Review of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) by Daniel K — 31 Jan 2011

5: Perfect. I feel I can only say this about two films: this and Citizen Kane, but this is my absolute favorite film ever made. It's a picture from a far more magnificent and stupendous era, when just about anything seemed possible.

I feel about it like I do about WWI and WWII as compared to OIF and OEF; their scale just doesn't seem to compare. Films of today, whether Star Wars, LOTR, Troy, Gladiator, Avatar, etc, etc, just seem small and artificial by comparison; Lawrence of Arabia is truly epic filmmaking at its absolutely grandest scale.

The only films I can think of that can even remotely compare are pictures like Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, Ben-Hur, Gone with the Wind, etc, but all of these were made on the back lot. Lawrence of Arabia achieved this kind of scale in one of the harshest and most inhospitable environments on earth, which is what makes it that much more impressive.

David Lean would have made quite a General I am sure. His artistry is simply unsurpassed; each time I see the film it is almost as if for the first time. I keep picking up on new nuances on every viewing.

The number of perfectly planned and elegant cuts is incredible. I'm not just talking about the famed match to sunrise jump cut either - which is possibly the greatest scene in the history of cinema - although this is of course the grandest and most memorable.

It gives me goose bumps and shivers up and down my spine each and every time. It just does not get old. The same is true of the final scene in which Lawrence is obscured by a dirty windshield as he departs Arabia and when he is asked from across the Nile, "Who are you?" Despite the prodigious number of times I've seen this picture and the incredible length of T.

E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which is what the film is at least partially based upon, I still feel as if Lawrence is a bit of an enigma. Lean and O'Toole of course do everything they can to illuminate his character down to the very soul, but there is only so much one can know about a man, even after reading 1000+ densely written pages in his own hand.

I can't think of another character exploration more fascinating, complex, or more epic. Getting back to the films technical artistry, other remarkable cuts abound: looking up at Sharif on a horse, which turns to blue sky, which is then blended into another blue sky and panned down to a new scene; the twirl about the inner courtyard by the bar; etc; etc.

One wonders if Hitchcock could have done any better in terms of sheer planning and storyboarding; I'm sure not. The desert landscapes do not get any more sweeping than this. It seems as if the entire world is laid out for us to see and we can think of nothing better than to dive into it.

I can assure you that this was even more incredible when I saw it at the Clearview Ziegfeld theater in midtown Manhattan, the last remaining grand old movie palace of the olden days, when I was attending Columbia.

This was perhaps one of the greatest nights of my life. It was a sparkling brand-new print that I can't wait to see on Blu-Ray. I was surprised how good the picture looked on DVD this time around actually.

Even better, the next night I went to a David Bowie concert in the Bronx where I was about ten feet away from him on stage. This was pretty much an unbeatable one-two punch in terms of entertainment value.

The music is indelible and unforgettable as well. It absolutely makes the film. Nothing could possibly be over-the-top when it comes to filmmaking this powerful and brilliant, but this score is not afraid to push the boundaries of what it means to be a sweeping epic.

It reaches for the stars and rightly so. The casting is perfect, down to the smallest role. I remember each and every face as if I were related. In my opinion, O'Toole's performance is one the greatest ever put on screen.

What an introduction. Each frame of the film seems familiar and unforgettable at this point. The film has scarred me for life, which is as it should be. Anything I write here could not possibly convey the films incredible majestic beauty and power.

It is the masterpiece of all masterpieces. It puts films like 8 and 1/2, L'Avventura, Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad, North by Northwest, and The Searchers to shame. The only part of it I have yet to come to gripes with and appreciate is how this world and this depiction relates to the current state of affairs in the area.

I can't quite bring myself to realize that these events laid the groundwork for the current chaos, authoritarianism, terrorism, conflict, and awful relations between and among these fledgling countries and world powers like Great Britain, the United States, and France.

I feel like I want to view this as a world apart and it seems like its a bit too easy for me to do so. This isn't undoubtedly at least partially because when I see the picture, I'm viewing it more through a cineaste's eyes than through those of an intelligence professional and/or geopolitical analyst.

Discussing it in terms of its relationship to contemporary events would involve a separate review/paper, which I'm not prepared to write. I've already authored a paper at Columbia examining the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" as an ethnographic study of the Bedouin people.