I’m going out to see my
favorite movie tonight. I’m taking all my friends with me, and for four hours,
the earth will move. For four hours we will be safe from Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Demi Moore and Mission Impossible.
For four hours we will believe in movies again. Tonight, we’re all going off to
see David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
It’s time that somebody
came out and said it: Lawrence of Arabia
is the greatest cinematic experience ever wrought by the hand of man. This is
not an opinion that any sane person is supposed to maintain, by the way. A
highbrow guilty pleasure, maybe. An extraordinary visual achievement,
certainly. But a great film—with a capital ‘G’? Let’s put it this way: in 1992,
Sight and Sound asked 130 critics
from around the world to choose their top ten films of all time. Lawrence of Arabia was named precisely
twice—one time more than Conan the
Barbarian.
It’s been a rocky ride to critical legitimacy for Lawrence—to say nothing of Lawrence lovers. It is surely the most unlikely
epic ever made: a minor, anti-heroic historical character from an obscure
corner of World War One became the subject of one of the most expensive movies
ever made. The recipient of seven Academy Awards in 1962, Lawrence was largely forgotten afterwards; cut from 222 minutes to
202, and then to 187; it’s negative left to rot and it’s color left to fade.
Restored in 1989 by Robert A. Harris, Lawrence
has since been allowed to tread a more dignified career arc: pristine 70mm
prints regularly make the rounds to better rep. cinemas everywhere. Once a year
it puts in an appearance at the local Imax theatre in Toronto, together with an ever-changing host
of pretenders to the throne of the Big Visual Experience. And of course, it
mops the floor with all of them.
Seen up against these miserable usurpers, two things
become immediately obvious. First, Lawrence
of Arabia is unarguably the most
literate, subtle spectacle ever made. Second, it’s a kind of film that will
probably never be made again. To see Lawrence is not
just to notice that they don’t make ‘em like that any more. (They didn’t make
‘em like that then, either.) It’s to
notice that Lawrence is unique.
Yet, Lawrence has always seemed a guilty kind of pleasure for serious
film types. I used to think of it as a sort of Gone With the Wind for the erudite. It was certainly my Gone With the Wind: I first saw Lawrence
in 1962 when I was seven and for me it was a life-event. Images stayed with me
for years: Sherif Ali emerging from a mirage; the sun rising over the desert;
the film’s final, muted shot of T.E. Lawrence on his way home—thirty years old
and the most important events of his life behind him.
Multiple viewings later, Robert Bolt’s instantly
memorable dialogue for Lawrence has
wormed its way into my life—mostly those great lines he gave to Anthony Quinn,
who played Arab chieftain Auda Abu Tayi. Confronted with a giant-killing
argument, what better rejoinder than “thy mother mated with a scorpion”? When I
face a desk piled over with work I sometimes gaze grimly out the window towards
an imaginary desert horizon and think: “I must find something honorable.” If I’ve cooked a good meal
my roommate says: “You are a river to your people.”
Sometimes, I dream that Scarlet O’Hara and Lawrence have
somehow psychically become one. Scarlet, near starvation, clutches a handful of
dirt and looks into a blood-red sky. “I must find something honorable” she
puffs. “Nothing is written” croaks Lawrence
to Sherif Ali after rescuing Gassim from the desert, “and after all, tomorrow
is another day.”
Alas, until recently it has
been perversely fashionable to despise David Lean’s films for being too big,
and too grandiose from about The Bridge
on the River Kwai forward. Director Francois Trufault best summed up the
French New Wave’s opinion: “Rubbish”, he called them, “traps for fools, Oscar
machines.”
Ten years after the release of Lawrence,
Lean was called to account for his cinematic gigantism. “You’re the man who
directed Brief Encounter” began
critic Richard Schickel at a National Society of Film Critics
luncheon-and-lynching in Lean’s honour, “explain to us how you could come up
with a piece of bullshit like Ryan’s Daughter.”
Two hours of invective later, Lean complained: “I don’t think you ladies and
gentlemen will be satisfied until I do a film in 16mm and black-and-white.”
“No,” said Pauline Kael, then the armour-piercing critic
for the New Yorker, “you can have colour.” David Lean didn’t make another film
for 13 years. He was to make only one more before he died.
Looking over those lost years, it’s hard not to feel
cheated. The new wave’s fight against excess has been utterly lost, with Lean
ending up as collateral damage. Today the philistines are more securely in
charge than ever. A big film must now be an action spectacular, and budgets of
literally hundreds of millions are controlled by cinematic nonentities like
Renny Harlan and Kevin Costner. Surveying the wasteland today, who is there to
take on the Lean mantle? Steven Spielberg? The mind boggles.
One thing is for certain—no Hollywood studio will ever
allow anyone to make anything like Lawrence again.
Omar Sharif, who’s career started with Lawrence,
sums up the most obvious reason: “If you are the man with the money and
somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that's four hours long,
with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and
he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert—what would
you say?”
Hollywood is notorious for saying “yes” and throwing
enormous amounts of money at filmmakers with hands of cement—this summer alone
six movies with Lawrence-like budgets
will be released—but they’re not quite so potty as that. We now live in a time
where a marble-mouthed ex bodybuilder like Arnold Schwarzenegger can become a Hollywood power, but a David Lean will never again be
allowed to exist.
To revisit Lawrence 35
years on is not merely to behold a masterpiece. It is to bear witness to a more
cinematic age, a time when a big budget was not a guarantee of mediocrity. It
is to recall an epoch when something like big cinema was possible.
So, tonight my friends and I shall make our pilgrimage.
We shall see Lawrence of Arabia, and
for a few short hours we shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the camels.
We shall see the desert shining like a jewel. We shall see all evil and all our
pain sink away in the great compassion that will enfold the theatre. Our lives
will feel as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress....
Then on Monday, it’s back to the Stalones, the
Schwarzeneggers, the Twisters. God! I
must find something honorable.
Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997
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