Lawrence of Arabia

Lengthy movies and iconic movies both merit long posts. This one, which is three hours and forty-seven minutes long and considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made, warrants plenty of reaction from me. I see no way around it; we're rambling our way through this one with a gigantic, sprawling paragraph, folks. First, a summary of sorts. The plot itself is relatively simple. It's World War I and the British forces in Cairo are struggling to deal with the Ottoman Empire's army and how best to attack it. A young and eccentric officer - Lawrence - whose quirky personality has him accused of insolence time after time has spent a lot of time in the Arabian desert and knows a thing or two about the Arab tribes living there. He's dispatched to the East to do a little recon on the Arab revolt against the Turks. Lawrence befriends a number of these guys through his charisma and bravery, and winds up persuading various tribes to stop fighting one another and start focusing their aggression toward the ruling Ottoman regime. Soon, Lawrence and company are launching guerrilla attacks on Turkish trains and caravans and such. War takes its toll on Lawrence, and he becomes jaded not only by bloodshed and violence but also by his own identity crisis - is he a British officer, an Arabian chieftain, or something else entirely? Eventually Lawrence's motley crew of Arabs has overtaken enough Turkish cities for the British troops to say, "we'll take it from here." They thank and congratulate Lawrence and promote him to corporal before immediately ordering him home. He looks like a lost man at this point. Many years later (but, at the beginning of the film) he dies in a motorcycle accident and few people at his memorial service can accurately recall or describe him. That's the whole plot. It takes nearly four hours to get through all of this, in typical "classical Hollywood epic" fashion. For a movie that takes place during a war, it's surprisingly light on action. For a movie that seems to be a biopic of sorts, it's surprisingly lacking in character depth or development. Lawrence is a quirky guy when the movie begins, and he's a quirky and slightly shell-shocked guy when it ends. Along the way, there really aren't a ton of other memorable characters. The movie plays out in a fairly dry manner, almost like a stage play, but then, I guess that's how movies tended to work fifty years ago. Seriously though, almost every shot in the movie is static. It's tough to fairly criticize cinematography more than twice my age, but in the present day the movie certainly feels quite dated in a number of ways. This is fine. A "classic" is often defined by the period in which it first appeared, after all. Still, I can't pretend I wasn't largely bored by this slow-moving dinosaur. Solid acting, a great score, and beautiful scenes may have put Lawrence of Arabia on the map in 1962, but I imagine this thing, if released today, would be reviled as a terrible bomb. Of course, what feels stale and boring today was apparently innovative as all hell in 1962. And I can kind of see why, I guess. The wide open shots of camels walking through the desert must have looked impressive on the big screen, along with the iconic shot of the guy riding up on a camel on the horizon, shrouded by heat waves. The film is also void of any romance subplot - void of any women at all, in fact - and did not feature a single movie star. (Peter O'Toole and Alec Guinness became famous because of this film, and not before it.) It was shot on location in the Middle East for the most part, rather than in American studio backlots. I give the movie props for all those things. I just didn't find it very entertaining. Other nitpicks? The video was a tiny bit blurry in the way that any video from a long time ago is, but for the most part it was clear and crisp and beautiful. The audio, on the other hand, suffered from, I dunno, being really old, I guess, to the point where the dialogue was barely audible. I've had this problem with old movies before, and am used to watching them with subtitles turned on. Really though, why is pre-'80s movie audio so terrible in general? Can someone who knows more about the history of the film industry (Trev?) enlighten me? In summary, I'd say that although I respect and appreciate the legacy of classic cinema, I really see no reason for anyone to watch Lawrence of Arabia at this point in time. It's a shame and all, but I guess I kind of saw this coming all along. The same will probably be true for Ben-Hur, another historical epic from fifty years ago that I've got in my backlog.