screen version tries valiantly to mask its stage origins) but also, as Pauline Kael said, gets all the best lines.   Bolt, Wilson and Lean don’t get across any clear idea of T E Lawrence’s personality or motivation – it seems a considerable abnegation of responsibility to depend on his being an ‘enigma’/rum sort’ (and to rely on this connecting in the audience’s mind – and below a conscious level – with the impenetrable mystery of the desert).

What is heroic about Lawrence of Arabia is Peter O’Toole’s resourcefulness in the title role, his ability to suggest psychological complexity when the screenplay and direction give him no help whatsoever.    Of course it’s impossible in 2008 to watch Peter O’Toole and see his performance for what it was in 1962:  it’s a palimpsest now, with later O’Toole portraits complicating the view.  Some things, though, remain clear.  O’Toole’s looks make him right for the part in a variety of ways.  His height enables him to be physically outstanding; his leanness gives him an ascetic potential; in his face, the blue eyes and the bone structure combine romanticism and coldness.  Once these elements are animated through the ineffable wit of his voice and movement, the heroic is fused with the eccentric in a unique way.   (It’s fascinating to think that Albert Finney turned down the part.  Finney is a magnificent actor but he has, at least in physical terms, a down to earth quality which I think might have limited him as Lawrence on screen.)

Lawrence of Arabia is famous for, among others, the debut in an English language picture of Omar Sharif and the long, bravura shot whereby he makes his entrance – starting as a dot in the screen and metamorphosing from a liquid shimmer into human (on camelback) form.  According to the Wikipedia entry on the film, the character of Sherif Ali whom Sharif played is a composite, based on a number of different Arab leaders (with each of whom Lawrence actually served).  It’s plain to see here (as well as easy to say with hindsight) that Sharif is an effulgent film star and a limited actor – but, as you’re also reminded in Doctor Zhivago, he’s a much better actor with his face than with his voice.  Sharif is very good at conveying a developing relationship with Lawrence, one that seems to grow into something combining loyal affection and respect with an awareness of necessary distance, and incomprehension.

No one else in front of the camera is a drag in the same way as the British actors in the senior military ranks and in the small roles in the British officers’ club scenes.  The lower British orders, army or civilian, like Harry Fowler (although he’s the same as usual), Jack Hedley and Norman Rossington do relatively well in their small roles.  Other members of the international cast who perform with credit in more sizeable parts include Zia Mohyeddin (as Lawrence’s guide to Prince Faisal), I S Johar (a man Lawrence rescues from the desert), Claude Rains (a stereotype mandarin in something called the Arab Bureau) and Arthur Kennedy (an American war correspondent – although the part is crassly conceived and written).  Anthony Quinn is entertaining but his hard-to-disguise temperament seems so alien to that of the Arab tribal leader he’s playing that he verges on the ridiculous.  For all the thought and care that have evidently gone into his playing, the same goes for Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal (although it may be that you see and fault Guinness’s Faisal through the perspective of his later, ill-conceived interpretation of Dr Godbole in Lean’s A Passage to India).  But, while some of these supporting performances are good as far as they go, you realise that’s not very far, as soon as Jose Ferrer arrives on the scene (for only a few minutes).  He plays the Turkish Bey who has Lawrence stripped and beaten.  There’s a moment of eye contact between Ferrer and O’Toole which, given the impersonality of much of the acting in Lawrence, has an astonishing charge.  Whether the actual incident with the Bey also involved Lawrence being raped, as is apparently implied in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, seems to be a matter of historical controversy. Ferrer’s acting has the force and subtlety to leave you in no doubt as to what is in the Bey’s mind but unsure as to what he decides to make happen.

Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Score, Cinematography (Freddie Young), Editing (Anne V Coates), Art Direction (John Box, John Stoll and Dario Simoni), Sound (John Cox).

23 July 2008