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 premature 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 in 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 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, of course, 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 treachery of everyone 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 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 actions which would flashback when returning to England. Notwithstanding directorial designs to use the forbidden to eclipse 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 when 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. 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 is 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 intriguing 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 at a confession about enjoying 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 to original screenwriter, Michael Wilson was during the McCarthy era a blacklisted writer, unallowed initial screen credit for William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (since restored), refused credit nor permitted to accept the Academy Award (both also restored) for adapting Pierre Boullé’s Bridge on River Kwai for Lean and, with neither the director nor Bolt objecting, was banned from a co-credit on Lawrence (also restored). Unhappy with Wilson’s construct of verifiable events and political action, Lean called on playwright Bolt, who, using Wilson’s basics, gives a more affective bent to the overachiever. The major contribution is stylish 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 prig editorialists roared disapproval over their 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, initially banned any showings to keep peace between neighboring countries; 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 unfactual impressions. Lawrence’s brother A. E. added the complaint that he didn’t recognize his older sibling in the screen portrayal. Perhaps explaining in part the movie’s popularity in England, and winning four BAFTA awards including best film and best actor (but not nominated for best director) 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 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 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 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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