The Last Great Spectacle

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