Film: Jessica Kellgren-Hayes

Intelligently Epic

There are no intelligent epics like 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia today and in my opinion there never will be again. The overuse of computer-generated effects has numbed us to the awe and wonder they once produced. A modern film running at over three and a half hours with an iffy plot and no women would never capture our attention and hearts in the way that looking at an image and knowing it has been created using just a man and a camera does.
Peter O’Toole makes an unforgettable debut as TE Lawrence, the Welsh-born British Army officer who campaigned with Arab irregular forces during WWI. He is a brilliant and volatile leader who, after being sent from Cairo to the Arabian desert to find Prince Faisal of Mecca, finds himself leading an Arab revolt against the Turks for the British.
Lawrence of Arabia takes a critical view of British imperialism in the Middle East – depicting it as cold, calculating and resented by the locals. There is nothing simple about O’Toole’s Lawrence, who discovers in himself a taste for sensual ruthlessness and is wracked with self-hate after being captured and beaten by the Turks. It being 1962, the film only hints at the sexual assaults the real Lawrence wrote of.

When crossing the desert, Lawrence meets Sherif Ali of the Harith played by Omar Sharif, an Egyptian superstar who was reluctantly cast in preference to white actors. He clearly has the sharpest lines with the crackling jealousy and macho tension between the impossibly handsome O’Toole and the equally impossibly handsome Sharif hovering on the brink of the sexual.
Whilst this is not historically accurate it does have some grounding. The real Lawrence wrote admiringly of his “man-on-man loves”, and biographers conclude that he was most likely gay.
The story of ‘Lawrence’ is not founded on violent battle scenes or cheap melodrama, but on director David Lean’s ability to imagine what it would feel like for an audience to see a speck appear on the horizon of the desert and slowly grow into a human being.
Moreover on Lawrence as a personality (the persona that Lean, O’Toole and screenwriter Robert Bolt create) is a sexually and socially unconventional man. He is so out of touch with the Arab existence and the squabbles between tribes that he skims above them. It’s imperial overconfidence at its best but he rallies the splintered desert tribes and wins a war against the Turks.
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