Lawrence of Arabia (1962) – 4/5

Always has been an epic, always will be

„Lawrence of Arabia“ is a British film that is mostly in the English language and rarely you will also hear some Arabic and Turkish. The British background is the reason why I got to watch this movie on the occasion of a retrospective dealing with cinema from the UK and it was a one-time showing and I do not regret one bit going. It was not the first time I saw this film, not sure if the second or third time, but it has aged so well that its incredibly massive over 3.5 hours flew by quickly. Like they literally do not go faster with any other film. This one is from 1962, so it had its 60th anniversary last year, which means that pretty much everybody who worked on this is gone now sadly, except the little boy who plays Anthony Quinn’s son here. I am not sure about him. But before I get to the cast, let’s take a deeper look at the production behind the camera here. The director is David Lean and this is maybe his career-defining work, even if there are one or two other movies where he was in charge of that made an (almost) equally big impact. He was in his early 50s at that point. The two writers are Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. The former scored his first Oscar nomination for the screenplay here, but lost. Still he went on to win for his two following nominations then and one of them was another David Lean movie. Wilson had already won two Oscars by 1962 and also worked with Lean on other occasions. You can see Lean’s status as a defining filmmaker from his era also through the comments that Klaus Kinski made about him at some point. Lean’s movie here won a total of seven Oscars and was nominated for three more. It feels kinda sad if we compare this masterpiece of a movie here to the movie that won seven Oscars in 2023, one that was not awfully bad, but still the difference in class could not be any bigger. The Oscars should really ask themselves what is going wrong with them and that film by the way was even nominated for another four Oscars, not just three. This little snippet of information makes you wonder if the Oscars are really pointless altogether at this point now in the 21st century.

Anyway, I will not go into detail about all the awards „Lawrence of Arabia“ won, but just a few words on two others. Editor Anne V. Coates died not too long ago into her 90s already and her final career effort was „50 Shades of Grey“. But the man everybody here should be talking about is of course Peter O’Toole and he is the ultimate contender, especially if we limit it to actors, for the one person who never won an Oscar, but was more deserving than everybody else. He was around the age of 30 when this got made and now a complete newcomer to acting, but you even read during the opening credits that he is presented as an actor that is introduced to audiences, so he was not known before this film at all it seems, but what a way to enter the limelight. Maybe this was also the reason why he lost that year. He had no previous star potential when he went up against a certain Gregory Peck and maybe people were also certain that O’Toole would win one day anyway. Well, if we ignore the honorary award, it wasn’t meant for him sadly. The second nomination followed just two years later and a whole bunch followed in the coming years and decades and then also the final one in 2007, a few years after the Honorary Oscar already, but a competitive Oscar he could never win. Oh well, it does not make his portrayal here any worse really, so it is all good. O’Tooles performance as the title character is the biggest reason why this film is one of the greatest epics in film history. There were really so many memorable moments here to his character, the quirky introduction of the character, the conversations with all the supporting players, the loss of illusion towards the very end. I could go on and one. Of course, you also never really see it that the main character already dies in the very first scene. Some may consider it a spoiler because this of course means that he lived through all the mayhem that followed afterwards (or actually before if we are precise), but for me it did not take any of the excitement away. This opening was also quite a shocker. I mean I knew now what would happen, but I did not know before.

It also does not take long for the film to drag you in I would say. For me it was at the latest then when he enters the desert with his initial companion and the latter gets shot when drinking from a well that belongs to somebody else. This was also a really memorable scene there and came a bit surprising. It was also the scene that introduced Omar Sharif the perhaps biggest supporting player here and he won a Golden Globe for his performance, but did not win the Oscar. Actually, he won even two Golden Globes because they still had a newcomer category back then. And he shared the newcomer win with O’Toole? How unusual was that with somebody from the same film. Impressive. But yeah, for Sharif this was also not the only time he worked with David Lean as they collaborated again for Doctor Zhivago three years later and you can say that about quite a few people from cast and crew here. As for „Lawrence of Arabia“, this film just had many really big names in the supporting cast. The aforementioned Anthony Quinn must not be ignored and he also scored some solid awards recognition for his portrayal here. Alex Guinness plays one of the most vital characters here as well and also on board is Claude Rains, who maybe most people will remember from „Casablanca“ and he scored a total of four Oscar nominations in the 1940s (without winning one), so this film here is already from the final years of his career and life as well. Jack Hawkins and Anthony Quayle deserve mentions as well, even if they may not have the same rich awards history like most of the others. These include Arthur Kennedy as well who was nominated for five Oscars in the 1950s, four of them for supporting, so he was a bit of the ultimate supporting player during that time.

And finally, there is Mel Ferrer here and he had already won an Oscar at that point. His role is small if I remember correctly who he is, but he is the one character who finally gives a face to the enemy because we hear all the time about the Turks being the enemy, but we almost never see them on any occasion, except at the very ending almost. This was truly a fateful encounter, even if Ferrer’s character did not know who he was talking to there because otherwise he would have killed the man right away or, who knows even made him his guest maybe because he was disgusted by the uncivilized people around him. For Lawrence this encounter was more fateful though not (only) because of the physical pain he endured, but because he understood that he would always be identified as somebody who is not an Arab, who does not really belong there. This broke his heart. But yeah, the man’s bright blue eyes and also light blonde hair, even if it looks darker on some occasions, will always be something I remember from this movie. There is a lot more. His mention how killing one man was something he liked stayed also in the mind and it may have resulted towards the end in well not his insanity, he was maybe not insane, but in becoming a bit of a megalomaniac there. Remember the Moses parallel? Also, it was pretty crazy how he walked through the Turkish area there acting as if he was invulnerable and as if they would never pay attention to him. Or of course the scene when he goes on a shooting spree and it was Sharif’s character who in a way brought him back to reason, the one who met Lawrence when he himself was killing somebody. Remember Lawrence’s words there about what a friend would never do? There you see how much he changed. As for Sharif, I must say that I will always remember of the play on words with Oma(r) from one of my favorite German show hosts, but let’s not get into detail there.

I must also mention the two young loyal friends Lawrence had in this movie. One dies in the desert in the quicksand and Lawrence cannot save him. The other is wounded from an explosion and he needs to be killed because they will not leave anybody injured behind because of the gruesome acts the Turks do to prisoners of war. Those two deaths hurt him the most, even if he himself pulled the trigger then for the second. This already showed you how much he had changed by then. Speaking of the desert again, it is also memorable to look at the two occasions when Lawrence is speaking about this region. Once he says he loves it so much and much later he says that he never wants to go there again. Said desert is also the first moment where he really proves his heroism when he goes back to save one man’s life instead of leaving him behind. What this rescued man does a little later then, results in another act of violence from Lawrence’s hands. He is not a saint. The aforementioned rescue then resulted in him basically wearing his trademark white outfit/costume for the rest of the film. Speaking of this outfit, there was an interesting comment from Sharif’s character there when he talks about Lawrence changing his clothes quickly to leave the Africans behind not just in theory, but he did no such thing. On the contrary, he kept it all the time and also stood up against the discrimination of his young friend there. That is really it then. Some brainstorming at the end: I see „your/thy mother“ sayings existed back then already too, one came from Quinn’s character and it was linked to a scorpion. Of course, it is as ironic as it gets that Lawrence did not die riding a horse or camel, but riding a motorcycle. The ending was very sobering when Quinn’s and Sharif’s characters go against each other and we also understand that challenges like fire, water supply etc. Are impossible to master there in Africa because of the mentality of the people. That is all now. People applauded this film when it ended and I applaud them for doing so. A must-see.