The first half of Lawrence of Arabia is a love story, despite the absence of female protagonists. T.E. Lawrence, a young British officer, falls in love with the desert and the people of the desert, and even more improbably, the Bedouin people fall in love with him—his sympathy for their cause, his blonde good looks, his soft voice and gentle manner. His is a love affair considered ill-advised and problematic by the English officers who believe the Arabs and their culture are inferior. But the public at large find this romance exotic and exciting when they learn about it through the press.
Lawrence is something like the desert or one of its creatures—sensitive, high-strung, and easy to fall in love with, although he is also proud, reckless, and carries within him the potential for violence. At the beginning of the movie, he is something like the natural world itself, untouched and unspoiled and in a state of relative innocence, and fittingly his companions are young men who are also relatively innocent and follow him from the pure motives of affection and love. Later his companions will become bloodthirsty mercenaries who follow him for money, which will reflect how he has fallen from grace into a state of corruption and degradation, a result of outer forces at work when he is exploited and corrupted by both the English and the Turks, but also partly due to the seeds he carries within his own breast in a Heart-of-Darkness like twist where the savagery and cruelty of the outer world is found also within. This darkness is easily ascribed to the torturing and massacring Turks but is also found in the civilized world of the English, who are coldly cruel but just as savage in their own way when they withhold medical help from the wounded Turks at a hospital in Damascus to avoid backing the newly erected Arab government.
The movie is a tragedy as it follows Lawrence’s descent from the paradise of his first encounter with the harsh beauty of the desert into a state of ugliness and degradation when war enters the scene and he is caught in its toils. His story is a love story that ends in betrayal and violence. The desert is a place of danger and beauty spoiled by violence, a place of both purification and becoming. There is a scene when Lawrence goes into the desert to contemplate what he should do and returns with his idea to take Akkaba. He is referred to as a desert-loving Englishman. The desert is a place of testing and becoming, but it also betrays him. He becomes not only a god and prophet-like figure, tested and refined by his time in the desert, but something less than human, both tortured and cruel like his tormentors, perhaps driven mad as much or more than actually evil.
The movie suggests that Lawrence has strains of sadism or masochism in his nature, but he is more impressionable than evil. At the beginning of the movie he has a definite bent toward mercy and is gentle and sympathetic to his Arab followers and friends. He does not love violence, in fact he rather hates it, but his sensitive nature is susceptible to cruelty and violence and their coarsening effects. He is intelligent, imaginative, and high-strong. His nature allows him to fall in love with and identify himself with a people unlike himself, but he cannot ultimately resist or overcome the effects of the violence and cruelty around him that become his undoing.
Lawrence is figure reminiscent of both prophets like Moses and of Christ, both who had a time of testing in the desert. As a Christ figure Lawrence becomes closely identified with the Arabs and their cause, and he makes their cause his own. He takes on and bears the death and violence around him—he shoots wounded soldiers, he is tortured by the Turks—but as he is not incorruptible like Christ and by the end he is absorbed in violence when he participates in a massacre of Turks. It seems that violence defeats Lawrence, and he does not emerge victorious over it. He is later reproached and abandoned by his Arab friends for allowing a massacre. However, he is reproached and abandoned for aligning himself with their cause—the sins, the violence and cruelty are theirs—but become his through joining and identifying himself with them. He is an enigmatic, ambiguous figure, both someone who falls from grace and a Christ figure, though probably a failed one. There is a scene at the end of the movie when his face is obscured and shadowed by a curtain with an Eastern design he stands in front of when he is taking his final orders from the English officers, perhaps suggesting what a misunderstood and confusing figure he has become, to others and perhaps even to himself.
Overall, the movie was so sad. I was heartbroken that Lawrence never had any type of redemptive moment or a scene of reconciliation with his friends at the end. A very long, sad, and haunting film!
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April 3, 2001 "Please retry" | — | 1 | $4.15 | $2.29 |
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4k Heaven
I bought my copy of the 4k Lawrence of Arabia for $120. $150 after tax/shipping. If you can afford it at that price, it's worth it. Some of the shots of the sun rising in the desert, or the famous super-long-distance introduction shot of Omar Sharif's character, make the purchase worthwhile. The extras are also wonderful, though I'm not sure any of the extras are exclusive to the 4k version. Possibly the Peter O'Toole interview looking back on the movie in about 2012 (shortly before he died). Most of the extras have a DVD resolution, so that suggests to me they're on the 1080p version too. The 4k version is NOT worth going into debt over. I just recommend it if a $150 bill doesn't make you say "ouch".
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2024
- Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2017
Top reviews from other countries
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Carlos Hinojosa CharlesReviewed in Mexico on June 17, 2024
La mejor versión de Lawrence of Arabia para uso casero.
- KungFuFreakReviewed in Australia on July 29, 2024
A Must buy for fans of this movie
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- BenminxReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 29, 2016
A classic that earns its accolades with bravery and brilliance - genuinely epic cinema.
