The Epic: Lawrence of Arabia (Dir David Lean, 3h47m, 1962)

No epic, in the sixty-plus years since its first release, rivals Lawrence of Arabia. One could engage in much hyperbole about its length (the longest film ever to win Best Picture, only further embellished by quarter hour intermission and overtures pushing it over the four hour mark), its massive visual scale-thousands of extras shot in colossal widescreen, not to mention perhaps the single greatest use of the maximalist 1960s Super Panavision-70 film alongside the equally epic 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968).. To mention nothing of its themes, as the life of TE Lawrence (a first major role for Peter O'Toole) juxtaposes his experiences in the First World War, and his role leading Arab attacks on the Turks, with Lawrence's emotional state, the violence of war, and a depiction of a man caught between Britain and the desert.

Depicting TE Lawrence's life from his time in Arabia, to his death in 1935, which opens the film, and leads to a prologue in which the legacy of Lawrence is considered by his English peers, so the film flashes back to the 1910s and the First World War. Here, the film fleshes Lawrence out at pace; we see the elements that will make him "extraordinary", a plaudit that the young solider and later commander will struggle with for much of the film, and his mercurial abilities, a disobedient figure only saved from courtmarshall several times by his wits and later military victories. O'Toole imbues Lawrence with a fragility, a feyness that would lead Noel Coward to daub his sensitive performance as "Florence of Arabia", but a curious belief in his indestructibility that remains in place, and only becomes greater, and more quasi-messiahanic as the film progresses and his support among the Arabs grows.

TE Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is at the centre of a film considering war, power, and masculinity

O'Toole portrays Lawrence as a man of action who recoils at violence, or at least is able to keep his violent impulses on a short leash. He is enigmatic, his masculinity curiously performative: his despair at the death wrought by the forces under his control buttresses oddly against the celebratory nature of his most triumphant moments, the conqueror's strut along the roof of the train he has seen to the derailing of, as newspaper man, Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy) photographs him. O'Toole captures every facet of the film's central figure, and holds these contradictory moments-the heroism of attempting to attack the city of Aqaba, the bravery to go back into the desert to locate one of the fifty men he has, and the sorrow at having to execute the same man to keep the peace-O'Toole embodies all of this and more. It is this performance that makes both the scale of Lawrence manageable, and makes nearly four hours feel like two. Lawrence, though, undeniably remains an enigma.

Lawrence is surrounded by many characters across the film; we see him quickly come into the orbit of the high ranking British officers, who he is soon seen to have little in common with; Lean is quick to show the changes in how his fellow officers view him throughout the film. Dressed in his iconic robes, TE Lawrence is nearly thrown out of the officers' mess, who concern themselves more with the building of a squash court at their Cairo headquarters, until he is recognised, and until his accomplishments become known. Against Lawrence, the British characters, with the exclusion of General Allenby (another role in Lean's films for Jack Hawkins), who is at once impressed and even pities Lawrence, noting, "Not like that poor devil – he’s riding the whirlwind" when discussing Lawrence's continuing attempts to take Damascus and assist the Allies in the Middle East. Almost to a man, the British characters are obstructive and only later celebrate his success.

The same cannot be said of the Arab characters; certainly, Alec Guinness' Faisal is representative, as he himself puts it, of the old men who make the peace, and spends much of the film on the sidelines, he is still the first figure of the Arabian world to take notice of Lawrence, both in terms of his skills, his knowledge of the Middle East and of the Quran, and to realise that the British solider is not entirely of the world of their would-be allies. Indeed, whilst a few of the Arab characters-Anthony Quinn's enjoyably mercenary Auda Abu Tayi chief among them, do lean into stereotype, it is with them that Lawrence's strongest relationships are formed; his young charges Daud (John Dimech) and Farraj (Michel Ray) become his most devoted followers, and accompany him through some of the film's tensest moments. 

Lawrence of Arabia is an impressively shot film at colossal scale

At the centre of all of this, of course, is Sharif's Ali,a figure as complex as Lawrence, who we see develop against his foil, from his iconic introduction in which he represents the factionalism and, from Lawrence's perspective, the barbarism of some of the Arabian tribes, but he quickly becomes both confidant and friend to Lawrence. Much has been made to what degree this friendship stretches-there is, after all, not a single speaking female character, and much of the film considers masculinity in both the Middle East and in Britain-but what is clear is that we see Lawrence, for a large section of the film, from Ali's perspective. Much as Ali is seen from Lawrence's perspective, so we see the reverse, from the blindingly white Sheriff’s robes that he wears for much of the film that leaves only O'Toole's face uncovered and lends him a purity that is lacking from the men around him. Even as his wavering belief in himself leaves Ali to nurse him back to health, so we see Lawrence's belief in the Arab people impact on Ali as the Arab falteringly learns politics from a children’s' book and begins to shape the world after the First World War for his people.

Against Lawrence and his central struggle, and the figures that inhabit it, is the vast scale of the film itself. Look. I know I'm losing something from not having Lawrence of Arabia on the biggest screen, to lose myself, as Lawrence loses himself, in the desert, as the cinema screen towers above and stretches away in either direction, like some great desert formation of its own, but even on a decently sized television, one cannot help but be caught up in the pure scale of the film. Jordan and Morocco, the two major shooting locations seem on an unimaginable scale. So often, Freddie Young's cinematography captures the sweep of the desert, our heroes but tiny figures among it. Time and again Young and Lean create great moments of cinema from Lawrence's adventures

Of these, three struck me as particularly of note: first, and most obviously, there is the introduction of Ali, in this great unbroken shot that required a custom built lens; but this is more than just a technical feat. It depicts the desolate nature of the desert, it depicts the power of Ali and Sharif's characterisation-moreover, we see him as if from Lawrence's perspective, a black-robed presence entering the film in grand fashion. Against this is perhaps the most intimate scene of the entire film, of Lawrence, in the darkness, stepping out into the desert, a sequence that sharply depicts the fragility, the quiet of Lawrence, the thin trail of footprints leading to O'Toole's silhouetted figure, the usually vivid colour pallet reduced to blues and blacks as Lawrence contemplates. 

The influence of Lawrence of Arabia stretches long across cinema

Finally, there are the film's remarkable gallery of great shots, from stark battlefields to a toppled train to the banner-strewn town hall in Damascus; my favourite of these is perhaps the most surreal-Lawrence encountering, on the road back to Cairo, the colossal form of a steamship that looms, momentarily, and impossibly, above the dunes, before the Suez Canal is revealed. Over it all, on the far bank of the river, a motorcyclist (allegedly voiced by Lean), asks the question that runs through the entire film, as Lawrence gazes impassively on. "Who are you?" the rider calls. "Who are you?" He is the protagonist of perhaps the most visually stunning pieces of cinema ever made. Yet, Lawrence of Arabia does not exist in a vacuum. 

Perhaps what is lost in considering Lawrence purely as a piece of cinema, to set aside that decades of influence and legacy, is that legacy. Chief among these imitators, these followers in O'Toole's footprints, is Dune; the original Frank Herbert novel undeniably borrows elements of the real-life Lawrence's life, but Denis Villeneuve's two part adaption makes this overt. These homages range from the pure scale of the desert to the changes that Villeneuve made to the story, in which Timothee Chalmet's Paul becomes a figure, like Lawrence, torn between quasi (and in Dune's case, literal) messianic tones, holding desperately to the reins of brimming violence and attempting to balance the factionalism of his Arab-coded followers, and his own fragility as a mere man. As Villeneuve himself notes, Lawrence "had a tremendous impact on my psyche and my creativity."

Further afield, it is almost the destiny of any film of these tremendous scales to be compared to Lawrence: lesser epics, such as Khartoum (1966) Lion of the Desert (1981, partly funded by Colonel Gaddafi) and the disastrous Ishtar (1985) attempt to repeat the thematic scale, whilst Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert, (2015) by its very nature and focus, must contend with the spectre of O'Toole Lawrence in Robert Pattinson’s more grounded performance. Elsewhere, directors as far apart as Spielberg (partly responsible for overseeing the 1988 remaster), whose greatest homage can be seen in the Tunis-set scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, (1981) and James Cameron, who cites the film as an influence on his science fiction saga, Avatar, cite the film as an influence on their work.

Lawrence of Arabia's footprints in cinema are everywhere, if you know where to look, in depictions of men torn between duty and destiny, in films whose scale, like the desert it depicts, threaten to swallow the audience up in their pure magnitude, and in any film daring enough to call itself an epic.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Lawrence of Arabia is available on DVD and BluRay from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and available for streaming on AppleTV

Next week, to 1930s New York and Sergio Leone's last great epic, Once Upon a Time in America