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HOOKED ON MYTH Lawrence of Arabia is all about amplifying myth. Director David Lean, with some structual moorings 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 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-finders 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’s sexual assault of him while a captive, in Chapter 80—might not have happened as described. Numbers of historians, psychologists and armchair skeptics believe Lawrence manufactured the violation in order to provide excuse for his alleged aberrant behavior—turning his asexuality or closeted sexuality or fear of sex into bloodthirst. And Lawrence would later offer subsequent accounts substantially different from his original text, most damningly having allowed his captors to sodomize him. (Early into his recall of the incident in Seven Pillars, a reader’s defense mechanism triggers caveat on embellishment; his anecdotes on intimacy among tribal members read as substitute voyeurism.) But the Turks as well as the Arabs have always made handy if contagious perverts-villains and Lean, usually the prophylactic gentleman, incautiously obliged with the following from Jonathan Yardley’s 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 in a bit. In the first half of the epic, we’re reasonably sure Lawrence’s campaign, based on his considerable and acknowledged-by-others expertise on Arab cultural and political matters, is to coalesce a united Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The second half moves into the murky psychosexual, into carnage and, at 3 hours and 5 minutes in, the very smirky 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 clandestine treaties, the arrogation the prominent shocker among them.) Though Lawrence was ceremonially pivotal to the Arabs appearing to be conquerors of Damascus, the facts are that Australian forces, under the command of Major General William Hodgson, were first to enter the city, and British forces headed by General Edmund Allenby arrived shortly after and together they liberated the city; by military command protocols, it was Allenby’s decision to give Prince Faisal and Lawrence pictorial credit. The 5’ 5” hero was bitterly disappointed in not securing Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, one of history’s most consequentially ongoing débâcles, the subject of a surprisingly 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 an additional load of opportunistic gossip. Lean’s sandcastle is likewise built on the shifts of political expediency and treachery—everyone’s using Lawrence’s dream of Arab self-destiny to do the dirty work, thus sharing while publicly denying responsibility for the supposed wus-turned-legend rampaging through slaughterhouse butchery against the Turks. In duplicating what Lawrence famously perceived about the desert, the director initially frames Lawrence of Arabia as arrestingly “clean”—visually elegant and its eloquence unspoken—when Peter O’Toole stretches out 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 and Anne Coates’s match cuts and generous heaps of footage, the morning, afternoon and night sequences aggrandize the scope of sand and dunes to breathtakingly augment forbidden terrain. As time has proven, the pannings by Freddie Young (with Ernest Day at the camera), Nicholas Roeg, Skeets Kelly and Peter Newbrook haven’t lost any of their awesome power; even the quicksand death and massacres remain magnified as “art.” Until directorial designs are inserted and eclipse the mirages. 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. After being introduced on a 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 footage, Ali establishes almost instant antagonism and appeal, the beginning of a same-sex attraction based on Selim Ahmed, who was in a close three-year relationship with the Brit, and whose initials pronouncedly obvious in the dedication of Seven Pillars. To Yardley, and bucking historians and paucity of corroborative proof, 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.” Not overtly in Wilson’s first script but penciled in at the margins by Lean, the assertion of vibes between the two characters become fixed in the Bolt version. accepted by Sharif and O’Toole and subtly implied on screen. (Apropos stretch: Ali burning Lawrence’s British military clothes and helping to dress him in all white thawb, both practical and as if a wife.) When Yardley asked about 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 eyes seem the long existing acceptance for needed release, which in this scenario is passive submission to horny aggressors savagely spilling, the opposite of the conjoined fervency in homoeroticism. Naturally eccentric, sheathed in sun-bleached hair and with fulgent blue eyes, O’Toole at 6’ 2” is plentifully perplexing; with depiction of Lawrence’s sexual practice factually undependable, it’s the convulsion inside the actor that’s afire and spreads to his character, able to glow through neuroses in ways few other actors achieve and probably this facet about him more than anything else permits helpless-to-comprehend viewers to go along with him. What we’ve accepted since: if we have to trek through inexplicable torment, he’d be first choice to lead the way. Some of the thesping isn’t as lastingly impressive, edging close to fractured caricature. The amusing Alec Guinness as lookalike Faisal (who in reality was only two years older than Lawrence), the bizarrely-nosed Anthony Quinn (doing his own makeup based on the real Auda Abu Tayi), the coughing José Ferrer and his sadists, the pompous Donald Wolfit embroider for effects; they’re Lean’s stereotypes to enhance his star’s complexity. Mundane Arthur Kennedy is Jackson Bentley, subbing for Lowell Thomas whose photos and news reports of Lawrence made both of them international public figures. Confusing is Jack Hawkins as Allenby; this is his second performance of the indeterminable in a Lean epic—the other is The Bridge on the River Kwai. Among his last roles in a long career, Claude Rains as natty-dressed Dryden is Lean’s sole supportive pinnacle; in modulated sardonic suavity as a composite of British politick, using a cane as adjunct, he games Lawrence into protégé. As to Michael Wilson’s contributions, concentrating on documented historical events and political intrigues, he was during the McCarthy era a blacklisted writer, unallowed initial screen credit (since restored), just as he was refused credit (nor permitted to accept the Academy Award, also restored) for adapting Pierre Boullé’s The Bridge on the River Kwai for Lean. Disappointed with Wilson’s construct, Lean called on playwright Robert Bolt, who, using Wilson’s basics, gives a more emotional bent to Lawrence. (The director would apply a similar indifference nearly twenty-five years later to Christopher Hampton’s never completed script of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo and seek Bolt for a rewrite; having had a heart attack and debilitating stroke in 1979, he didn’t finish his adaptation, either.) His major contribution to Lawrence of Arabia is delivering language packed with ephemeral wit, backdoor sexual 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 be concerned: In London, entrenched snob editorialists roared disapproval over their lavish “adventure,” cavalier interpretation of events, historical inaccuracies, insulting insinuation, with Lawrence’s brother A. E. adding the complaint that he didn’t recognize his older sibling in the screen portrayal. Perhaps explaining the movie’s popularity in England, and its winning four BAFTA awards including best film and best actor and getting better reviews from movie critics than Lean remembered, 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.” For all the difficulties in scripting, long-suffering hardships during roughly a year and a half of filming, producer Sam Spiegel insisting on and Lean assisting in cutting twenty minutes from the original version a very short time before its premiere to accommodate exhibitors wanting 3 showings per day, and then fifteen minutes more in cuts for the first TV release but now completely restored at 227 minutes, Lawrence of Arabia endures as the warped but nevertheless stellar accomplishment in Lean’s career of roadshow movie making and a testament to his kinship with Freddie Young. Experiencing the sensuous essence in Lawrence’s wanderlust—as a bonkers word wizard he entranced readers by a stratagem so controlling they become as hooked on the potency of geographic bliss as he was—Lean and Young understood the power derived from and the imperative to use immersive Super Panavision 70 to unleash and embrace the fabulist’s arousing mythic sandscapes. (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). ROLL OVER IMAGES AND POSTERS TO ENLARGE
Text COPYRIGHT © 2000 RALPH BENNER (Revised 05/2025) All Rights Reserved. |
