Lawrence of Arabia has some of the most epic movie-making magic money can buy. I mean, look at the majesty, the scale, the beauty of a shot like this…
…and add this immediately-recognizable, soaring score played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and you’ve got a movie that feels expensive. Plot schmlot, give me the feeling of adventure in the inhospitable desert.
T. E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), a British officer, unites the tribes of the Middle East to fight against the Turks in World War I. With warriors Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) and Auda (Anthony Quinn), Lawrence and his Arab army work miracles on a front dismissed as “a sideshow of a sideshow.” But the realities of war lead to Lawrence’s increasing ruthlessness, culminating in a massacre of Ottoman troops where he yells “NO PRISONERS!”
Later, when Lawrence learns that the French and British are planning to slice up the Ottoman territory for themselves, he and the Arab army race to Damascus and conquer it in the name of Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness). From there, the business of nation-building begins and Lawrence is removed from the negotiating table. Feisal tells him:
Young men make wars, and virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. And then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men—mistrust and caution. It must be so.
Lawrence learns he’s been a pawn to both the English and the Arabs, and in the intercontinental chess game, it is Feisal who wins. Feisal tells British General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) “you are merely a general; I must be a king.” The movie ends here, but we’ll pick up the thread in our Trivia section.
A New Section: Counternarratives
Philosopher Edward Said’s “Orientalism” is a useful counterpoint to a work like Lawrence of Arabia. Said argues that Western representation of Eastern societies is inherently biased and serves to justify and perpetuate Western imperialist agendas by showing the Orient as exotic, backward, and inferior. Though Lawrence (and others) may have viewed the Orient through the lens of their own personal encounters, “in the final analysis [they] expressed the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient.” Boo.
Oh, and Lawrence probably overstated his value to the whole Arab Revolution in his self-aggrandizing memoir, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” So yes, Lawrence of Arabia ain’t a perfect history, but damn if it’s not incredible entertainment.
Rating: 8/10, very sandy.
Cast and Crew
Virtual unknown Peter O’Toole got the call as Lawrence, beating out heavyweights like Marlon Brando, Albert Finney, and Alec Guinness.
O’Toole’s performance in Lawrence is fêted—Premiere magazine lists it as the GOAT—but it wasn’t for me. He’ll have his chance to win me over, though, since he’s got six (!) more nominations coming up.
We won’t be seeing director David Lean or his frequent collaborator Alec Guinness again in this column. Their work together in The Bridge on the River Kwai was a highlight and it’s disappointing to not catch either of their other noteworthy pair-ups: Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984). We also won’t see Guinness’ turn as George Smiley in a TV adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” or as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977).
The Egyptian Omar Sharif played Sherif Ali, and in a movie full of great characters, it’s the ruthless yet pragmatic Ali and his complex relationship with Lawrence that carries the film.1 Sharif had starring roles in two other mammoth hits that dwarf the rest of his catalog: the aforementioned Doctor Zhivago and Funny Girl (1968). He was also an expert bridge player and I adore this video of him. We won’t see any more of his films and that sucks because I cannot possibly communicate in the bounds of this one paragraph how incredibly cool he was.
To those we’ll see again: Anthony Quinn played Auda, and he’s a powder keg just like every other Anthony Quinn character. José Ferrer is in this movie for five minutes and it’s the most painful, unpleasant five minutes of the movie—because Ferrer so thoroughly imbues his Turkish rapist with menace.2 Anthony Quayle played a British colonel, but we’ll see him as Thomas Wolsey in a 1969 film.
And to those we won’t: end of the road for Jack Hawkins, who has been in the three longest movies we’ve watched. Raise a glass to Arthur Kennedy, who was terrible in Bright Victory but who found a nice niche as a supporting actor.3
The Trivia
Before World War I, much of the Middle East was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe.” The European powers believed that, once that empire vanished, Europe would become the key player in the Middle East. But what would that look like?
During the war, the British made a key agreement with the Hashemites, a family of the Hejaz4 led by Hussein (Prince Feisal’s father). The Hashemites agreed to fight the Ottomans on the condition that, after the war, the British would let them rule an independent Arab nation.5 The British weren’t really allowed to make such an agreement, though, since other Allied powers might call dibs on Ottoman land. Prince Feisal ended Lawrence of Arabia holding Damascus6, but it turned out the French had called dibs on Syria.7
The movie describes the Sykes-Picot agreement thusly:
Well now, Mr. Sykes is an English Civil Servant and Monsieur Picot is a French Civil Servant. Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot met. And they agreed that, after the war, France and England should share the Turkish Empire. Including Arabia.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
You can see Syria in the French zone of influence. In 1919, the British propped up Feisal and claimed he had the right to serve as ruler of a free Syria; the French disagreed, believing that recognizing Feisal would in effect concede Syria to Britain. When the General Syrian Congress declared independence from French influence in 19208, the French invaded, forcing Feisal to flee to Mesopotamia (what would become Iraq).9 France’s occupation of Syria and Lebanon was formally validated by a League of Nations Mandate in 1922.10 It was at the 1921 Cairo Conference that the British decided Feisal would govern Iraq and his brother Abdullah would govern Transjordan.11
Things weren’t all hunky-dory for the Hashemites, though. Abdullah and Feisal’s father, Hussein, was facing down a threat from Abdulaziz Al Saud (commonly known as Ibn Saud). Ibn Saud came from the Nejd, the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, and was allied with the Wahhabi movement.12 Though both Ibn Saud and Hussein were British protégés and were both supported by subsidies from the British government, in 1925 Ibn Saud conquered the Hejaz and Hussein was exiled to Cyprus. In 1932, the kingdoms of Hejaz and Nejd were unified into Saudi Arabia.
Odds and Ends
Lawrence uses the quote “I cannot fiddle but I can make a great state from a little city,” from Athenian politician Themistocles13…at Lawrence’s funeral, they say “Nil nisi bonum,” a shortening of a Latin phrase meaning it’s inappropriate to speak ill of the dead…a character gets eaten by quicksand, which isn’t really a thing…Lawrence refers to the Turkish Bey as “effendi,” a title of respect equivalent to “sir”…basically the whole Trivia section here came out of “A Peace to End All Peace” by David Fromkin…Lawrence of Arabia fails the Bechdel test in spectacular fashion—it doesn’t even have a speaking role for a woman.
Also, if you felt like our Trivia section ended on a cliffhanger and are curious how it went for the Middle East over the last hundred years: the Middle East only makes up 8% of the topics of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,”14 so I guess it all worked out.
IS LAWRENCE OF ARABIA GAY? Sure is. David Lean said you’re supposed to read Lawrence and Ali as lovers. This puts it with Ben-Hur in our “secretly gay epics” category.
From IMDB: “Peter O’Toole claimed that he learned more about acting from his few days of filming with José Ferrer than he did in all of his years at drama school.”
Kennedy’s character in this film, reporter Jackson Bentley, was based on Lowell Thomas. Thomas was a radio broadcaster who brought Lawrence to prominence with stories full of hyperbole, half-truths, and misplaced acclaim. Perhaps it’s ironic, then, that when Thomas saw Lawrence of Arabia and was asked how accurate it was, he replied “they got the camels and sand right.”
A region in the west of modern-day Saudi Arabia.
Note that the term “Arab” is tricky. Auda describes the problem thusly in the film: “The ‘Arabs’? The Howeitat, Ageyli, Ruwallah, Beni Sakhar, these I know […] but the ‘Arabs’: what tribe is that?”
Importantly, Feisal wasn’t from Syria (again, he’s a Hashemite prince from the Hejaz), which made it challenging for him to argue he was the authentic spokesman for the Syrian provinces. His positions clashed with those who were anti-Zionist, anti-European, and pro-“Greater Syria” (of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel).
There were a lot of pledges made during WWI. Two more to know are the Balfour Declaration (1917) and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (1918).
Before the declaration, Feisal had worked out a secret agreement with French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau where Syria would gain independence under only loose French trusteeship, but this agreement was rejected by the General Syrian Congress. The Congress then declared the independence of a Syria within her “natural borders” (arguing that included Lebanon and Palestine) and the French invaded.
Not that “Iraq,” full of Kurdish, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Jewish populations, was a coherent thing. From a contemporaneous American missionary: “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unit. You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually.”
Mandates were where a European power would indirectly rule. France had a League of Nations Mandate to rule Syria and Lebanon while Britain had one to rule Palestine (including Transjordan) and another to rule the newly-created Iraq. The Brits tried to rope the U.S. into having Mandates over Constantinople and Armenia, but we stayed out of this whole thing (despite the creation of the League of Nations—and therefore Mandates—having been spearheaded by the U.S.).
The Hashemites still rule in Jordan. Iraq became a republic in 1958 when their last Hashemite king, Feisal II, was deposed. (This also ended the short-lived Hashemite Arab Federation between Jordan and Iraq.)
Wahhabism was created by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth-century religious leader who advocated severe puritanical reforms.
You can read about Themistocles here in Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives.”
And 9% of the Fall Out Boy version.