slow but absorbing

Rating: 10/10 (12 December 2006)

It is difficult to watch this movie today without thinking about the current situation in Iraq. Europeans--and now Americans--have been intervening in the Middle East, with disastrous results, since the Trojan War; "Lawrence of Arabia" tells the story of a man who played a key role in a critical period that led to much of the current turmoil in the region. In order to defeat the Turks, who were allied to the Germans, Great Britain unleashed the genie of Arab nationalism, and no one has been able to bottle it since. By promising what was then Palestine to both Jews and Arabs Britain unwittingly planted the seeds of the interminable Arab-Israeli conflict--but that's outside the scope of this review. Peter O'Toole plays T.E. Lawrence as a bipolar, sexually ambiguous nerd with a messiah complex (interestingly there are no women in the movie). In leading the Arabs to victory over the Turks Lawrence sees himself as their liberator when in fact he's the tool of western imperialism. The latter part of the movie, which depicts Lawrence's bumbling attempts to introduce western-style democracy to the Arabs, bears striking resemblance to George W. Bush's equally naive meddling in Iraq. As spectacle, the movie has never been surpassed and scarcely equalled; among big-budget epics of similar scope only "Ben Hur," "The Ten Commandments," and possibly "Apocalypse Now" come close; the only movie with similar grandeur is "2001: A Space Odyssey," and of course that's a different kind of epic. Sir David Lean won a well-deserved Best Director Oscar for this film. The movie made stars out of O'Toole and Omar Sharif, but there are Oscar-worthy performances from Sir Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Arthur Kennedy and Claude Rains; Jose Ferrer is uncommonly creepy as a sadistic Turkish officer, in a scene with uncomfortable homoerotic overtones. Maurice Jarre's score is outstanding; this is the kind of film wide-screen was made for.