Lawrence of Arabia: film, book, man

This year is the centenary of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), as great a book as any that ever won the Nobel Prize.  It’s now the perfect time to take another look at the nearly four-hour film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), superbly directed by David Lean, which portrays Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt against the Turks from 1916 to 1918.  The film is a biography of a wounded spirit, an account of a military campaign and a crucial part of the history of the modern Middle East.  It is visually beautiful and fast moving, with a fascinating hero, a variety of contrasting English and Arab characters, and haunting music.

The theme of the film is the triumph of Lawrence’s strong will over his own weak flesh.

Every scene advances the action, and reveals his charismatic and enigmatic character, what he thought and felt as well as what he did.  He tries to be loyal to both English and Arabs, and is forced to betray both.  He must overcome three main obstacles: the sun’s anvil and the burning fiery furnace of the desert; the cruelty and superior modern arms of the Turks; and the ancient internecine hostility of the Arab tribes, whom he must unite into an effective fighting force.

The desolate, empty, splendid desert, with its huge black volcanic cliffs jutting out of the red sand dunes, sets the scene for the pageantry and gathering of the Arab tribes.  The great battle scenes take place when the Arabs charge on their racing camels against the Turkish camp at Aqaba and on horseback against their railroad in the desert.  The most dramatic scenes occur in Tafas, Deraa and Damascus.

Albert Finney and Marlon Brando were considered for the leading role.  (Alain Delon was considered for Sherif Ali, Laurence Olivier for Prince Feisal, Cary Grant for General Allenby.)  But the blond and blue-eyed Peter O’Toole, a stage actor in his first important film, is perfect as Lawrence.  The film begins with Lawrence’s fatal motorcycle crash in Dorset, when he is protected only by goggles, on May 19, 1935, aged 46.  After the crash, when his motorcycle swerves off the road and disappears into the woods, his rear wheel spins in the air and round goggles hang on a thin dead branch.  His racing at high speed on narrow shadowy curving country lanes reveals at once Lawrence’s obsessive risk-taking and suicidal impulse.

The film then flashes back to the First World War. A brilliant intellectual, linguist, archeologist and author, Lawrence is pale-skinned and confined to dull work in the Cairo map room.  The masochist holds his finger in the flame of a burning match.  When asked to explain how he ignores the pain, he says, “the trick is not minding it hurts”. Suddenly, there’s a brilliant cut from the burning match in the office to a fiery sunrise in the desert.

Lawrence first encounters Sherif Ali (the Egyptian movie star Omar Sharif) at Ali’s precious well in the desert.  First seen riding toward Lawrence from a great distance, a dancing black apparition emerging from a mirage, he seems both mysterious and dramatic.  Ali kills Lawrence’s guide, who drinks from the well and draws the pistol that Lawrence has given him.  Ali mistakenly predicts that Lawrence, now alone in the desert, will never reach the Arab leader, Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness).  Lawrence insists that his compass will guide him; Ali snatches the compass and dangles it at the end of his whip, which recalls the image of Lawrence’s goggles hanging from the branch after his accident.  Then, no thief, Ali returns the life-saving compass.  Their initial hostility is eventually overcome when Ali, educated in Cairo, offers sound advice and urges restraint, becomes his moral conscience and his closest friend.

Lawrence is often contrasted to the traditional British officers, from Generals Murray and Allenby and Colonel Brighton, the British liaison to Feisal, to the mindless men at headquarters who build a squash court and condemn the “wogs”. In Feisal’s magnificent tent with colourful cloth hangings and carpets, Lawrence, who’s memorised passages from the Koran, continues a mullah’s reading of the holy book.  By reciting these lines, Lawrence establishes sympathetic rapport with and earns the respect of the suspicious Feisal.

Feisal’s men, unused to modern mechanized warfare, have just been massacred at Medina by Turkish artillery.  Lawrence also wants revenge for the Turkish defeat of the Allies in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16.  After an entire night of deep thought, he devises a new strategy of guerrilla warfare.  He will let the Turks keep their desert fortresses and tie down their troops while the Arabs, avoiding direct conflict, attack and blow up the Hejaz railroad from Medina to Damascus.  When they exult on reaching a temporary goal enroute to their final destination, he reminds them, “But it is far from Damascus” in Syria, their ultimate goal and conquest that will end the war.

En route to Aqaba, a port on the Red Sea, Lawrence endangers that vital mission by recklessly going back to rescue Gasim, a tribesman who’s fallen off his camel and will surely die in the desert.  By risking his life and the success of the whole campaign for a single worthless man, Lawrence shows he’s a great leader who protects his followers.  He also proves, in opposition to the Arab belief, that “Nothing is written,” that a powerful man can defy and determine his own fate, just as the Arabs can defeat the Turks.

Over a nighttime campfire Lawrence, always ashamed of his illegitimacy, confesses to Ali that though his father is a peer, he will never be one because “he didn’t marry my mother”.  This intimate confession establishes a bond between them.  Ali horrifies Lawrence’s servants by throwing his military uniform into the fire and giving him elegant white robes that confirm him as El Aurens, an accepted member of the tribe.  Pleased with his new costume and his new identity, Lawrence pulls out his dagger and stares at his reflection in the silver blade.  He then whirls and dances in his robes—until a British officer observes him and exposes his vanity.

Lawrence first sees Auda (Anthony Quinn, transformed by a hooked nose) at his well and disputes with him as he had with Ali.  Each well, created for the exclusive use and survival of the tribe, is jealously guarded.  David Lean establishes an effective contrast between the suave elegant Ali and the barbaric killer Auda, who vainly waves his curved sword in the air as Turkish biplanes bomb his men.  Ali and Auda exchange insults—calling each other fool, thief, coward and bastard—and threaten to kill each other, which emphasises the implacable hostility between the tribes.  Auda’s magnificent hospitality in his tent and lavish feast with a gigantic mound of food reprises Lawrence’s feast in Feisal’s tent.  Auda admires the wily Lawrence and tells him “Thy mother mated with a scorpion.”  He shouts poetically that he’s poor, despite all his wounds and conquests, because [in the desert,] “I am a river to my people.”  Feisal and Auda are always followed by their African slaves, who are dressed in red robes, carry swords and stand silently in the background.

In Aqaba, where the Turkish fixed guns face west to the sea, Lawrence takes the town by land, which everyone thought was “impossible.”  To capture of the port and assist the Allied advance into Syria and Palestine, Lawrence and the tribes must make a 600-mile ride through the unforgiving desert, a descent from the interior to the vulnerable eastern side of town.  The Arabs charge through the Turkish camp on camels while the enemy abandon their weapons and flee on foot.  (In Seven Pillars, Lawrence’s view of the sea at Aqaba echoes the triumphant Thalatta! Thalatta! (“The sea! The sea!”), shouted after another long weary march in Xenophon’s Anabasis.)

To avoid a tribal blood feud, Lawrence is forced to execute a murderer, the same Gasim he had saved in the desert.  Like a god, he’s given life and he’s taken it.  Though he’s saved Gasim, he fails to rescue his young servant Daud, who sinks into a quicksand.  Later, he must also kill Daud’s companion, the faithful and wounded Farraj, so he won’t be captured and tortured by the Turks.  The film subtly suggests Lawence’s homosexual attraction to these handsome boys.

Like Moses, the sunburned Lawrence crosses the Sinai desert to tell the generals in Cairo that he’s captured Aqaba.  The great scene when he defiantly brings his filthy and forbidden young Arab companion into the British Officers’ Bar was imitated in the film of Out of Africa (1985), when Baroness Blixen enters the all-male bar, and in The English Patient (1996) when Count Almasy crosses the harsh desert and brings his Arab companion into the military club.

Lawrence tells the commander General Allenby (Jack Hawkins), “There was a lot of killing, one way or another.  And I actually enjoyed the killing.”  He persuades the general to accept his new guerrilla strategy and declares, “Arabia is for the Arabs now.  That’s why they’re fighting.  They hope to gain their freedom.  I’m going to give it to them.”  Lawrence has absolutely no authority or power to give freedom to the Arabs and contradict postwar policy.  But he egoistically feels that his personal honour is more important than the plans of the British government.  Driven by military necessity, Allenby duplicitously agrees that the English have no claims to Arabia.  Lawrence, a complex hero, is both narcissist and idealist.

In one of the greatest scenes (based on chapter 117 of Seven Pillars) Tallal, a tribal leader, witnesses the aftermath of the brutal massacre and rape of everyone in Tafas, his village.  Like Lawrence’s suicidal motorcycle crash and rescue of Gasim, he self-destructively but heroically “rocked on in the hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy.”  In a delirium of the brave, “he sat up in the saddle and cried his war-cry, ‘Tallal, Tallal,’ twice in a tremendous shout.  Instantly their rifles and machine-guns crashed out, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among the lance points.”  Though Ali tries to restrain him, Lawrence now descends to the moral depravity of the Turks.  He is so enraged by the atrocities committed on the Arab village that he encourages his army to massacre the retreating enemy by shouting “No prisoners!”  In Seven Pillars Lawrence writes, “In a madness born of the horror of Tafas we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as though their death and running blood could slake our agony.”  He emerges from the battle with blood-soaked robes and becomes, like the Arabs he’d once condemned, “barbarous and cruel.”

The Arabs attack for wealth, Lawrence for military glory.  He blows up the tracks to derail the Turkish trains.  The Arabs, united by bloodlust and greed, kill the soldiers and passengers, and loot everything (including a civilian’s pearl tie pin) as their bountiful reward.  Auda is pleased to secure a huge clock, which turns out to be broken and enrages him.  Later, his desire for a prize is gratified when the shattered railway brings an open flatcar filled with Arabian horses.  When the gates are dropped, they all jump down and race away, and Auda proudly captures a handsome white stallion.  Accustomed to raiding, the Arabs steal their mostly useless treasure and go back to their camps, but Lawrence promises they will return.  His army will protect Allenby’s right flank on the final push to Jerusalem and Damascus.

Jackson Bentley (the America reporter based on Lowell Thomas) plans to make Lawrence into a hero, glorify the war and encourage America to fight for the Allies.  Pushy and naive, he questions everyone and foreshadows the fame the ambivalent Lawrence will achieve after the war.  When Bentley asks, “What attracts you to the desert?” the stigmatised, illegitimate and bloodthirsty Lawrence, who feels dirty, replies “It is clean.”   (Bentley’s postwar narrated slideshow reveals the contrast between Lawrence’s heroism and egoism.)

Lawrence seriously claims, “I’m invisible.  They can only kill me with a golden bullet.”  He’s promised to take the Arab Revolt to Deraa, and recklessly goes into the town in a rather obvious disguise to reconnoitre the Turkish base for future Arab attacks.  Lawrence is captured and taken as a sexual prize for the Turkish general.  The quintessence of evil, played by José Ferrer, has polished boots, smart uniform, stiff red collar, sleek-hair, pointed pencil mustache and tubercular cough.  He tears off Lawrence’s shirt, pinches his white flesh, notices his recent bullet wound and takes him for a deserter.  The humiliated Lawrence kicks the Turk in the groin.  Barebacked and spread out on a narrow bench, he’s held by a grinning private who’s surprised that he endures the punishment and doesn’t cry out in pain: “The trick is not minding it hurts.”  The film then suggests that he’s handed over to the sexually excited Turk and sodomised (off screen).  Like the rescue of Gasim, this exploit is another unnecessary and dangerous self-testing that almost breaks his will to command and risks the entire success of the Arab Revolt.

General Allenby and his shrewd civilian political advisor Mr. Dryden (based on Sir Ronald Storrs and played by Claude Rains) tell Lawrence what he already knows, but won’t tell the Arabs who have to keep fighting.  According to the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty, signed by two diplomats, Britain and France have agreed to divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves after the war.

As Lawrence boasted, he captures Damascus and gets there before Allenby.  But the ancient city, hopelessly run by the Arab Council, is in complete chaos, and has no water, electricity or medical help.  This disaster shows that the Arab tribes are not capable of ruling their own country.  Dressed in filthy Arab robes, Lawrence visits the Turkish Military Hospital, filled with soldiers who’ve been wounded by his men.  Exhausted and disgusted, Lawrence has a fit of hysterical laughter and is slapped by a British medical officer.  Later on, when Lawrence has been declared a hero and wears military uniform, the same officer doesn’t remember the man he slapped and asks for the privilege of shaking his hand.  The horrors of the hospital were partly inspired by Baron Gros’ Middle-Eastern painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa in Palestine (1804).  The film ends as Lawrence, a victorious but broken man driven through the desert to the ship that will take him home, passes a speeding motorcycle, an ominous sign.

The perfectionist David Lean directed the film amid broiling heat, freezing cold and sandstorms, and Freddie Young’s splendid cinematography captured the romantic background and magnificent desert settings.  The complex characters and superb actors, the effective contrast between reflection and action take place in the historical, political and military context.  The intelligent screenplay has crisp British dialogue that contrasts with the solemn and bombastic Arab speech.  “It is written” by the blacklisted and uncredited Michael Wilson, whose script was extensively revised by Robert Bolt.

Lawrence of Arabia was shot over 18 months from May 15, 1961 to October 20, 1962, almost as long as the Arab Revolt, and completed at a final cost of $13 million.  It won Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Art and Set Direction, Sound, Editing and Musical Score (by Maurice Jarre).  The film shows that Lawrence justifies the tribute from his Arab comrade-in-arms: “Of manhood, the man, in freedom free; a man without equal; I can see no flaw in him.”  The conflicts portrayed in the film continue today throughout the Middle East.

Author’s Note: Jeffrey Meyers’ The Wounded Spirit: A Study of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the first and only book on this subject, was published in 1973.  He’s held in his hands Lawrence’s curved Hejazi dagger, now in All Souls College, Oxford.  He’s traveled to Seville (Moorish setting of the Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus scenes); to Eilat in Israel, 10 miles west of Aqaba in Jordan; and to the Jordanian desert where most of the film was made.  He asked Sir Alec Kirkbride, the last surviving officer of the Arabian campaign, if he’d really shot all those Arabs to restore order in Damascus.  Alec casually replied, “Oh, not that many.”

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