The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lean · a film · 1962 · the roadshow film in the reconstruction of 1989, about 216 minutes of picture
Mode
Epic of war and of one man, built as a rise and a fall; biography framed as an enigma that the witnesses at a memorial cannot settle
Mythos
The man who goes into the desert and is reborn there with new robes and a new name, taken for a prophet; hubris, the ascent to a summit and the fall into blood; the miracle that the tribes read as one, and its reversal
Phase
From the Cairo map room in 1916 to the Arab Council in Damascus in 1918, in two parts divided by an intermission, after a prologue of a death on a motorcycle in 1935 and a memorial at St Paul’s
Presentation
Feature film in colour, photographed by Freddie Young in Super Panavision 70; the roadshow film of 1962 in the reconstruction of 1989, about 216 minutes of picture and about 227 with overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music; shot in Jordan, Spain and Morocco; music by Maurice Jarre
Register
From mess-hall wit in Cairo and the genial coldness of British officers to the desert held empty for minutes at a time, a charge on a port, a man walking on a wrecked train, and a massacre
Scale
One man, the Arab revolt, the British and Turkish commands, a desert crossed twice, and the bargains of an empire
Governing Proposition
A British officer is sent from Cairo into the Arabian desert, makes himself a leader of the Arab revolt, crosses the Nefud, takes Aqaba and is taken for a prophet, then is used by the empire that sent him and undone by what he finds he is. The wager of the film is that the largest frame cinema had can carry an interior: that a man held as a mark on an emptiness, for as long as it takes to cross it, shows what will looks like against a space that will not notice it, and that the legend of a hero can be built and taken apart by the same film.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with the end. In England in 1935 a man rides a motorcycle along a road and is killed. At the memorial at St Paul’s those who knew him are asked about him, and they cannot agree who he was. The whole of what follows is an answer to their question, and the film will not settle it. It frames a life as an enigma before it has shown a single day of it.
Then Cairo, 1916, and a British officer, T. E. Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, in a map room. He puts out a match with his fingers, a joke for a bored officer: a small performance of his capacity for pain, before an audience. He is sent into the desert, to Feisal’s camp. He blows out a match, and the cut gives a desert sunrise. The film has made its first and most famous transition, and stated its law: a performance before an audience, and then the space in which it will be tested.
David Lean directed, for Sam Spiegel’s Horizon Pictures, and Columbia distributed. The screenplay is by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, from Lawrence’s own account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Wilson, blacklisted, was left off the credit on release. Freddie Young photographed it in Super Panavision 70, Anne V. Coates edited it, John Box designed it and Maurice Jarre wrote the music. It was shot in Jordan, Spain and Morocco, premiered in London in December 1962, and won seven Academy Awards, Best Picture and Best Director among them. No woman has a speaking part.
Movement II
At a well in the desert, a rider comes out of the mirage: a speck held for a long minute before he is a man. He is Ali, played by Omar Sharif, and he shoots Lawrence’s guide, Tafas, for drinking. The cutting has refused to break while he came, and the refusal is the lesson. The desert has a law, and it is older than the officer who has come to learn it.
At Feisal’s camp Lawrence meets Feisal, played by Alec Guinness, and from there the road runs across the Nefud to Aqaba. In the Nefud by day, under the sun’s anvil, one of the riders, Gasim, is lost. Lawrence goes back for him and rides out of the heat haze with Gasim to Jarre’s theme, and makes his claim: “Nothing is written.” The tribes read the return as a miracle. He is given the white clothes of a sherif, an investiture, and a new name, El Aurens, a second baptism.
The miracle has a price, and the film makes him pay it soon. To stop a blood feud, Lawrence executes Gasim, the man he went back for. The claim that nothing is written is made and answered within one movement, and the execution is required by the rescue. What it did to him the film will say later, in three words, to a general.
Movement III
Auda abu Tayi, played by Anthony Quinn, joins Lawrence, and Aqaba is taken. The charge is filmed in one long pan, from the riders to the guns of the port, which face only the sea. It is the summit of the film and of the man: strategy, tribe, myth and self in one charge, and a man in white at the head of it.
To report the victory Lawrence crosses the Sinai with two boys, Daud and Farraj, and Daud is lost to quicksand: the price of the summit, paid before he has left the desert. At the Suez Canal a motorcyclist on the far side calls across the water to a man in robes: “Who are you?” It is the prologue’s question asked by a stranger, and the film lets it go unanswered.
In Cairo he reports to Allenby, played by Jack Hawkins. He tells Allenby of the execution of Gasim, and of what it showed him: “I enjoyed it.” It is the film’s hardest truth, spoken plainly to a general. The British comedy of Allenby and of Dryden, played by Claude Rains, is genial and cold, and it obeys the same law as the desert: everyone is using Lawrence, and Lawrence is using the desert. The first part ends here, at the intermission.
Movement IV
The second part opens with Bentley, an American journalist played by Arthur Kennedy, at Feisal’s camp, who has come for a hero and finds one; the figure is drawn from Lowell Thomas, and it is needed for the legend. The train raids follow. Lawrence in white robes walks along the roof of a wrecked train, his shadow beside him, to the cheers of the tribes. He looks at himself in the blade of a dagger. The press makes the hero it wants, and the hero lets it.
The raids make one point twice, and Bentley is played at length; the middle of the second part has stretches of level talk and exposition stiff in places. The film knows what it needs from them: the legend has to be made in public before it can be broken. Farraj, the second of the two boys, dies. A broken detonator, a compass, a British uniform kept under the robes: the particular stays particular, even as the man becomes a figure in the press.
Then Deraa, and the Turkish Bey there, played by José Ferrer. What is done to Lawrence at Deraa the film veils so far that what it changes is asserted rather than shown. It is the hinge of the second part, the point at which the rise turns into the fall, and the place where the film’s reticence costs it most. After Deraa he returns to Allenby, and the road runs on to Tafas.
Movement V
At Tafas Lawrence gives the order, “No prisoners!”, and the liberator becomes a butcher. The film shows it in smoke and a column of the dead, with a dread as high as anything in its first part. The man who put out a match with his fingers to show that he could bear pain has performed his capacity for the extraordinary until the performance owns him.
Damascus falls, and the Arab Council meets there. It fails, because the British arranged it to. The council is shorter than its weight, a satire of politics a little apart from the tragedy, but it closes the disclosure the film has built: the empire spent the idealism of the man it sent as it spent money.
Lawrence is driven away. A motorcycle passes the car on the road, and the film ends where it began, with a motorcycle on a road and a man who has become nothing. Of the release, a version shortened within weeks of opening and again in 1971 was the one most saw for a quarter of a century; the reconstruction of 1989, made by Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten with Lean supervising, restored the roadshow film, with small seams of repair. Its meaning has stayed open since: hero, fraud, masochist or victim of the empire, the man in the car is still the question the memorial asked.
Act III · The Twelve
The prologue is required: a death and a memorial at which those who knew him cannot agree who he was make the whole film an answer to a question it will not answer. Part One is near to bare. The well, where Ali shoots the guide for drinking, sets the law of the desert; the return for Gasim makes Lawrence’s claim, and his execution of the same man, to stop a blood feud, is that claim’s cost. Aqaba is the summit and the Sinai its price, paid with Daud. Length is not charged; the crossings are compelled. Repetition is charged, and Part Two gives more: the train raids make one point twice, Bentley is needed for the legend but played at length, and the council in Damascus is shorter than its weight.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a man who makes himself in another people’s cause is used by the empire that sent him and is undone by what he finds he is. The film discloses the outsider’s will to be chosen, the press making the hero it wants, and the British state spending idealism as Dryden and Allenby spend money. Its hardest truth comes in two moments: Lawrence telling Allenby of the execution, “I enjoyed it”, and Tafas, where “No prisoners!” turns liberator into butcher. The desert is disclosed in image as fully as in speech. Held a tenth below the bar because the Arabs are seen from outside, two of them through made-up faces, and because Deraa, the hinge of the second part, is veiled so far that what it changes is asserted rather than shown.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is the film’s mode, and it recurs from the first reel to the last. Lawrence blows out a match and the cut gives a desert sunrise. Ali comes out of the mirage, a speck for a long minute before he is a man. The Nefud by day, the sun’s anvil, and Lawrence riding back out of the heat haze with Gasim to Jarre’s theme. The long pan at Aqaba from the charge to the guns that face only the sea. Lawrence in white robes walking on the roof of a wrecked train, his shadow beside him, to the cheers of the tribes. The dread is as high: Daud in the quicksand, Tafas with its smoke and its column of the dead. This is the film’s highest axis with The Made. Held a step from the top because the middle of Part Two has stretches of level talk, and some of the height is grandeur of place more than of feeling.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears load. A man goes into the desert, is reborn there with a new name and new robes, and is taken for a prophet: the white clothes of a sherif are an investiture, “El Aurens” a second baptism, and the return from the Nefud with Gasim a miracle that the tribes read as one. Its reversal is built into the plot, since the man he saved is the man he must execute. The shape is hubris: the ascent to Aqaba, the god who walks on a train, then the fall through Deraa into the blood of Tafas, and a man in a car who has become nothing. The particular stays particular: a match, a compass, a broken detonator, a British uniform kept under the robes. Held below the top because the myth is reached as much through landscape and score as through structure, and the fall is told in fewer steps than the ascent.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood roadshow epic of the late 1950s, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, and Lean’s own The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which had already made the war epic a study of one man’s obsession. The departures are real: an epic whose hero is vain, masochistic and at last a killer who enjoys it; no love story and no woman; the hero’s legend dismantled by the film that builds it; emptiness held in frame as a subject, at a length no epic had risked. The stake was large: a leading man unknown to the public, two years of shooting in the desert, and a hero whose sexuality is left in plain sight. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: the wager was placed on Lean’s proven path and the studio epic’s machinery, and the form is the roadshow, deepened rather than turned.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what a man becomes against a space that will not notice him. The 70mm frame makes Lawrence a mark on an emptiness, and the duration of the well, the Nefud and the Sinai makes the viewer cross what he crosses. The size of the image is the size of his ambition and the measure of its folly. The frame of the memorial, with witnesses who disagree, makes the life an enigma, and the two parts are the rise and the fall. Told as a chamber drama, the film would keep the psychology and lose the knowledge that the self was made out there and could not survive coming back. Held below the top because Part Two’s political scenes use inherited studio grammar, and the enigma of the frame is posed more than worked by the form.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Sixty-four years of return are evidence, and the film is returned to in two ways. Morally: Lawrence as hero, as fraud, as masochist, as victim of the empire; the queer reading of Deraa and of his bond with Ali and with the two boys; the charge of Orientalism made against the whole, and the answer that it shows the failure of the Arab Council as a British contrivance. Historically: a long quarrel over its departures from the record, in Allenby, in Auda, and in the American journalist modelled on Lowell Thomas. Formally, its compositions and its cutting are studied without end. What holds the axis: the readings converge on the enigma the film announces, its meanings stand largely open at first viewing, and much of the writing concerns its making and its accuracy rather than new readings.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1960s. Intrinsic force: the film made the large-format epic carry an interior, an ambiguous and finally damning study of one man, and made landscape a dramatic agent rather than a backdrop. It perfected the roadshow epic more than it reorganised film; the decade’s reorganisations came from the new waves, and the form it crowned declined within the decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and lasting in the cinema of scale, from the desert of Star Wars (1977) to the widescreen epic of a self-made messiah in Dune (2021), which takes it openly, and in the match cut taught as the type of the transition. The reach clears the bar, but it lies chiefly within epic and spectacle.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over more than six decades. Form: the release did not survive intact. Within weeks of opening it was shortened, and shortened again for the reissue of 1971, so the version most saw for a quarter of a century was an altered one. The reconstruction of 1989 recovered the film, but with some lines re-recorded by actors twenty-seven years older and with small trims of its maker’s own, so the whole form now stands by repair with small seams; that charge is real and small. Presence is continuous and wide: the 70mm revivals from 1989, television, every home format, and high standing in polls of critics and directors. The large negative served restoration well. The casting is the surface that dates. The bar is cleared, held below the widest figure by the cuts and the repair.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Freddie Young’s photography holds a figure on the horizon in focus with the grain of the sand. Anne V. Coates’s cutting gives the match and the sunrise, and the long refusal to cut as Ali approaches. Jarre’s score carries the desert’s grandeur in one theme and its menace in percussion. John Box built Aqaba in Spain. The dialogue of Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson is spare and dry, in lines fit for a stage. O’Toole moves from vanity to rapture to a dead stare without a break in character; Rains and Hawkins make the British state genial and cold. None of this rests on the size of the frame. The costs: Arab leads played by Guinness and Quinn in make-up, Kennedy’s Bentley broad, studio-lit interiors that sit oddly against the desert, and exposition in Part Two stiff in places.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lawrence putting out a match with his fingers in the Cairo map room, a joke for a bored officer, and the massacre at Tafas. One law governs both: a man performs his capacity for pain and for the extraordinary, before audiences, until the performance owns him. The match is the first step toward the dagger blade in which he studies himself, the train roof, the robes and the blood. The British comedy of Dryden and Allenby obeys the same law as the desert: everyone is using Lawrence, and Lawrence is using the desert. The range is wide, from mess-hall wit to massacre. The strain is in Part Two: Bentley’s journalism plays in a lighter key than the law can carry, and the council in Damascus is a satire of politics set a little apart from the tragedy.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held in one structure are many: consciousness, in Lawrence’s will and its breaking; the state and empire, in Cairo, the British government’s bargains and the Turkish command; war, its tactics and its massacres; the tribe and the nation, in Harith and Howeitat, the blood feud and the dream of one Arab people; the natural order, in a desert that is the film’s second protagonist; the press, in Bentley; the sacred, in prophecy and in “Nothing is written”. They are integrated: Aqaba is strategy, tribe, myth and self in one charge. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: the family is absent, women are absent entirely, labour is unseen, and the inner life of the Arabs is held from outside.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 9.2, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.8. An elevation that recurs from the first reel to the last, in the match cut, the rider out of the mirage, the return with Gasim, the pan at Aqaba and the dread of Tafas; a command of photography, cutting, score and performance that would bear weight at any size of frame; and a myth of rebirth, investiture and hubris built into the plot as rise and fall.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 8.2: a departure real in its hero and its emptiness but placed on its maker’s proven path and the studio epic’s machinery; and many orders held in one structure, with the family, women and labour absent and the Arabs held from outside. Above them, The Inevitable at 8.3: a first part near to bare, and a second that repeats its raids and plays its journalist at length.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.6 from a sum of 103.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Lawrence of Arabia as the roadshow film of 1962, premiered in London in December 1962, in the reconstruction of 1989 by Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten with David Lean supervising: about 216 minutes of picture and about 227 with overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music, from the motorcycle on the road in 1935 to the car leaving Damascus. Produced by Sam Spiegel for Horizon Pictures and distributed by Columbia; written by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson; photographed by Freddie Young in Super Panavision 70; edited by Anne V. Coates; designed by John Box; music by Maurice Jarre. The shortened versions in circulation from the first weeks of release until 1989 are not judged; their history bears on The Imperishable only. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted. Five lines of dialogue are quoted, each certain; the rest is described. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the running times of the premiere and the shortened versions, which actors re-recorded which lines, the later restoration of the screenplay credit, later restorations, the exact order of the smaller scenes of the second part, the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.