Growing up in the 90s as a young child who was really into film, I was told two things about Lawrence of Arabia by my elders, usually in tandem. First, that it was A Truly Great Film, indisputably so, even among the Greatest Ever Made. And second, that despite its urgent and inarguable Greatness, I wasn’t to rush to see it – not until I had an opportunity to do so in a cinema. It wasn’t even worth watching on a television screen, they said, for that would cut its brilliance in half, or worse: like having your first glass of champagne and mixing it with water.
And so I waited. In Johannesburg, where I lived, there was no such thing as repertory cinema: my first experience of seeing a “classic” on the big screen was a 20th-anniversary re-release of Grease. Eventually, my patience ran out: when I noticed a late-night airing of David Lean’s horizon-wide historical drama on the TV schedule, I junked the advice I had hitherto been given, and stayed up to watch it on our boxy 14in Sony. I have no doubt that it was unfortunately cropped, letterboxing rarely being the favoured broadcast option in that dinkier age of television sets. But I don’t really remember, largely because, with all those caveats and warnings in mind, I was enthralled by the film anyway.
Lean’s near-four-hour biopic of writer, explorer and army officer TE Lawrence is a grandiose spectacle, sure: just hearing the title triggers a slideshow of sprawling, heat-hazed desert panoramas in one’s mind’s eye, a mental needle-drop of Maurice Jarre’s swelling, ceremonial theme, and that might apply whether you’ve seen the whole film or not. In the 60 years since it was released, Lawrence of Arabia has become a byword for the brand of epic studio cinema that “they” don’t make any more, or at least don’t make quite like that. In multiple senses, that aspect of the film is diminished by a small screen. Those who advised me to wait weren’t just idly gatekeeping; they simply remembered the overwhelming experience of watching a film so vast their gaze almost couldn’t reach the corners of the screen.
That emphasis on its spectacular qualities, however, tends to make people misremember (or at least, remember less) what an elegant, literate feat of historical portraiture Lawrence of Arabia is – how ambiguously textured and sometimes intriguingly amoral it is as a Great Man biopic that plays fast and loose with facts, and more importantly still, how sinuous and alluring Peter O’Toole makes it as a human character study. The image I hold closest from Lean’s film isn’t, in fact, any sandy Middle Eastern vista, nor even the celebrated “match trick” cut that vaulted editor Anne V Coates to legend status in her profession – it’s O’Toole’s impossibly scalpel-cut face, blue eyes burning with cool arrogance and wilder curiosity, jaw set with the confidence of both an instant matinee idol and, in the film’s world, a western warrior, floating a few inches above the ground he strides with an outsider’s entitlement. That visage suffered less on a grainy TV screen; Lean finds as much beauty in closeup as he does in widescreen.
Noel Coward, memorably, was sufficiently enamoured of O’Toole’s presence to quip:, “If you’d been any prettier, it would have been Florence of Arabia.” (The 6ft 2in actor certainly cut a more statuesque figure than the man he played.) Coward, more than most, likely picked up on Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt’s tacit queering of Lawrence: if the man’s widely assumed homosexuality rarely makes it directly into the text (save for military superiors dismissively referring to him as a “creature” who needs to be “made a man”), it glimmers through O’Toole’s often deliciously louche performance, and his comfortable, close-quarters body language with Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali – a composite of various real-life Arab leaders, gradually seduced by Lawrence’s brazen, rebellious military guidance, and seducing the white man in turn.
If the film’s geopolitics are more vocally articulated than its sexual ones, however, they’re often just as hard to read. On the face of it, Lawrence of Arabia presents as the kind of white-saviour epic that was prevalent in its era, making a colonialist hero of Lawrence as he emboldens his Arab comrades in their first world war revolt against the Ottoman Empire. As it plays, however, the film seems subtly sceptical of its golden-boy subject, presenting him as both icon and egotist: his recklessness in wartime is both sexy and selfish, his fascination with the Arab people indicative of both an open-minded, anti-colonial streak and an eminently English fetish for the exotic. When I revisited the film – at long last, on a suitably large screen – I was struck perhaps more powerfully by its 50-shades-of-tan desert-mirage beauty, but not at the expense of its tart, conflicted historical revisionism.
Is Lawrence of Arabia one of the great last hurrahs of a British heritage cinema still in thrall to its own cultural roots – so confident of its place in the world as to cast white Englishmen in brownface in key MENA roles – or does it point the way to a more questioning view of macho military history? The film’s masculine romanticism, not to mention the sheer darn size of the thing, leads us to believe the former, which is perhaps why its Great Film stock has fallen slightly in recent, more politically conscientious times: early this month, many were shocked to see Lawrence of Arabia tumble out of the top 100 in Sight & Sound magazine’s decennial critics’ poll of the all-time greatest films. (The film-makers in the parallel directors’ poll kept it in: Lean’s craft still inspires awe in his artistic descendants.)
On its 60th anniversary, however, its time to take a closer look at this still-extraordinary film, with all its ornate fabrications and flavourful biographical details, its rousing imperatives and mixed signals. For too long, perhaps, Lawrence of Arabia’s much-hyped big-screen dazzle invited us to marvel at it rather than look into it – but it’s a richer film still when you see the trees for the forest, the grains for the dunes.
