LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
UK, 1962, 215 minutes, Colour.
Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit.
Directed by David Lean,
Lawrence of Arabia was the second of David Lean's big blockbusters. It won him the Oscars for best film of 1962 and best director, Robert Bolt (who was later to script Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter for Lean and his own play A Man for All Seasons for Fred Zinnemann) also won an Oscar for this screenplay,
The film is made on large proportions: it lasts well over three hours, lingers magnificently on the desert scenery and reconstructs the Middle East World War I situation in some detail. It has a large cast and excellent actors and provided the first major screen roles for Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif.
The film presents T, E. Lawrence as an enigma. Because it confines its interest to Lawrence's desert campaigns during the war, it could never have solved all the puzzles of his personality, drives and dreams. He lived another seventeen years after the war, working in the Middle East and in India, hiding at times from people, writing "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" which later writers have questioned for its truthfulness. He was killed in 1935 in an accident which opens the film. Peter O'Toole shows us what Lawrence must have been like in the eyes of his fellow soldiers and the Arabs. He offers many clues towards his personality and leaves us with them. Given the scope of the role O'Toole does very well and seen now in the perspective of his work in, say, Becket, The Lion in Winter and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (the films for which he was nominated for Oscars), he can be Judged a fine actor. Omar Sharif, Lean's Zhivago, is at his best here.
But the film is spoken of as David Lean's and considered with The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter. It 1s the most substantial of them all, exploring the personality of an individualist, as they all do, in the formative environment in which they live and suffer.
1. Why did this film win the Oscar for the Best Film of 1962? Why was it so popular - story, acting, scenery, magnitude?
2. How did the prologue of Lawrence's death prepare for what was to come - a daredevil who took risks past danger signs?
3. What did the sequence at St. Paul's add - especially Allenby 's statements (how were they shown to be ironical?) and Bentley's remark about Lawrence as an exhibitionist?
4. What did you make of Lawrence out of the whole film? At one stage, he could not explain himself but knew he had a destiny. After his flogging, he was not sure. Was all we got a look at what Lawrence did, while he himself remained too much of an enigma?
5. We sense many Lawrences vying with one another:
"The iron-willed mystic of the desert; the sado-masochist in all things sexual; the exhibitionist poseur and self-confessed 'posturing fraud'; the British exile who identifies himself with an alien land and its people; the illegitimate misfit, who never really accepted an aristocratic soldiering Establishment; the sensualist and the ascetic, the compassionate man and the barbarous man.... Only Lawrence the scholar is missing, to complete the round-up." (Colin Bennet in the Melbourne Age, 31 July, 1971,} Haw accurate is Bennett’s assessment of the Lawrence of the film?
5. What impression do the desert vistas make on the audience? How is the audience absorbed into the environment and atmosphere of the film?
7. What kind of men did Allenby, Murray, Dryden and Brighton seem to be? How did each of them respond to Lawrence's vision?
8. What part did endurance play in moulding Laurence - his not minding the burning match, not drinking in the desert?
9. How did Ali's entry and the shooting at the well introduce the Arabs and the Arab problems into the film?
10. How did the sequence of the air attack on the Arab camp and Prince Feisal's chasing the planes on horse with his sword visualise the Arab troubles and their attitudes?
11. How did the British relate to the Arabs - Brighton's diplomacy and wanting decisions, Lawrence's sympathy, sharing the Koran and the Arab spirit?
12. What was the purpose of Lawrence's night of reflection in the film — how did it show his concentration, mystic tendencies and intensity?
13. How was the three weeks' desert Journey to Aquaba one of the highlights of the film, the endurance, the desert, 'not drifting', the emotive force of the rescue of Gasim, the proof of Lawrence's greatness in proving that nothing is written unless a man Wants it written, the strategy of the attack and its moral force?
14. What did Lawrence's confiding in Ali about his background reveal about him?
15. How did he become Lawrence of Arabia when he was given Arab dress and the title 'Aurenae'? How do you explain his delighted reaction?
16. How did Lawrence get Auda on his side - "Auda attacks Aquaba not for the gold but because it is his pleasure"? What kind of an Arab, shrewd and savage, yet leader of his people, was Auda?
17. How did the vendetta incident before Aqaba show the risks in trying to unite the Arabs? What was the effect of the execution on Lawrence? Why was he worried because he enjoyed performing it?
18. How did the restful sequences by the sea at Aquaba give the audience a chance to pause and reflect quietly on what they had experienced? - the victor's wreaths and Ali 's admiration, human capacity to achieve what is written in his head?
19. How important was Auda's comment that Aurence was great but not perfect because he did not tell the truth about the money?
20. Why did Ali resent Lawrence's going to Cairo to inform Allenby about the capture of Aquaba? Why did Lawrence call him an 'ignorant man'?
21. Lawrence saw a huge dust storm on the desert and saw it as a 'Pillar of Cloud'. In what sense did he see himself as a new Moses 'leading an Exodus in the Sinai Peninsula'?
22. What effect did the Arab boy's death in the sand have on him? Why did he want to make reparation by walking?
23. Why did Lawrence make a point of going into the officers' bar dressed as an Arab and with the boy? What was the effect? the contrast?
24. How did Allenby use sunning in exploiting Lawrence's revulsion at his enjoyment of killing in persuading him to continue fighting for the Arabs?
25. Did Lawrence enjoy his celebrity when walking with Allenby to the bar and the congratulations of the men?
26. Was Laurence naive in not expecting Allenby and Dryden to be unscrupulous in their treatment of the Arabs? Why was Lawrence so involved with the Arabs? Why was the desert 'clean' for him?
27. Had Lawrence changed by the time he went back and began blowing up the Turkish trains? Why did he allow Auda's men to loot?
28. Why did Prince Feisal and Bentley help each other in publicising Lawrence's work? What effect did Bentley's articles have?
29. Why did Lawrence defy the dying soldier to shoot him? Did he enjoy his triumph as he walked along the carriage roofs?
30. Did Lawrence enjoy shooting the boy wounded by the detonator?
31. How did Lawrence 'a attempts to rally the Arabs in the winter snows contrast with his lack of spirit after hie beating by the Turks?
32. Why did he dare the Turks to recognise him? Why did he kick the Bey? What was the effect of the beating - fear, the willingness to betray everyone, the consciousness that he was mortal? How did the suffering embitter him?
33. How did Allenby exploit Lawrence's wish to retire and his feelings against the Turks?
34. How disgusted were you with Lawrence's and the Arab's vengeance against the Turks? Did he have any grounds for such a massacre? Why did Ali participate in it? What was his reaction to Lawrence?
35. Why was the Arab assembly at Damascus a farce? Did Feisal have the capacity for succeeding in politics where Lawrence was unable?
36. Comment on the irony of the British orderly who knocked Lawrence the Arab out of his way but wanted to shake the hand of Lawrence the hero (and his previous comments at the beginning of the film at St. Paul's).
37. How did Laurence feel as he went home?
38. How much of Lawrence was heroism, how much obsession? Could such a drama have been played in any setting other than the infinite desert?
