Film

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Lean's 1962 epic dwarfed most of the contemporary competition, including Spartacus and El Cid, and the passage of time has only proved how difficult it is to run ideas, history, characterisation and landscape in harness on this sort of scale. In the restored 'director's cut' (adding a further six minutes), certain mysteries are cleared up. TE Lawrence's berserk massacre of Turkish soldiers is no longer motiveless, but a reprisal for the killing of Arab children; he knew his way about in the desert because he was a cartographer. The two sequences that everybody remembers are still cinematically daring, and both reverberate in the imagination like a gong: Sheik Ali's slow emergence from desert haze into focus to shoot a trespasser at his water-hole, and the cut from a burning match to the rising sun. The storming of Aqaba on the Red Sea, shot from a far vantage point, is as exhilarating as Derby Day, and in clean contrast to the brutal sweaty massacres elsewhere. Despite the extra footage, the united Arab attempts at government in Damascus are still too condensed to communicate, though the pandemonium of revolutionary fervour at the conference eclipses similar stuff in, say, Reds or Danton. As for O'Toole's Lawrence, he is an extraordinary mixture of narcissist, mystic and masochist, a Nietzschean with whimpering crises of confidence, half Man of Destiny, half borne under by the tides of nationalism.

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