GROSS/53 1962 - Lawrence of Arabia - a void in the desert
Fragile, neurotic, self-deceiving. The ideal revolutionary hero.
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LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, director DAVID LEAN, screenplay ROBERT BOLT and MICHAEL WILSON, music MAURICE JARRE, cast ALEC GUINNESS, ANTHONY QUINN, JACK HAWKINS, JOSE FERRER, ANTHONY QUAYLE, CLAUDE RAINS, ARTHUR KENNEDY, OMAR SHARIF, PETER O’TOOLE, production HORIZON PICTURES/COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1962, 210 MINUTES.
In my fantasy remake of this beautiful and ridiculous movie, which is still an epic but into which I will shoehorn a cheeky counterfactual, I’ll bring together - in a hotel bar, probably in Tunis, late in 1960 - Frantz Fanon and T.E. Lawrence. I haven’t settled on casting for this. Suggestions in the comments, please.
The idea is to connect the two men’s stories, separated in real life by fifty years. They were both outsiders and they both, in different ways, profoundly influenced the struggles they were involved with. Both experienced disappointment and disillusion but if Fanon had lived another few months he’d have seen Georges Pompidou accept the independence of Algeria while Lawrence’s intervention was immediately eclipsed and rendered irrelevant.
The struggle
Each had in mind an ideal. For Lawrence it was unity and autonomy for the Arab peoples. For Fanon a democratic, socialist republic in Algeria governed by the masses. This is the point of the comparison. Fanon’s goal - and that of the highly-organised movement he was a part of - was a sovereign state free from domination and complete in every important respect. Lawrence was a dilettante who imagined if he could figure out how to ride a camel the Arab world would be free. The contrast between the naivety and foolishness of Lawrence’s DIY scheme and the multi-decade, world-spanning effort to build a free nation in Algeria is obvious. While Lawrence was hypnotising the British Army elite, the Arab world was already being torn apart by the cynicism and cupidity of the European powers. There’s nothing more ridiculous in recent British history than Lawrence’s Arabian ambition.
Lawrence of Arabia, shot while Fanon was still alive and as the war in Algeria was reaching its climax (and after the Battle of Algiers), of course stays firmly in its period. It’s as if the whole intervening half century hadn’t happened. I find myself wondering how a movie made in the midst of the cold war, conscious of the increasingly dark and Machiavellian great-power interference in the Middle East and in Asia - but also the promise of the non-aligned movement, Bandung and the explosion of newly independent nations - could possibly maintain this absolute costume-drama sterility. A whole repertory company of RADA-trained actors who know what to do with a swagger stick; the cool cloisters of colonial administration buildings; natives either servile or animalistic; Alec Guinness in blackface.
Lean’s history of subtle explorations of the fantasies of the English middle-classes might support a reading of Lawrence of Arabia - a worldwide hit - as a kind of therapeutic nostalgia exercise for a country at the beginning of its decline. A reminder of a time when Great Britain still controlled half the world and a single, charismatic, English intelligence officer who had figured out how to ride a camel and had decent Arabic could change the course of history.
The movie
Anyway, here we are, in 1962, the period during which Hollywood was still able to demand of working people with full lives and tiring jobs an entire evening of their time - and on any night of the week. Movies that had overtures and ten-minute intermissions and allowed no time at all for a b-feature. And movies that usually made larger claims about history and culture too.
The best way to think of Lawrence of Arabia, I conclude, is as something from outside of history and culture and specifically from outside the history it ostensibly represents: the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and the self-serving lies of the European powers that led to the carving up of Arabia and North Africa after the first world war.
The consensus on Lawrence - the actual Lawrence - is that he was a self-deceiving flake who wrecked practically everything he got involved with. He deceived others too, including his superiors in the British army and the general public at home (via one newspaper reporter in particular). Interestingly, the group that was least deceived by him was probably the Bedouin Arabs he claimed to know and aspired to lead.
They took from him the gold sovereigns he brought from the British garrison in Cairo and, when their aspirations to freedom and unity collapsed in the various betrayals and deceptions of the European powers, forgot all about him. T. E. Lawrence is usually a footnote in the local histories and, even where his contribution is taken more seriously, he’s an element of the wider British betrayal and not some kind of magically-endowed rogue element.
So let’s pretend that we don’t know any of this and consider Lawrence of Arabia as a film about the adventures of a fragile upper-class Englishman in the desert - we could place it amongst the other films that are mostly about sand - Dune, Walkabout or Ice Cold in Alex.
Lawrence (played here by Peter O’Toole who did this kind of tortured and/or sexually ambivalent and/or drunk thing terrifically well), loved the sand. He revered the desert. In the movie he’s quoted as saying that this is because it’s ‘clean’. This is the kind of thing he says. He’s a neurotic figure quivering against a sand dune the size of a cathedral: the absolutely ridiculous widescreen grandeur of the Arabian desert. In the resorts of the Gulf states these days, I read, you can sign up for a day out on the dunes on quad bikes and ‘surf’ down them (barbecue afterwards). Same vibe.
The dunes
There’s an account of the history that requires we believe it was the release of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, six months before this movie, that tipped the New Hollywood’s first domino (and, incidentally, triggered the studio system’s final crisis). It’s a satisfying theory. Anyone who loves those playful, formally chaotic early new wave movies (anti-epics?) would want to believe that one of them might have achieved this, all on its own. We’re certainly at the end of the epic era. The next movie in the GROSS sequence must be the absolute apex of the form, a hyper-evolved aircraft carrier of a movie, Cleopatra. After that it’s just the decadent tail-end.
Camille Paglia, academic, astrologer and splendid anomaly, loves Lawrence of Arabia. She’s not bothered about the nostalgia or the deception. She’s voted for it twice in the Sight and Sound poll of the best movies of all time (also for Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments and Gone With the Wind). For her there’s something unproblematically fabulous about epics like this one: “Oh my God, the dunes of Lawrence of Arabia with that music” she says. A great film, for Paglia, should be “…a permanent life experience.” It’s hard to argue with that and there’s something refreshing about Paglia’s happy celebration of a form that recent film criticism has itself been kind of neurotic about, struggled to come to terms with.
It’s certainly hard to think of a contemporary cultural creation made on the scale of these epic movies. Ponderous works of art that aimed to leave a mark in the memory and in the emotions by means of their scale - their raw, economic ambition - alone. Even the biggest contemporary movie - a Nolan or a Cameron - is a much more introverted creation. The typical mega-production of the 21st Century will have a vast budget but it won’t be funding 20,000 extras or a fleet of camels/lions or the artisan builders of meticulous 1:1 plaster and plywood replicas of ancient temples.
I’m trying, Ms Paglia, I really am. I don’t want to be a cynical old git. I want to fall head-first into David Lean’s bath of warm sand and to get lost in the complicated psyche of his flawed home-counties hero. Lawrence in Lean’s appreciation (and, actually, in his own) was a proper hero, the kind of man who sets out to leave a permanent mark in the human story, something much bigger and more important than his own vain self.
Amazon Prime just withdrew Lawrence of Arabia for some reason but it seems to be on Apple TV+ and elsewhere. There’s a 4K Blu-Ray, which will be beautiful.
Pontecorvo’s extraordinary The Battle of Algiers, shot in Algeria with the cooperation of the FLN government only a few years after independence, offers a hard-edged contrast with Lean and Spiegel’s dry, apolitical, morally empty tale. It’s on BFI Player and should be watched alongside Lawrence of Arabia.
I can ‘t find any statistics to back this up but I feel sure that a decent proportion of the audience for any given screening of Lawrence of Arabia was asleep by the intermission. In the UK people were working almost ten hours more per week in 1959 than in 2024. Many jobs were significantly harder, involving more physical labour.
These reviews are on Letterboxd, obvs, and there are others that aren’t published here.