Three hours and thirty-six minutes long, as vast as the desert, as dry as Cecil’s wit, and without a single woman in a speaking role, actually.
I’ve been looking forward to this one. It feels like a reward after suffering through Gone With The Wind, and the start of a good string of movies to come. The only downside is I shelled out $35 for the DVD set, but there’s not much that could be done about that, I suppose.
As always, I encourage anyone who has seen the movie to offer insight, commentary, and hate mail, and those who intend to see the movie, well, go see it.
Folks, this movie is all about the cinematography. If you can’t see it in a theater (which you can’t, but I did when they restored it a few years back, bwahahahaha), get it in letterbox. Then go to your richest friends house with the biggest mother of a TV you can find.
They did a decent job with the pan and scan on this, but it’s just not the same unless you can see the vastness of this film.
I saw Lawrence of Arabia at a restored theater that was done up in sort of a Moroccan style.
It was the longest night of my life. Watching Peter O’Toole and his cohort schlep across the desert on camels was not and is not my idea of entertainment. Sorry.
The great sand and sky vistas are stunning. The performances in the film are flawless. Even the camels are great! One scene when Omar Shariff is telling Lawerence about the problems they will face crossing a bad bit of desert he says ‘After (some number of days) the camels will die’ and the camel looks back at them and makes this noise like “WTF!?!”
This movie would not be made today. My god there is like a five minute scene of just Lawerence thinking for Christs sake! When was last time you saw that in a movie?
I got the dvd recently, too, and enjoy the heck out of this movie. Unfortunately, I only have one friend with a 50" tv, and I don’t think she’d enjoy the movie that much.
slotar - offer to do the dishes, give her a foot massage, rent the tv and send her off to the movies, anything to borrow the tv for a couple of hours! That’s fantastic.
screech-owl
(who wishes she knew someone with a big tv, or had one so someone would give me a foot massage)
A single man set in the vastly scaled, uncompromising world that is his life.
O’Toole was perfect, his eyes utterly memorable. I’ve spent only a little time in Arabian deserts but enough to get a hint of the beauty of having everything else of life stripped away so it’s just you, the incredible heat and the barren landscape. You are naked. That’s what I love about this film, it conveys the potential for emotional inhibition; the invitation extended by deserts for you to explore yourself outside your ‘real’ life through their extreme physical environment. Magnificently cleansing and insightful.
The film also conveys well the beauty of an uncomplicated environment; no industrialisation, no radio’s, just you and it. Oh happy days!
I think O’Toole carried the film wonderfully and grasped the essence of Lawrence, no mean achievement.
Others can and will comment on other aspects of the film. Mine was just a personal angle.
Although I always feel that Alec Guiness, when filming Star Wars, had to put up with a godawful amount of Lawrence jokes during the scenes on Tattooine. Claude Raines doesn’t look nearly as French as he did when we saw him in week 2 for Casablanca, either.
I agree with London_Calling’s mention of Peter O’Toole’s eyes. The scene that does it for me is near the end - the “No prisoners!” bit. Watching the emotions fight in his eyes is a treasure.
His treatment of Gasim (the Arab he rescued in the Nefud desert, who later killed one of the Howeitat, with results we’re familiar with) is also a fascinating look at priorities and at what cost he is willing to achieve his goals. Farraj and Daud tie into that as well.
Anyway- that’s all just from hazy memories of the last time I saw it. Hopefully I’ll have more things to say tomorrow.
LOA is my favorite movie! Best in a theatre as has been mentioned. The DVD has some cool extra stuff on it. Robert Bolt (the writer) was talking about Sam Spiegel (the producer) and David Lean (the director), who were both known to be extravagent. He said they were “pouring rivers of money into the sand”. Love that line.
I named my current company from that movie: Akaba.
Potter: Oh, it damn well hurts. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts. Potter: Well, what’s the trick, then? Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
Murray: I can’t make out whether you’re bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted. Lawrence: I have the same problem sir.
Lawrence: Oh thanks, Dryden. This is going to be fun. Dryden: Lawrence. Only two kinds of creatures get fun in the desert. Bedouins and gods, and you are neither. Take it from me. For ordinary men, it’s a burning, fiery furnace. Lawrence (as he lights Dryden’s cigar with a match): No, Dryden. It’s going to be fun. Dryden: It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun.
Sherif: Good Army compass. How if I take it? Lawrence: Then you would be a thief. Sherif: Have you no fear, English? Lawrence: My fear is my concern. Sherif: Truly. God be with you, English.
and the wonderful
Auda: I carry 23 great wounds, all got in battle. 75 men have I killed with my own hands in battle. I scatter, I burn my enemy’s tents. I take away the flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure yet I am poor, because I am a river to my people.
I love the scene at the well, where Lawrence’s Bedouin guide is nervously hauling up (stealing) some water, all the time watching his back and the horizon. Lawrence doesn’t know why the guide is antsy, but he picks up on the tension, too. The desert is both perfectly silent and humming with heat waves at the same time. When the bucket splashes into the water at the bottom of the well, Lawrence (and we) practically jump out of our skins.
Well!
And then the reason for the tension becomes clear. In the shimmering heat waves on the horizon appears a blob - it grows - it’s a man on a camel - it’s Omar Sharif on a camel with a gun and he blows the guide away!
Jeez, what a scene. Talk about Zen artistry – leave some empty space in the scene, leave some empty space in the soundtrack, and stop editing things to death!
And I second LNO’s observation about Peter O’Toole’s face and eyes as he struggles with his desire to massacre the departing soldiers. “No Prisoners!!”
I saw this movie for the first time in 1970, when I was sixteen, and let me tell you this girl fell in LOVE with Peter O’Toole! I have the letterbox edition of this film, nothing else will do. And in 1988 or early 1989, while living in Lansing Michigan, I drove all the way to Detroit to see it because it was being played in a restored movie palace, the Fox. To give you some idea of how ornate the THEATER was, in 1925 it cost $10,000,000 to build. So I got to watch it on a HUGE 30 x 70’ screen!
What folks have been saying about Lawrence’s struggle with what he will sacrifice to achieve his goals is perfectly illustrated in one scene. He and his men must retreat from an attack scene and one young man he had taken under his wing is injured and can’t be moved. Lawrence is torn, he wants to stay and help him or something but he MUST leave. No option. So he takes out his pistol and aims it at the young man, who speaks up and says “Daud will be angry with you”(Daud was his companion who had died earlier in the film) Lawrence replies “Salute him for me!” and fires.
Indeed. That’s one of the scenes that really stuck with me, and has impressed me over the years. In most other movies in that situation, would the protagonist shoot his ‘adopted son’? No, he’d stay behind, and through heroism or hijinks or luck, he’d rescue the boy, who would come out at the end of the movie on a stretcher or crutches and say “Lawrence believed in the cause and he wouldn’t let me die!” Sappy, silly.
The mercy killing of Farraj makes sense rationally, is a struggle emotionally, and is virtually unseen in other movies.
