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DAVID LEAN Lawrence of Arabia Two Disc UK Set [DVD] [2001]
Header Photo: Detail from front cover of Dvd set.
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Actors: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif
SPECIAL FEATURES
A Making Of Documentary
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His death occurred on an English road, in Dorset. He was riding a motor-cycle powerful enough to satisfy his appetite for speed, and the time was early morning in the spring of 1935. With his death, the ballyhoo
which hounded him through life was doubled. Had he, or had he not, a project for meeting and reasoning with Hitler? Was there, or was there not a mysterious black limousine at the scene of the accident? Had he killed himself deliberately? Or merely been stung by a bee? In fact it seems most probable that he swerved to miss two boys on bicycles and was going too fast for it. But the world did not want an ordinary death for this extraordinary man.
An element of mystery there briefly was. When he was picked up from the road his papers identified him as a fellow called Shaw, recently discharged from the Royal Air Force with the rank of Aircraftman, the lowest rank of all, a bearer of coldscuttles and tender of air-camp pigsties. This unimportant person was taken to the Military Hospital at Bovington Camp. But Mrs Thomas Hardy, the widow of the great novelist, made anxious enquiries about Aircraftman Shaw; so did Mr Winston Churchill; Augustus John, famous painter came in person. Artists of all kinds, high-ranking officers, men with titles and even crowns, awaited news. At length he was attended by the surgeon and physician to the King of England. On May 20th, the London Times announced : "After a week of hope and fear, a commonplace accident has robbed the nation of one of its most remarkable personalities. Lawrence of Arabia is dead."
Shaw was the name he had taken when he tried to escape from his publicity, his past, or himself, in what he called the "monastery" of an Air Force barracks. Now was he revealed as Thomas Edward Lawrence, illegitimate but well-loved son of Thomas Chapman, Irish Baronet. And now his other names and titles were called over too: Liberator of Damascus; Hero of Aqaba; Uncrowned King and Kingmaker. To the Beduin Sheiks he was "Prince Dynamite" and "Destroyer", both for his exploits against that the Hejaz railway and his own explosive energy. To the ordinary Beduin tribesmen, veterans of the First World War campaign against the Turkish Empire in Arabia, he was no man of mystery but a type they recognised, an ironwilled leader,
brother-in-arms of Auda ibu Tayi, chief of the fighting Howeitat. The "L" of Lawrence came adrift in their pronunciation and to them he was "El Aurens" or plain "Aurens". And this name, used with casual affection or respect, was a source of comfort to him while he was among them. His own countrymen preferred the further legend to the man. There was substance enough in his life for a legend, but romance was added. Did he love this Legend or detest it? "There is only one thing worse than being talked about" said Oscar Wilde,
summing up the attitude of famous people to their fame "And that is not being talked about." No doubt this was the case with Lawrence. One half of him was scholar, thinker, gentle and retiring. The other half was man of action, harsh, decisive and it must be said flamboyant. Perhaps it was this second half he was in flight from when he changed his name to Shaw.
Now that he was dead the Legend grew unchecked and the suffering man was all but forgotten. The nation rang with eulogy. The King made public his grateful recognition. General Sir Ian Hamilton numbered him among the great who raise the level of human existence. Field Marshal Lord Allenby declared that he had left the pattern of a life well spent in service. Winston Churchill wrote most eloquently: "In Colonel Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time. I knew him well. I hoped to see him quit his retirement and take a commanding part in facing the dangers which now threaten the country. No such blow has befallen the Empire for many years as his untimely death."
In the newspapers he figured as the Knight of Araby. He was a shining example to set before the young. And when the earth had received him, a young girl slipped through the lingering mourners and placed upon his grave a small group bouquet of lilac and forget-me-not, upon the card of which was written "To T.E.L., you should sleep among the Kings."
Of course reaction followed. Hands were not wanting to tear down the image other hands had raised. Voices were not wanting to claim that there was Fraud in the legend. Sensational books were written to show him in the light of charlatan, poseur, and worse. The arguments are long and cmplicated, any conclusion difficult. The glib solution is a shrug. He is a "mystery,"
a "paradox," a "puzzle" and "enigma". Let it be so; what man is not? But the makers of this film can testify that he is remembered very clearly by the Beduin survivors of those not-so-long-ago campaigns, and by the simple name of "Aurens".
Meanwhile, what of the necessary man beneath all this blast and counter-blast of reputation? For that, the best, the only satisfactory piece of evidence lies in his own account of the Desert Campaign, his book "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom."
Lawrence agonised over the preparation of this work. Yet, a true artist in this, he had no thought of what it might bring him. The First Edition was of 212 copies, for private subscribers only. Its beautiful printing and binding ran him heavily into debt which forced into the publication of a hastily abridged edition called "Revolt in the Desert". This was a best seller and paid the debts incurred by the parent edition. But when that was done Lawrence withdrew "Revolt in the Desert" from the market, so far as he was able, and what it earned thereafter gave to charity. He seemed to turn away from the book, hating it. "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" was not generally available until after his death. He himself never made a penny from it.
But George Bernard Shaw gave him enthusiastic encouragement in his preparation. H.G. Wells called it a great human document. E.M. Forster judged it a masterpiece but feared to tell Lawrence so lest he evoke a sarcastic reaction from a man whose friendship he treasured. Certainly it is unique.
The flesh of the book is its full philosophical reflections and poetic descriptions. Its bones are the action. This begins with Lawrence meeting with Prince Faisal and other Arab chiefs to unify their rising against the Turks; it recounts the taking of Aqaba by Lawrence's audacious strategy of attacking from the land instead of the sea; relates the forays against the railway; interrupted by an act of fearful carnage against retreating Turks at the village of Tafas, of which more later. The book ends at Damascus.
At Damascus, Lawrence's fortunes seemed to be at their peak. But it was there that he broke off, fled from Arabia and began that search for obscurity which led him to the ranks of the Forces under an assumed name. Why? Presently the Air Force discharged him, because his fame as Colonel Lawrence was embarrassing to his officers. By appeal to friends in high places he secured his reinstatement, under yet another name. Why? It is "Seven Pillars" if anywhere that we shall find the answer.
The book is sometimes mystifying, sometimes painfully self-revealing. And both mystification self-revelation seems sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional. Even admirers of Lawrence, writing about this book, did so obliquely, as if averting their eyes. Moralists recoil from it, and indeed they are warned at the outset:
"Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances...We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom. As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. we had sold ourselves into its slavery. By our own act we were drained of morality."
Controversy rages about the alleged cruelty, even sadism, of his campaign. Here is on that very subject
"What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine. Blood was always on our hands, we were licensed to it...When there was reason and desire to punish us we wrote our lesson with a gun or whip immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was beyond appeal."
Is this a confession or an excuse? One cannot tell. Perhaps he did not know himself. Certain it is that he shed a lot of blood, on one occasion needlessly and dreadfully. But certainly also he hated bloodshed. He reversed the 1914 strategy of seeking out and attacking the enemy. His aim was to incapacitate, not to destroy. The loss of two men caused him concern, the loss of twenty (his own or the enemy's). Early in the campaign an Arab charge at a mountain pass wiped out a Turkish force:
"...these soldiers had been very young. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they will be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over the plunder..."
While one critic accused him of sadistic love of inflicting pain on others a second declared with an air of discovery that Lawrence had a masochistic love of pain inflicted on himself. The air of discovery is odd since psychologists are agreed that the two emotions are one. And in any case, here is Lawrence himself: he is speaking of his torture at the hands of the Turkish Governor of Deraa, who did not know the identity of his prisoner:
"...my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry...I remembered the corporal kicking with his nailed boot to get me up...I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then he flung up his arms and hacked with the fall length of his whip into my groin."
This is plain enough. It is a little impudent after such a revelation to claim any special shrewdness for the insight that Lawrence had a special attitude to his own body.
This incident was a turning point in Lawrence's life. He quickly realised, he says "how in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost". Utterly worn out, his love of the Desert and his Beduin followers turned to revulsion. He sickened, he tells us, of "that rankling fraudulence which had to be my mind's habit: that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech". He went to Colonel Allenby and "begged for a smaller part elsewhere". He had come to realise the peril of his position as the England leader of an Arab revolt, responsible to no-one but himself, and wanted "to pillow myself on duty and obedience." He was sick of the Desert.
But Allenby had need of him, and persuaded him back. It can have been no small decision for Lawrence to quit the desert, and we should like to know how Allenby reversed it. But at this point Lawrence becomes exasperatingly brief. "There was no escape for me" he simply and sadly says. But the old straightforward idealism had gone. "I must take up again my mantle of fraud in the East." And a certain personal recklessness had taken its place: "I took it up quickly and wrapped myself in it completely. It might be fraud or it might be farce: no one should say that I could not play it."
That is all he says. We must make our own evaluation. But if it was a farce it was bloody farce. Lawrence had a bodyguard. It comprised ninety men, outlaws and killers all. "They were," he says, "a wonderful gang of experts...The British called them cut-throats but they cut throats only to my order." They were with him at the village of Tafas where the Arab Army, newly raised by Lawrence at Allenby's behest, overtook a fleeing and demoralized Turkish column. The Turks had done their worst with the litte place, and now the darker side of Lawrence's nature took control. He told his bodyguard: "The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead."
"By my orders we took no prisoners...In a madness born of the horror of Tafas we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of fallen and of the animals. He went on up it went on all day and became one the night with men went crazy and I would like to be cane toys to break away." It went on all day and it became "one of the nights when men went crazy...and others' lives became toys to break and throw away."
It was with this
deed behind him that he entered Damascus, the longed for goal of the Arab revolt. And there it ended.
The common enemy now gone, old tribal hatreds sprang into flame between the Beduin leaders, and they despised the local politicals. They had conquered in the Desert, but they could not run Damascus. The epitome of this failure lay, for Lawrence, in a Turkish Military Hospital, hopelessly broken down, in which the erstwhile enemy now lay, some dead, some dying, some long dead. As he laboured hopelessly against such circumstances he felt, he says, that he would never again be clean. The British had their own intentions, and waited.
The Beduin could not run Damascus but they had taken it, and at the Peace Conference their claims could not be ignored. Lawrence was called to Versailles to represent them, a much-admired, much-photographed,
much-talked of public hero.
The man himself? Thereafter began the intermittent, desperate search for obscurity, the Lawrence enigma which has filled a library of books.
The last joint venture of Sam Spiegel and David Lean was The Bridge on the River Kwai, a film which secured more than a hundred international awards and was received with extraordinary enthusiasm by audiences in every part of the world. This success posed problems. Creative men wish each new venture to better the last. Lean and Spiegel felt that Kwai was an effort they would find difficult to top. However, that film has revealed a certain pattern. It worked out a general theme by focusing closely on the situation of one man (in this case the eccentric Colonel Nicholson); and that one man was placed by his fate in an interesting locality. Any return to the actual circumstances of that film, any bridges, prison camps, Burmese jungles would debase the pattern to the level of a gimmick. Yet they were convinced that the pattern itself was artistically important and that they could now explore it more fully.
Their first idea was to make a film of the life and death of Mahatma Gandhi. They approached this project cautiously, feeling that there was something presumptuous in attempting to film, almost in his life-time, the activities a man believed by his own people and by others to have been a saint. It was with some relief as well as disappointment that they abandoned the project. To dramatise you must simplify. To simplify you must leave something out. And to decide what aspects of Mahatma Gandhi's life and personality can be decently left out and which retained was a responsibility which they found themselves unwilling to accept.
Sam Spiegel had first read T.E. Lawrence's own account of his Arabian adventure "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" some years before its general publication. Like many another he had fallen under the fascination of its extraordinary author. And - like
many another
in his own field - had entertained the idea of film on the subject. Now the film rights in "Seven Pillars" became available. Spiegel at once acquired them, and there in India he and Lean decided that LAWRENCE OF ARABIA should be their next venture.
To say that Lawrence was a complex character is to state the case mildly. There is enough action, enough psychological and thematic material in "Seven Pillars" for a dozen times with a dozen different points of view. On top of that Lawrence and his book have enjoyed, or endured, the comments and interpretations of some scores of historians, soldiers and journalists, often withan axe of their own to grind.
Spiegel and Lean engaged the British playwright Robert Bolt to write the screenplay and the three worked out together their own point of view upon the man and the theme to be drawn from his story.
Of the many overwhelming problems which the screenplay presented, none was more critical than the casting of the name part. Since the role of Lawrence fell into none of the familiar categories of cinema hero, it was felt that the actor should be one not familiar to cinema audiences. The choice fell on Peter O'Toole, young Irish star of the Royal Shakespeare theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. The unknown would be surrounded by the famous.
Alec Guinness, who had portrayed Lawrence in the Terence Rattigan play, Ross, was eager to interpret Prince Feisal in whose subtle, find-drawn character he found a challenge. Anthony Quinn found a vehicle for his vivid energy and style in the part of Auda ibu Tayi. Jack Hawkins fittingly portrays Colonel Allenby, Lawrence commander-in-chief, "the Bull" as he was called by his subordinates, half in affection and half in awe. Claude Rains, past master of the quiet gesture, found congenial the part of Dryden. Allenby's simple-seeming, devious political advisor. Jose Ferrer chose to contribute a vignette of unhappiness and helpless cruelty in the part of the Turkish Bey. Anthony Quayle was intrigued by the character of Brighton, the British colonel, adhering to the admirable and inadequate code of military duty and obedience. Arthur Kennedy, noted for the uncompromising truthfulness of his performances became Bentley the newsman, too knowing to know more than half the truth. Omar Sharif, first favourite in the cinemas of the Middle East is here introduced to Western audiences as Sheikh Ali ibn el Kharish, Lawrence's friend, his teacher in the ways of the Beduin, his pupil in the way of Europe.
Beyond the problems of casting lay the physical difficulties of shooting such a film. David Lean took himself off to Jordan with John Fox, the Art Director. There they found the desert to be as Lawrence loved it and described it in his book, a landscape almost unimaginable to those who have not seen it, and not seen before on film. There too they came upon the wreckage of trains just as Lawrence left them nearly forty years ago, the metal kept bright by the utter dryness of the atmosphere. Lean and Spiegel decided it was there in Jordan and nowhere else that the bulk of the film must be shot, be the difficulties what they may.
Young King Hussein, descendant of Hussein of Mecca, Feisal's father, who initiated the Revolt which Lawrence led, interested himself in the making of the film. It was by his order that the unit received expert help from the crack
camel-riders of the Desert Patrol, and by his courtesy - and it may be said under his protection - that the film secured the participation of some hundreds of Beduin tribesman.
The first shooting site was Jebel Tubeiq, 250 miles east of Aqqba in a desolate area near the Saudi Arabian frontier, with the nearest Water 150 miles away. This site was discovered through aerial reconnaissance by Director Lean and Art Director John Box. Until photographs and sketches of the area have been made by the film men, the place had been unmarked on any map. Jebel Tubeiq had been uninhabited since the Seventh century A.D., when a band of monks abandoned a monastery they had established there in what must have been the world's most remote hideout.
Paleolithic rock carvings in the area are said to date back 12,000 years. Until the arrival of the film troupe, Lawrence undoubtedly was one of the very few white man ever to have laid eyes on Tubeiq. Director Lean and Cameraman Fred Young found infinite pictorial challenge in Jebel Tubeiq, with its fields of brilliant red sand dunes reaching illimitably to the horizon.
The initial exploit which brought Lawrence to fame was his dashing capture of the port of Aqaba, itself remote. Here the company established its headquarters. The logistics of moving equipment and personnel to Aqaba from London were not easy. The moves from there to the location sites were very difficult indeed. These moves were sometimes in the region of 300 miles. Once there, the crews, the actors, the Beduin who gathered, and the animals, had to be fed and watered. Where heavy equipment was imperative roads had to be improvised, and where these broke down, caterpillar tractors brought in by sea to Aqaba must drag the foundered lorries from the sand. Meanwhile the temperatures rose to levels where thermometers had to be cooled to prevent them from destroying themselves in an effort to record it.
But though the weeks under canvas ran into months morale ran high and the unit persisted. In the first place it was adventure. In the second place they were there for nobody's whim but because that particular landscape was part and parcel of Lawrence's story, and couldn't be faked. If the circumstances posed problems to Peter Dukelow the construction foreman, the landscape and people fascinated Freddy Young, First Cameraman, as they fascinated David Lean.
Beneath the cliffs of Wadi Rhumm, tribal battleground time out of mind, the Beduin presented with their black goathair tents, their animals, themselves, a picture precisely Old Testament - except for their weapons, beautifully maintained even when worn over the poorest garments. the women however could not be photographed because the tribesmen held it is a mortal insult that any man should hold a picture of another's wife. Where women were necessary to the film, twenty women who being of a Christian sect which did not fall under the ban, were substituted with the permission of their priest.
Because of their modernisation, the actual sites of Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem could not be used for scenes showing Lawrence's activities in these cities from 1916 to 1918. For these scenes, the company moved to Spain, Where at Seville the Moorish-Arabic architecture provided near duplicates of the buildings of the Lawrence story. At a Spanish location also the blasting assaults on the Hejaz Railway were filmed. Some photography had been done at Aqaba, but because this city too has been modernized, the Red Sea port was totally reproduced on a Spanish site, as it appeared in 1916, with a Turkish army camp laid out behind it. The filming of the Arab charge through the camp site brought thousands of sightseers to the surrounding hillsides to witness free the greatest entertainment of their lives.
The far-travelling LAWRENCE OF ARABIA Company made still another major geographical shift to Morocco. Here through the corporation of King Hassan II and his brother, H.R.H. Prince Moulay Abdallah, the Royal Moroccan Army supplied cavalry members of the Camel Corps, and footsoldiers, in all, thousands of men, camels and horses. And here was played out the stunning blood-bath sequence of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
The battle sequences completed, there remained only the opening scenes of Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson's screenplay to be filmed in England, including re-enactment of the memorial service to T.E. Lawrence at St Paul's Cathedral.
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