Day 84: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Movie #51 – Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - 216 min, cert PG.

This first biopic in the Top 250, with the possible exception of Schindler's List, we follow the life of T.E. Lawrence, or at least that part of it that he spent in the Middle East and North Africa. At the start of the story, Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) is a lieutenant in the British Army, stationed in Cairo. He is insolent and slovenly but the army put up with him because of his specialist knowledge of the local tribes. It is this knowledge that gets him selected for a mission to go and assess the prospects of the Arab Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) in a revolt against the Turks. He suggests a daring strategy to the Prince, which involves crossing a harsh desert to attack a Turkish stronghold from the lightly defended landward side rather than from the sea and offers to lead the attack himself. The prince accepts and the attack is successful. Lawrence goes on to pursue a guerrilla style war on the Turkish railway network – staying hidden in the vast Arabian deserts, and then striking without warning. He leads another attack, this time on Damascus, and is again successful, but instead of conceding it to the British, he tries to organise the Arab tribes into ruling it themselves. This proves impossible, however, as the various tribes are incapable of working together enough to run a city the size of Damascus. His dreams of Arabian home rule dashed, he returns to England.

I actually enjoyed this more than I expected to. At over three and a half hours, I thought I would find it too long and a too dull, more like a history lesson than a movie. But O’Toole’s personality makes the movie very watchable, and I found it very easy to lose myself in the story, so the time passed quite quickly. That said, I do think it’s about half an hour too long.

David Lean is undeniably very good at this sort of thing. Vast battle scenes with thousands of extras is something of a trade make for him, and this film needs his skill at it on many occasions.

Score – 7/10. Quite good, but a bit too long, and starting to look just a little dated.

Next up is The Pianist, another Holocaust movie. It will be hard pushed to match up to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, but it comes recommended to me so we shall see.