Very Great . and Very British

Rating: Null/10 (7 June 1999)

I don't mean my title to this commentary in a perjorative sense. I'm simply pointing out that there are more than one side to a story. An Arab director would have made a movie about Prince Faisal, where Lawrence would have been a featured but peripheral character. Indeed, I sometimes wonder why one hasn't yet - you'd think that some altruistic patron of the arts from the Fayed family would spring for it . oh, well.
During the Persian Gulf War, there were a lot of columns in the American newspapers about American stereotypes of Arabs. One ethnic-Arab columnist in The Washington Post used L. of A. as his source. I'm not directly quoting but he described Anthony Quinn's Auda as melodramatically over-the-top and Alec Guinness' Faisal as oily. He found only Ali a believable character but only because Omar Sharif himself is an Arab.
In any case, I couldn't possibly add to the superlatives already attached to this movie. It's a simple story, grandly told.
And this is just the stuff they didn't leave out! For what they did leave out, there are dozens of histories and biographies, starting with Lawrence's own "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."