Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence of Arabia

Opening Shot

A motorcycle. A country road. Lawrence accelerates. He swerves to avoid two cyclists. He crashes. He dies. David Lean kills his protagonist in the first two minutes, then spends four hours explaining what was lost. The memorial service is full of people who claim to have known him. None of their descriptions match. Freddie Young's camera finds the desert through a match dissolve from a blown-out match flame, and the transition is cinema's most elegant statement of intent: small fire, infinite sand.

What It Does

Freddie Young's 70mm Super Panavision photography is the most important cinematographic achievement in the history of the format. The desert sequences aren't beautiful in the way postcards are beautiful. They're beautiful in the way that things which can kill you are beautiful. Young shoots the horizon as a character: it shimmers, it lies, it extends past the point where the human eye can resolve detail. The mirage sequence, where a figure approaches across the sand for what feels like five minutes of real time, is built entirely on the tension between the camera's patience and the viewer's need for resolution.

Maurice Jarre's score is one of the few in cinema that feels equal to its landscape. The main theme has a sweep that matches the desert without trying to domesticate it. But Jarre's quieter cues are more interesting: the music that plays when Lawrence is alone, contemplating what he's becoming, has an uncertainty the big themes don't. The score knows Lawrence is performing, even when Lawrence doesn't.

Peter O'Toole, in his first major role, plays Lawrence as a man who discovers he's extraordinary and then discovers what extraordinary costs. The scene where he extinguishes the match with his fingers ("The trick is not minding that it hurts") is the film's thesis in seven words. O'Toole's eyes carry a light that dims by degrees across four hours, and by the end you can see the exact moment the performance of heroism replaced the reality.

Why It's on the List

Lawrence of Arabia proved that spectacle and psychology are not opposing forces. Lean made the most physically enormous film in cinema history and filled it with a character study so intimate that the desert feels like the inside of Lawrence's head. The film's influence on everything from Star Wars to The English Patient to Mad Max is well documented, but its real achievement is simpler: it made an audience sit for four hours watching a man discover that the thing he's best at is the thing that will destroy him.

The Argument Against

Four hours. The second half, after the intermission, is notably slower and more politically complicated than the first, and some viewers feel the film peaks at Aqaba and then manages its decline. The Arab characters, despite Lean's relative care for the period, are secondary to the white protagonist's psychological journey, which is a colonial framing the film acknowledges but doesn't fully escape. Omar Sharif's Sherif Ali is the most developed Arab character, and even he functions primarily as a mirror for Lawrence's transformation.

Closing Image

Lawrence sits in the back of a car, leaving the desert. A motorcycle passes him on the road, echoing the opening. He is being sent home. The desert disappears behind him. His face in the rear window shows nothing. The man who crossed the Nefud is being driven to a boat. The landscape that made him is already gone.