NOTES ON GETTING HOOKED ON MYTH

Lawrence of Arabia is all about amplifying myth. Director David Lean, with some structual anchorage from first writer Michael Wilson and sadomasochistic cravings from replacement writer Robert Bolt, condenses the saga of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom into a quixotic romance of guerrilla exploits of an enigmatic, educated archeologist misfit whose private life remains one of history’s continuing mysteries still shadowing a distinguished military career. Lawrence seemed to have willfully helped shape the quandary facing the fact-checkers and biographers trying to validate details in the book, to which George Bernard Shaw gave his imprimatur, by allowing speculation that the most famous incident he penned—the Turkish bey and his sadists’ sexual assault of him while a captive—might not have happened as described. Numbers of historians, psychologists and armchair skeptics believe Lawrence manufactured the violation as a fabrication of sexual fantasy or excuse for his alleged aberrant behavior—turning his asexuality or closeted sexuality or fear of sex into bloodthirst on the sands. Lawrence would later offer subsequent accounts substantially different from his original text, most damningly having allowed his captors to sodomize him. During his recall of the incident in Seven Pillars, a reader’s defense mechanism triggers caveat of masterly literary embellishment; if one hears this recording at 5:36 in, it’s a riveting radio play supplying clocked-in horrors. (Elsewhere in the tome the brief anecdotes on intimacy among tribal young men read as voyeurism and a tinge of blissful memories.) Turks, as well as Arabs, have always made handy perverts-villains and Lean, usually the prophylactic gentleman, incautiously if not slimily offered up the following to Jonathan Yardley for his Washington Post interview published in 1989: “I’ll never forget standing there in the desert once, with some of these tough Arab buggers, some of the toughest we had, and I suddenly thought, ‘He’s making eyes at me!’ And he was!’” Hmm, and more hmm to follow in a bit.

In the first half of the epic, we’re reasonably assured Lawrence’s crusade, based on his considerable and acknowledged-by-others expertise on Arab cultural and political matters, is to coalesce the divided Arab tribes into a united front against the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The second half moves into psychosexual murkiness, into carnage and, at 3 hours and 5 minutes in, the very smug geopolitical games related to the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreement plotting a defacto takeover of Arab territory. (Didn’t stay secret: after the Tsar was executed, the Bolshevik government published Russia’s clandestine treaties, the “agreement” the prominent shocker embarrassing Britain and France.) Though Lawrence was ceremonially pivotal to the Arabs appearing to be conquerors of Damascus, the chaos in liberating the city from the Turks and Germans, about which there are stacks of conflicting accounts, is generally viewed to have climaxed this way: Australian forces under the command of Major General William Hodgson were first to enter the city, and British forces of General Edmund Allenby moved in very shortly after. By military command protocols, Allenby, who personally arrived in the city a few days later, as did Prince Faisal, had the unenviable task to assuage Faisal and Lawrence as pictorial yet counterfeit victors to be heralded by the world press. Lawrence was bitterly disappointed in not being able to fulfill his promise of Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, one of history’s most consequentially ongoing débâcles, the subject of a decent thiry-years-later companion piece/followup to Lawrence of Arabia entitled A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia starring Ralph Fiennes, whose nuances, in tandem with Alexander Siddig’s as Faisal, present another load of innuendo. Two years apart in age, Faisal, ensconced by Britain as King of Iraq after being exiled from Syria by the French, would die from a heart attack in Berne, Switzerland in 1933 and Lawrence succumbed after sustaining severe head injuries in the motorcycle accident in England in 1935, which, inevitably, spawned and still do conspiracy theories, the more recent gathered together in three manipulative Mark J.T. Griffin projects: the 2021 movie Lawrence: After Arabia, the book Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia? and in 2024 the Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia? documentary.

Lean’s sandcastle is likewise pictorially built on the shifts of political expediency and treacherous dignitaries using Lawrence’s dream of Arab self-destiny to do the dirty work while publicly denying any shared responsibility for the supposed wus-turned-legend rampaging against the Turks with slaughterhouse butchery. Lean sets up the desert early on as primal purification: though the real T.E. in Seven Pillars wrote that the “abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me,” Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence will later perceive it in one word—“clean.” Visually arresting and elegant and its eloquence unspoken, he stretches in repose to take in the twilight, with the Super Panavision 70 camera virtually painting the sand orange and the brush silver; with Maurice Jarre’s score adding the touch of exotic, he sinkingly walks the dunes; with Anne Coates’s match cuts and her selective heaps of breathtaking pannings by Freddie Young (with Ernest Day at the camera), Nicholas Roeg, Skeets Kelly and Peter Newbrook, he’s overtaken by the purity in the endless aridity and barrenness, soon supplying solace as cover for barbarous actions which would flash back when returning to England. Notwithstanding directorial designs to use the forbidden to eclipse disputed chronologies, this panoramic apotheosis, birthing at least fifty biographies on T.E. and countless addendum, is also a return to Lean’s boyhood discovery of the joys received from his first Brownie box camera changing the course of his life.

In the Washington Post interview, Lean confirmed what he intended for O’Toole’s Lawrence and Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali—that they be sexual intimates. Introduced on camel, riding toward a well while bulls-eyeing a shot to the head of a water thief, whose streaming blood steals around 60 seconds of film, Ali quickly establishes antagonism and appeal, the beginning of a same-sex attraction cursorily based on Selim Ahmed who, guessing from few surviving pictures, was 15 to 17 at some point in a three-year friendship with the 22 year-old Brit starting in 1911 and whose initials pronouncedly obvious in the dedication of Seven Pillars. (Never seeing one another again after being asked to assist in gathering the Arabs to fight against the Turks in 1914, Lawrence was informed Ahmed died from typhus in 1918.) To Yardley, and bucking paucity of proof other than hearsay and circumstantial deduction, Lean said emphatically, “Certainly Lawrence was very if not entirely homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time: Lawrence and Ali, Lawrence and the Arab boys.” Absent in Wilson’s script, but penciled in at the margins by Lean, the hook of homo vibes between two warrior friends becomes elusively Bolted and slyly accepted by O’Toole and Sharif, the latter calling it a “love story.” (An apropos stretch: Ali burning Lawrence’s British military clothes and helping to dress him in all white thawb, both practical and as if a spouse.) When Yardley asked whether he agreed with those who think the movie is “pervasively homoerotic,” Lean said, “Yes. Of course it is. Throughout.” Hmm II: With Brobdingnagian ears absorbing the sounds of desert beasts and connecting them to what he sees in their horny eyes would seem the long-existing acceptance for needed release, which in this scenario is passive submission to aggressors spilling. Glimpsed is Lawrence’s established haphephobia, usually a hindrance in sexual contact, employed to strike the bey, then channeled into vengeance and later, according to friends in England, when his assumed post traumatic shock syndrome meshed with his clean freak routines and guilt-ridden longings, turned into punishment by floggings. This is the opposite of mutual heat rising in homoeroticism, which is what he might have experienced if his phobia went into remission upon entering or being entered by a purportedly “beautifully built and handsome” find at the archeological site in Carchemish.

Naturally eccentric, sheathed as a sun-bleached blonde with fulgent blue eyes, O’Toole at 6' 2" is plentifully perplexing; with depiction of 5'5" Lawrence’s sexual practices factually unknowable, the convulsion inside the actor is what’s afire and spreads to his character, able to glow through neuroses in ways so few actors achieve and probably this facet about him more than anything else permits savvy viewers to trek through the torment. What we’ve accepted since: O’Toole believed destiny played its part in getting the coveted and showy whackjobs—Henry II in Becket another example and The Stunt Man, too—telling TCM’s Robert Osborne the characters in effect “chose me.” Some of the thespians aren’t as lastingly impressive, edging close to fractured caricature. The amusing Alec Guinness as lookalike Faisal (17 years older than the real king), the bizarrely-nosed Anthony Quinn (doing his own makeup based on the real Auda Abu Tayi), the hacking José Ferrer, the pompous Donald Wolfit embroider for effects; they’re Lean’s stereotypes to enhance his star’s complexity. Arthur Kennedy’s mundane Jackson Bentley subs for opportunist and aggrandiser Lowell Thomas whose world-wide syndicated photos of and articles and popular traveling stage presentations about Lawrence made both of them international public figures. ((Reportedly Lawrence saw Thomas’s presentation at least five times and never fact-checked him; being silent on theatricality enhances lure.) Among his last roles in a long career, Claude Rains as natty-dressed Dryden is modulated sardonic suavity as a composite of British politick, using a cane as adjunct, gaming Lawrence into protégé.

Jack Hawkins’s career was and continues as a years-long masterclass of conventionality in military uniform; his bearing and voice personify dignity, authority and steadfast strength, with an imposing no-nonsense aura to be left unchallenged. Not to say we could do without him, as in The Bridge on the River Kwai, however, in Lawrence, there’s a bit of a crack in the facade: he’s alternately flummoxed and intrigued and intriguing to the audience as General Allenby, angling every which way to avoid being played by a presumed keffiyeh-wearing weakling to whom he’s stern at first; then in shock & awe over the insubordinate defying orders to take it onto himself daring provocations against the Turks; then giving the upstart carte blanche to conduct his own war; surprised how bold and perceptive is this lone Brit among camel-riding buggers predicting an Allenby move into Jerusalem; being startled yet relieved by a confession about liking the act of killing people; making promises impossible to keep in order to retain a pain in the ass in the desert. We enjoy watching Hawkins being ping-ponged by a Homer-esque dramatist. Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars: “Allenby could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”

As usual with screenwriter Michael Wilson, there is this preface used against him and used by directors of his scripts to protect themselves: during the McCarthy era he became a blacklisted writer because he was a “commie” who wouldn’t recant or blab on others. Wilson was denied screen credit for Friendly Persuasion helmed by William Wyler, who hit a low in robbing Wilson his due: pressured by draft dodger John Wayne and gossip queen Hedda Hopper, he claimed his own brother Robert Wyler wrote some of the script. Wilson was refused credit and not permitted to accept the Academy Award for adapting Pierre Boullé’s Bridge on River Kwai for Lean, a disquieting weakling in defending Wilson; and, with neither the director nor Bolt objecting, was banned from a co-credit on Lawrence. Lean’s festering problems with Wilson’s scripts weren’t strictly over orthodox structure of historic events, political actions and writer “inventions” but in what was missing—T.E.’s supposed psychosexual wreckage. Lean had already viewed Terence Rattigan’s play Ross, with Alec Guiness representing T.E., and wanted something at least as baiting, about which Wilson, counter-wanting both evidence and relevancy, strongly objected. What he might not have addressed publicly—as he did about being discriminated against b/c he refused to snitch on fellow “commies”—was the likely deduction that Lean and Bolt were well aware of the vitriolic 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry by Richard Aldington, which sparked verbal fisticuffs for having unsparingly dented Britain’s favorite WWI hero. The book—which T.E. loyalists failed to stop from being published due to the author’s literary résumé—cemented the director and Bolt’s near-certainty of their subject’s poofdom. Bolt’s major contribution is his refined stuffiness of language packed with ephemeral wit, back-end peek-a-boo and escape clauses, shaped by his and Lean’s worries about getting too entangled in the various aberrances lest they cause censorship problems and political fulminations. They were right to feel anxious: London’s entrenched editorial prigs roared disapproval over the lavish “adventure,” cavalier interpretations of events, blatant inaccuracies, insulting insinuations. Turkey banned the film outright; Jordan, after granting Lean access to its desert and the use of Jordanian military to be extras, banned any showings to keep peace between neighboring countries but later lifted; with Omar Sharif as Lean envoy sent to charm Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt was allowed to view the film, though the Turkish bey sequence was further abridged. Resolutions sketchy, Columbia faced legal complaints and lawsuits from the families of General Allenby and Auda Abu Tayi over their concerns of slanted if unfactual impressions. Lawrence’s brother A. E. added the complaint he didn’t recognize his older sibling in the screen portrayal. Perhaps explaining in part the movie’s popularity in England, and winning BAFTA awards including best film, actor and screenplay (but not nominated for best director), A.E. succinctly capsulized its drawing card: “A psychological recipe. Take an ounce of narcissism, a pound of exhibitionism, a pint of sadism, a gallon of blood-lust and a sprinkle of other aberrations and stir well.”

When Wilson was notified he wouldn’t be getting credit for any contribution he made to L of A, his internal writer’s warrior mode fired off a strong missive to producer Sam Spiegel, citing extensive examples of the shooting script containing lifts from his script(s), challenging a “mere coincidence” defense. Following studio and lawyer advice, Spiegel, Lean and Bolt uniformly denied they ever “used” any of Wilson’s material, in some instances giving the impression Bolt never even read his scripts. After filing the grievance with supporting documentation to the British Screen Writers Guild, which in December, 1963, determined Wilson was entitled to a screenplay credit, the years-long battle to convince the American Writers Guild to do likewise commenced. What was and remains apparent: Lean and Bolt were deferred to as respected truthtellers they hadn’t much earned, as they well-nigh lied to cover up their avoidance of Wilson’s contributions; they stayed steadily haughty and evasive for years, creating the myth Wilson simply didn’t matter. By 1988, the arbitration process had slowed; given Wilson’s death in 1978, Bolt’s heart attack and stroke in 1979 and on the eve of the national release of an expensively restored L of A, the Writers Guild decision on credit was postponed. This greenlighted Columbia, not eager to have an upset Lean on a promotional tour, to issue prints maintaining the single Bolt designation. Then, in 1994, Cinéaste published Joel Hodson’s muckraker publicly exposing the deliberate Lean/Bolt sham. (See left column bottom on this page for the Cineaste article.) Wilson’s co-credit would be granted in September, 1995, seven months after Bolt’s death and four years after Lean’s. The Guild had already restored his nomination for River Kwai in 1984, and would reinstate his credit and award as best written American drama for Friendly Persuasion in 2002. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences also restored his nominations and provided his family an Oscar statue for his co-writing win for River Kwai.

The more famous of the biographical studies of Lawrence would be the psychological plumbing of depths in A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrenceby Harvard’s Dr. John Mack who brought a “compassionate” perspective to the subject: perhaps asexual or homosexual but likely “homosocial,” preferring the company of men but without sexual entanglement, the lack of which is deeply grounded in Victorian morality and its condemned-to-Hell proscriptions. And, wrapped in Freudian qualifiers, one of them the deep rootage of moral and social displacement when discovering he and his four brothers were born out of wedlock, Mack accepted T.E. having an inclination toward masochism, having hired someone to periodically flog him, ostensibly as punishments to allay his guilt when fantasizing over the “delicious warmth” he felt when claiming rape by the bey and his thugs, and for not achieving Arab independence. Whatever his sex life remained cloistered after Seven Pillars was first published in a private edition in 1926, but then gradually speculated about when subsequent and unexpurgated editions were commercially published after his death in 1935 and hysterically regenerated by London’s infamous scandal sheets when Aldington’s book hit the stalls. The success of the film—a genuine coruscation about the desert—revivified Lawrence the Anglo hero practically overnight, going from intellectual loner to mythical effigy, from nerd archeologist to military tactician, from self-ashamed rape victim to avenging angel, from Britain’s “go to” placator of Arabs to his “it-was-written” end on a Brough Superior SS100. He became a 20th Century Percival as a not-yet-coined incel in quest for masculinity. The Pulitzer-Prize winning A Prince of Our Disorder was not the basis of any inclusions in L of A, having been published in 1976.

Despite the millions of words poured into print, the Lawrence legacy is tarnished not only by the on-going debates of his sexuality or lack thereof, but also by his motherland’s inability to cope with some highly lauded British military apparently seeming to be sexually suppressed or dysfunctional, id est General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the life-long bachelor who followed Christ, dedicated himself to sexual abstention in order to “subdue the flesh,” using his extreme commitment to military assignments to counter ceaseless “sexual temptation.” Killing in lieu of cuming: as with Lawrence, and respected as leader and self-directed accomplisher, Gordon was plagued by indoctrination of religious and social prohibitions. He was killed in 1885 during the battle of Khartoum (against expressed orders by the Mahdi not to harm him), three years before the birth of Lawrence, who, with similar adventurous excursons and a like for foreign costuming, mentoned Gordon as a source of inspiration in Seven Pillars. They shared as authors a penchant to create adoxographical guessing games about themselves, their writerly flourishes leaving open the irresistible in their own exaggerations and the damnation from their critics. Deemed repressives whose sins weren’t so much their assumed guilt over probable hardons for men but the greater sins of leaving no juicy details. What happened to prodigy Alan Turing, for his factual efforts to help break the Germans’ Enigma code during WWII, is another supplemental in Britain’s long history of shame. This duality remains telling in the title of the satire No Sex Please—We’re British.

For all the difficulties in scripting, long-suffering hardships throughout roughly a year and a half of filming, the post-production rush demanded by Columbia Pictures to get the spectacle out as holiday attraction and for Oscar competition, producer Sam Spiegel then insisted on cutting twenty minutes from the original London version before its premiere in New York, ostensibly to accommodate exhibitor wish to have 3 showings per day but more likely fears of length and reaction to the subject matter, though it just so happened the infamous N.Y. newspaper strike was already in progress, going on from December 8, 1962 to March 31, 1963, which cancelled the publishing of reviews and the awarding of the N.Y. Film Critics Circle prizes. Conflicting stories have Lean agreeing to assist in the last minute edits, since he was always both mental and overseeing editor, or not agreeing to any cuts, invoking his hatred for producers. His diligence as director and editor convinces us he couldn’t bear any one other than himself to do the slicing. Coates, who helped with the edits, said another fifteen to twenty minutes were cut for the first TV showing. Fully restored at 227 minutes, Lawrence of Arabia endures as the stellar accomplishment in Lean’s career of roadshow movie making—in spite of his and Bolt’s warped prevarications—and is a testament to the symbiotic kinship of Brownie Boxer and widescreen Freddie Young. Experiencing the sensuous essence in Lawrence’s wanderlust as a bonkers word wizard entrancing readers by a stratagem so controlling they become hooked on the potency of geographic mysticism, Lean and Young amass the power derived from immersive Super Panavision 70 to unleash and embrace the fabulist’s arousals. (Opening 1/16/1963 at the Cinestage, running 36 weeks.)

Oscars for best picture, director, musical score, film editing, sound, color cinematography and art direction/set decoration. Nominated for best actor (O’Toole), best supporting actor (Sharif).

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