Lawrence of Arabia 1962
I saw a big chunk of Lawrence of Arabia on television many years ago, but had never watched the whole thing. In the last few years, a 4k restoration was released and I had a chance to borrow that using a Screen Pass. The 4k version looks amazing, sometimes a little overly vivid, but that may be how it was made. I like the movie, a great story of how a smart guy buried in bureaucracy found his place leading an Arab revolt. Peter O’toole is great in the movie, with some very strong supporting performances, primarily by Omar Sharif. But seeing the whole movie and the story arc is both grand and a little underwhelming. T. E. Lawrence is depicted as kind of a nut who both loves violence and is horrified by it, being overly enigmatic, and then having a huge ego before stepping back from it all. I think people like the complicated hero, but he is hard to identify with, and the portrayal may not be that accurate. The scenery and scale of the movie are the other star, with some great desert mountains and huge numbers of people on horses and camels. Camels are notoriously hard to work with and there are so many in this movie, really as much the heroes of the movie as anyone else. The movie itself is amazingly long, the first half moving particularly slowly as it establishes the characters and setting. I had forgotten Alec Guiness was Prince Faisal (almost the same character as Obi Wan Kenobi) and the higher resolution doesn’t help Anthony Quinn’s horrible fake nose. The second half moves more quickly but lacks the grandeur of the origin story in the first half. You want the promise of the first half of the movie to pay off in some real way in the second half but reality did not cooperate. A fictional story would be more satisfying, but the actual Middle East doesn’t seem to have much room for happy endings.
Written: 15 Jun 2021
Owned on: DVD, Digital