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'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962) by David Lean

Desert Spoils

Despite the near-universal recognition of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" as a film classic—it received seven Academy Awards—there are certain critical observers who seem to wish that its director had never left the home counties of England. The view that Mr. Lean did his finest work on such small-scale British dramas as "Brief Encounter" is best expressed by David Thomson, who wrote in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film that in the epic-size films (including "Lawrence") that characterized his mature career, "Lean became lost in the sense of his own pictorial grandeur."

Jean-Paul Sartre reportedly considered the real-life Lawrence to be a model existentialist. ENLARGE
Jean-Paul Sartre reportedly considered the real-life Lawrence to be a model existentialist. Columbia / The Kobal Collection

There is no denying that "Lawrence of Arabia" (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) is Mr. Lean writ large. But few other approaches suggest themselves in telling the story of T. E. Lawrence (played by Peter O'Toole), the British army officer who was improbably plucked from making maps in Cairo to lead the Arab uprising in World War I. "Lawrence was bitten by the desert and by the people of the desert," Mr. Lean said in a 1963 interview, "and if you are going to show that, it must be in the best possible way, and there is nothing like this big screen process for showing it."

Yet for all its girth, "Lawrence" is as nimble as Mr. Lean's early, more modest films. He was an editor by training, and his direction is sinewy and economical; along with editor Anne V. Coates, he achieves many of his wittiest effects with sudden edits. (The most famous is the transition from a flickering match to a desert sunrise.) So, at Lawrence's funeral, after a priest asks doubtfully, "Well, nihil nisi bonum, but did he really deserve a place in here?," Mr. Lean cuts with haste to an exterior shot of St. Paul's Cathedral (though Lawrence was actually buried in a Dorset County village). A contemporary audience unfamiliar with Lawrence might share the clergyman's skepticism, since the film opens with Lawrence's death, presenting his exploits in flashback, and it will be several hours until the magnitude of his life will seem equal to the majesty of that place.

Ms. Coates told interviewer Vincent LoBrutto in his 1991 book, "Selected Takes," that Mr. Lean taught her to be "ruthless" in her editing: "He threw a whole heap of stuff out that broke my heart and he was right." While Mr. Lean often dwells on cinematographer F.A. Young's shots (knowing that it takes time to register that those are camels, not ants, marching across the desert in an extreme wide shot), he also teases us with them. For example, in the moment before Lawrence realizes that he has reached the Suez Canal, he sees the uppermost part of a ship on the horizon, the rest of it concealed by a giant dune. The vessel appears as though it is lodged in the sand. The image is startling, but Mr. Lean cuts from it quickly, just as soon as Lawrence realizes that it is not a mirage. Even in the film's conception, Mr. Lean said, the goal was for "dramatic economy." He added, "Consequently we have short-circuited certain incidents, and run six characters into one." The result is a surprisingly spry epic.

Mr. Lean's star-studded cast communicates with efficiency, too. As the diplomat Dryden, Claude Rains has one of the film's most tender moments when he calls Lawrence's name so that he will turn to him and thereby reveal to a general that there is blood soaking through the back of his jacket, the result of torture ordered by a Turkish Bey (José Ferrer)—a discreet way of explaining Lawrence's reluctance to rejoin the campaign. In his one scene, Mr. Ferrer manages to be terribly menacing simply by affecting a faint cough, refraining from over-the-top histrionics. As Pauline Kael wrote in her review of Mr. Lean's film "A Passage to India," the director "knows how to give the smallest inflections an overpowering psychological weight."

Jean-Paul Sartre reportedly considered the real-life Lawrence to be a model existentialist, a view reflected at times in the superb screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. "How much of that is there?" Lawrence asks, sounding like a character in "Waiting for Godot" as he contemplates crossing a vast desert. Mr. O'Toole delivers such lines with pluck, while making plain Lawrence's transformation from an insouciant junior officer (who says, upon being given his initial assignment, "It's going to be fun") to a genuine leader. He also gives a concrete quality to a character too often described as enigmatic. When Lawrence single-handedly retrieves a tribesman who has strayed in the long journey to Aqaba, Mr. O'Toole believably does the unbelievable.

In its soaring battle scenes, "Lawrence" clearly enunciates what Alec Guinness's Prince Feisal calls "the virtues of war"—"courage and hope for the future." When Lawrence is sent back home, he does not want to go, and the film stresses the irony of his death: occurring not in war, but in a motorcycle accident on a tree-lined road in the English countryside. The trajectory of Mr. Lean's career indicates he took this as a lesson: You can't go home again. Following "Lawrence," Mr. Lean never returned to the small potatoes of "Brief Encounter." Instead, he made more films in the "Lawrence" mode, such as "Doctor Zhivago," though they suffer from diminishing returns—none were as agile as "Lawrence." Still, it is hard to fault Mr. Lean for again taking a page from his hero, who counselled that "nothing is written." If an unimportant cartographer in Cairo can rise to liberate Damascus, why can't a director expand his cinematic canvas?

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