just got the movie on DVD,subtitled in: french, spanish, portuguese, chinese, korea, or Thai. NOT in arabic.
Surely they have the technology. What’s the deal?
Just bought the DVD too and was wondering that precise question.
LOA is my favorite movie. My current company I named “Akaba” from the movie. Completely coincidentally, I have a number of Pakistani friends (in fact I’ve been in Pakistan). I’ve wondered the same thing. In the movie a white guy organizes a bunch of arabs (for lack of a better word). I’m a white guy who is the CEO of a company that has some Pakistani employees (no Arabs, but the message is the same). I respect my employees and obviously don’t want them to find the company name shameful, so the answer to this question is more than theoretical for me.
I’ve specifically asked folks and they have specifically said they aren’t offended, and they love the movie as well.
And to be clear, the people I’ve asked are not just the people who work for me; obviously that wouldn’t be a fair sampling.
As I understand it, Arabs are not big fans of the man. Rightly or wrongly, he is perceived as someone who sought to get their land from the Turks and get it under his country’s control. As for the myth, I don’t know…I would have thought they regard it as inaccurate and condescending.
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According to the book Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of World History by Richard Shenkman, evidence that as come to light in recent years indicates that Lawrence was not the friend of the Arab revolt he has been made out to be, and was instead cynically employing them to further British goals. I haven’t checked up on this, myself, but this shows that there certainly is a contingent that feels this way.
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Much as I love Robert Bolt’s screenplay, I was shocked when I read Lawrence’s own account of the war in his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The Arab leaders certainly come off better in the book than they do on the screen. I think Bolt oversimplfied vastly, in part to make a murky situation clearer, and in part because he only had three hours to tell the tale. In any event, although the leaders come off as proud, they do not seem as transparen or as childish as the screen version makes them appear.
In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence at times finds himself wrestling with trying to serve both London and Mecca. Some of his actions seem to serve the Arab movement more than the Brits, such as when he pushes for the Arab army to take Damascus from the Turks, even though the allies would have liked to control it themselves. Overall, he does not see a contradiction in working for the Arabs, believing that a strong, independent Arab nation, indebted to the British for their freedom from Ottoman subjugation, would be a natural ally and powerful counterweight to German, Russian, and Turkish influence in the region.
Gee, I dunno, maybe because there aren’t a lot of DVD players in the Middle East? They’re targeting the market of potential buyers.
I’m pretty damn upset that my copy of Braveheart isn’t subtitled in the Scots language.
I was reading a book called… shoot, something like Arab People in Cinema or something like that. You get the idea. Anyhow, their section on LOA said that it was alright as far as it goes, but that it did a major disservice to the Arabs to make Lawrence look better.
For pretty much the reasons above, they did not like the movie. More specifically, they objected to the scene when Lawrence and his guide are at the well and Omar Sharif shoots him. They point out, rightly as I recall, that nobody dies here in the book, and it plays as a comic episode.
Also the role that Lawrence plays as a leader and uniting force, when their contention is that he mostly just served as a conduit for arms into Arabia. I’m not sure if I agree with this analysis, but that’s for another thread.
They also object to the characterization of Arabs as “a silly people” in a speech which they say would get Lawrence shot (yeah, probably 
) and the Damascas scenes. They say that Lynch (always blame the director. geez!) made the Arabs mess up ruling Damascas, even though they actually held it for 2 years before it was taken away and given to the French. (I think the French, have to go check.) None of the stuff with no electricity and no hospitals. According to these guys it was a pretty decent time to be in the city. Have to do more research to see if they are correct on this point.
Ok, I think that’s all. I totally love the movie too, it’s freaking awesome… It’s what Dune should have been (on screen, of course )
Tenebras
[fixed coding]
[Edited by bibliophage on 11-16-2001 at 10:22 AM]
Point of order, Tenebras. David Lean directed LOA.
[understatement]It would have been a very different film if David Lynch had directed it.[/understatement] 
Love the name 
When you boil away all the crap, Lawrence was simply an agent of British Imperialism.
Remember that DVD’s are region encoded. yojimboguy, your profile says you’re in America, so your DVD is probably region 1. So the DVD won’t work in the Middle East. Even if the Arabs all became fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai, they still could not view the DVD.
I assume that this pisses them off. It certainly pisses me off. I can’t imagine any consumer who is happy that his DVD player is designed to reject some DVDs.
Here are some recent threads about region encoding…
DVD Regions & their video systems
DVD Regions: How hosed am I?
Okay, let’s sum up some things that might be considered off-color.
[ul]
[li]T. E. Lawrence’s (pseudo)autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom is often dismissed as a historical work these days. Somewhere John Keegan mentions that the book is more valuable as an example of post-Great War romantic prose than as a factual source. (I happen to like it a lot in that regard.)[/li]
[li]David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia, and his scriptwriter appear to have diverged even farther from Lawrence’s own account. In some particulars, it appears as if Lawrence’s story was manipulated to place the Arabs in a less-than-favorable light.[/li]
[li]A widely regarded leader of the Arab Revolt, Faisal Husayni, is portrayed in the film by an Englishman, Sir Alec Guiness.[/li]
[li]The film, which is about Arabs and Arabia, is not even translated or subtitled into Arabic. Furthermore, the latest release might not even be available in that region.[/li][/ul]
So in short the film, which purports itself to be a “biography,” is in fact an inaccurate re-telling of an inaccurate book, with non-Arab actors portraying Arabs in a somewhat unfavorable way, and the film isn’t available in Arabic in Arabia.
Yeah, that might piss me off a little bit.
Doesn’t David Lean get some credit however for casting Omar Sharif as a Russian in Dr. Zhivago?
We should be careful about veering off into GD territory when it comes to whether or not actors have to be from the same ethinc group as the characters they portray. There were several Arab actors in Lawrence of Arabia. However, it was probably hard enough for Lean to get the film made with an unknown Egyptian actor like Omar Sharif in a major role. And Peter O’Toole was an unknown to most people in 1962 also. Hence, a big name like Alec Guinness was required to help sell the picture.
Now, the nose prosthetic for Anthony Quinn is another thing …
>> the film isn’t available in Arabic in Arabia.
And who would be to blame for this? Maybe the Arabic Arabs of the Arabian Arabia? Or is it that they have expressed a strong desire to purchase this movie and it has been refused to them? Since they have us by the balls with their oil I think they could quite easily get the movie if they wanted it. Or am I missing something? (I often do)
Oh pooh. Who can forget the heroic performance of John Wayne as Ghengis Khan?
I always thought that the Arab’s resentment was not at T.E. Lawrence himself, but the way that the British reneged on some of his efforts after WWI.
Actually the film sanitizes some aspects of Lawrence’s relations with the Arabs…he was supposedly fond of the young Arab boys. If “Lawrence of Arabia” had been made a few years later, it probably would have been far more offensive to Middle Eastern sensibilities than today.
Slight sidebar: don’t some Arabs see Omar Sharif as a bit of a “sell out” to the west? I mean many of his roles have been either non-Arab (Russians, Germans, and other “foreign parts”)or portraying Arabs solely for western consumption.
Specifically, I believe he is banned in some countries for appearing in films with love scenes with western girls like Catherine Deneuve (Mayerling), and for having an on-screen kiss with Barbara Streisand (Funny Girl).
He was banned from his home country-Egypt-for a time because he had love scenes with Barbra Streisand-a Jew.
His films were also banned.
I heard it wasn’t that Lawrence was gay-but that he had been raped at the hands of enemies, and after that, he disliked any physical contact whatsoever.
(Funny, I have my CD player on, and my Doctor Zhivago soundtrack just rotated on…)
Lawrence is a fascinating character. On one hand he’s sort of a British imperialist superhero, and on the other he’s a bumbling, insecure dolt, and it’s difficult to see how he managed to get anything done.
The evidence he was homosexual is a bit shaky. Asexual is probably a better word. He more or less admits to being a sadist several times in Seven Pillars, though. David Lynch would indeed have some dark material to work with.
One thing to keep in mind here is the Rashomon effect. The Arab commanders he dealt with would naturally ascribe that he was just an advisor and translator, and likewise he would tend to inflate his role.
It is worthy of note, however, that as far as I know, none of the British officers he served with, including his superiors, challenged anything in Seven Pillars, and Lawrence himself praised quite a few that worked with him and did similiar roles.
Just to add some spice to this discussion…
There was evidently a hugely successful play about Lawrence that ran in the 1950s, and Alec Guinness played Lawrence (not Faisal). I suspect that Robert Bolt’s screenplay is wholly original, but it might have been influenced by the play. In any event, it is, as I mentioned, incredibly telescoped, and if you pick up your impressions of Lawrence from the film alone you are getting an incredibly skewed account.
By the time they made the film, Guinness was thought to be too old to play Lawrence, so newcomer O’Toole made his screen debut, and Guiness made an excellent Faisal.