As I confessed the first time I covered Lawrence of Arabia, I didn’t much care for the film the first time I saw it as a college student. Now, I was a budding film buff. I liked most of the films I was assigned to watch. Heck, I loved The Seventh Seal. About the only film I can distinctly remember not liking more than Lawrence of Arabia was the musical Gigi because, well, I found the whole thing downright despicable. But that’s a series of complaints for another time if I ever do something like this again for some list that includes Gigi. But I’m back to Lawrence of Arabia, and as I discovered on my second viewing, I appreciated Lawrence of Arabia much more in my 40s than I did in my 20s.
I’m getting close to my 50s. Would I appreciate the film more this time around? Well, not really. It’s not one of my favorites, but I wouldn’t say I hate it or anything either. I can see the merit to the film, and there’s a lot to say about it that I wouldn’t have thirty or so years ago. I have some thoughts on that.
To start, let’s go over all the reasons I maybe didn’t appreciate this film the first time I watched it. For one thing, it’s long. There are numerous scenes of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) crossing the desert, and he doesn’t say much when he isn’t. For a war film, there isn’t a lot of battle scenes, or there are but they’re spaced out quite a bit. Lawrence’s general stoicism makes him something of a maddening character. Part of the film’s point is no one really knew Lawrence the man so much as Lawrence the mythical figure, the Englishman who got the Arabs to temporarily unite against a common enemy and then went on to do seemingly impossible things that only an outsider would have dared try to do. It’s a film that, for much of the run time, feels slow even when things are happening. It’s arguably more about the politics of what happens and how an enigmatic man becomes a legend. Given how much time is just Lawrence crossing the desert in a film that runs nearly four hours, it just didn’t work for me when I was 20 or so.
Why would it work now? Well, I have a theory on this, and it involves history. Sort of. I belong to a faculty book club at the school I work for, and recently, a number of us were discussing how many of us seem to find more interest in reading up on history than we used to. The theory we more or less settled on was that, when we were younger, we lacked a frame of reference or just the experience to really have that much interest in history as we do now. It’s mostly a matter of just living through, well, whatever happens. My current students are the same age as I was when I first saw Lawrence of Arabia, and I suspect they’d approach the film the same way I did unless they’re really into that sort of film for whatever reason.
I could also hazard a guess that I didn’t go for this one as much because my dad wasn’t a fan, but he did like another film from director David Lean that likewise featured Alec Guinness, namely The Bridge on the River Kwai, and that one I did enjoy quite a bit, but I think part of that comes from the fact Dad would always point out to young me that Obi-Wan Kenobi was in the film. Yes, he’s in Lawrence of Arabia too, but the point stands. Dad liked one, not Lawrence, so I saw a lot more of Bridge on the River Kwai.
Now, as a more mature individual, I can actually see Lawrence of Arabia doing something that I tend to find interesting, namely looking at the politics involved. O’Toole’s Lawrence has no interest in politics. He’s an idealistic man who, before the film is over, seems to believe his own hype to the point he thinks a blue-eyed, blonde-haired man like himself can just put on some dirty clothes and walk through a Turkish-held village. He’s almost right: even though he’s caught, his captors don’t really know who he is and they want him for something else. But the point stands. Lawrence the legend is above everything and wants the Arabs to unite in ways that even they aren’t really all that interested in.
So, really, when Guinness’s Prince Faisal keeps insisting that the English (and sometimes the French) are going to gobble up all the Arab lands when the war is over, Lawrence doesn’t believe it. Not right away. And when he finally learns that is what’s going to happen, he seems to be more outraged about it than even the Arabs themselves. Lawrence’s arrogance takes the form of a man who knows what the Arabs need better than the Arabs themselves. There’s a bit more of the Englishman in Lawrence than he’d care to admit in that he thinks he knows what the Arabs need better than they do, and that doesn’t make him that much different from his superiors.
So, here’s Lawrence, a man who (mostly) does what everyone says he can’t do. When it comes to surviving the desert, he’s right. When it comes to gauging his own superiors, he’s wrong. With Omar Sharif’s Ali constantly telling what he can’t do, it mostly means no one really knows the real Lawrence. Why does he decide he can do these things? No one seems to know. Why is he so enamored with these people? He just is. He’s a private man, and while the Arabs seem to know him better, they don’t always know what to make of him either. He understands them better than most Englishmen, but at the same time, he is the only one trying to get them to form a nation at the end of the film. Lawrence can win battles against the Turks, but he can only do so much to stop battles between the Arabs themselves. That’s the sort of story I can get behind more now that I have more experience as a filmgoer.
That said, I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind on Gigi.
NEXT: T.E. Lawrence may have been a mystery to everyone who knew him, but the next film is about a mysterious woman and her effect on a private investigator. Be back soon for Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo.
0 Comments