The Hip Pocket #22: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

A reprint of my review of my favorite film

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Lawrence of Arabia
Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit, I.S. Johar, Gamil Ratib, Michel Ray, John Dimech, Zia Mohyeddin, Howard Marion-Crawford, Jack Gwillim, Hugh Miller
cinematography by Freddie Young
music by Maurice Jarre
screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
produced by Sam Spiegel
directed by David Lean
Approved
3 hrs 48 mins
originally published in Pulp & Popcorn magazine

The key to Peter O’Toole’s approach in playing T.E. Lawrence, the central figure in David Lean’s remarkable personal epic, is the way his pants are tailored.

It’s a simple thing, but from the first moment we see this man who eventually helps unite the Arab tribes against the Turks, he is just that wee bit silly, and that little tiny flair of absurdity makes him approachable and human. It is because he seems vaguely ridiculous that no one sees him coming, and because no one sees him coming, he is able to move mountains.

When you’re making a film about a life as gigantic as that of T.E. Lawrence, finding the right place to start the telling of that story can be daunting. The opening titles of Lawrence Of Arabia, coming at the end of a sustained overture, play out over an overhead shot of a man preparing a motorcycle for a drive. It’s only after the titles conclude that he climbs on and starts the motorcycle. There’s no score after the titles conclude. Instead, we just hear the sounds of the engine, of the construction along the side of the road, of the wind whistling past the ears of Lawrence (O’Toole, young and beautiful in his debut film role), right up to the moment where he loses control of his bike and flies off the side of the road. The hard cut to Westminster Abbey, where he has already been enshrined, makes it clear that despite the almost stupid mundanity of this death, this was a man of tremendous cultural import. We hear people discussing him as they file out of the funeral. There’s a general sense of respect, but there are a few people who speak of him as if he was, shockingly, only human.