31 Movies of May, Day 31: Lawrence of Arabia
May 31st viewing: Lawrence of Arabia, chosen by Chicago Cinema Workers Fund donor Amy Nice. Amy was also kind enough to donate an extra $5 to the fund to make me take a Malört before the screening, which tasted like the exact polar opposite of that lemonade that Lawrence orders after trudging across the Sinai.
Year of Release: 1962
Directed by: David Lean
Written by: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
Starring: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Claude Raines, Arthur Kennedy, Michel Ray, John Dimech, I.S. Johar
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Flavorwave IPA (India Pale Ale, 6.2% ABV), Indeed Brewing Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local* when getting buzzed during quarantine)
*in spirit
We’ve finally made it! We are at the end of May, 31 movies in the books, and boy, are we closing things out on a doozy. I deliberately saved Lawrence of Arabia for last mostly for practical reasons - when a movie is 3 hours and 40 minutes long, you need to locate a sizeable amount of free time to watch it. But it feels like a fitting movie to end on, as well. I needed to fit in something as epic and sweeping in its breadth as Lawrence of Arabia to really hammer home the type of wonder and awe that I go to the movies for.
For this last write-up, I’m going to go a bit behind the camera on how this project has worked. As you can tell by the publication dates of all my posts, and the fact that this post is coming at the end of June, not May, the “31 Movies of May” hasn’t translated to “31 Movie Posts of May.” But I did actually go through and watch a movie every day in May, I merely wrote about them later using the notes I jotted down during the screening. Usually I write somewhere between six and a dozen notes during the movie, but only about half of them find their way into the actual post I write. Some of them are ideas that just don’t blend together, sometimes there is one note in particular that I become really interested in expanding and that eventually becomes the entire post. Some of it is complete and total nonsense.
For today, I’m just going to transcribe my notes, whole cloth. Take the opportunity to feel like you are on this incredibly long viewing experience right next to me on the couch, with your own local beer (or cider) in your hand, and some take home popcorn from the Music Box in a bowl on the coffee table. And then go ahead and yell at me for how wrong I am:
Damn, this movie is pretty.
All of the stuff with Lawrence traveling with Tafas in the first half hour could be its own movie in another storyteller’s hands.
Many of the English officers, such as Colonel Brighton, are depicted with surprising clarity as oafish infiltrators of Arabia. Also, I had forgotten that Lawrence’s “little people, silly people” words get thrown back in his face later in the film. I don’t know if you could call the film enlightened, necessarily (particularly given the rash of Arab characters played by non-Arab characters, especially Alec Guinness in brownface as Prince Faisal), but it’s a surprisingly progressive movie that is unambiguously anti-colonialist. I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to any fans of the movie, but it did come as a surprise to me, having not seen the movie in probably over a decade. I imagine it would come as a surprise to those who only know the movie by reputation as well.
The Sun’s Anvil would be a great name for a rock band.
Omar Sharif is so great in this, he has a presence very similar to what Oscar Isaac does today.
The face-off between Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn is pretty fantastic. More than anything else, holding his own in a scene against Quinn probably got Sharif his well-deserved Oscar nomination.
“Thy mother mated with a scorpion.”
Peter O’Toole really sure does know how to embody thirstiness, like literal thirstiness. Lawrence getting to the officers’ bar, then making his demand for two large glasses of lemonade for him and Farraj, is a highly relatable moment as we start to enter the burning days of summer.
All the Brits other than Lawrence are some degree of rotten - Allenby’s cravenness, Dryden’s duplicitousness, Brighton’s boorishness.
“You are looking for a figure who will draw your country towards war?” “I guess so.” “Aurens is your man.”
The real key to this film is that the second half serves as a deconstruction of the Lawrence it built up in the first half, but when people talk casually about Lawrence of Arabia it seems we spend a lot more time talking about the Lawrence of the first half than the Lawrence of the second half.
Parallels between Claude Raines in this movie and Joe Pesci in The Irishman.
Back to the grander Part II analysis: Part II is all about how Lawrence was a failure. This isn’t really a great story of heroism, yet T.E. Lawrence came in at number 10 on the American Film Institute’s list of greatest movie heroes!
That said, even as the movie gets exceedingly bleak in tone, it is still so damn pretty.
And that’s all folks, that was our month of quarantined movie watching. Thank you to anybody who took some time out of their own quarantine to read any of these meandering posts I wrote, and thank you especially to all the people who helped raise over $200 for the Chicago Cinema Workers Fund. You are awesome and you are doing real good in this world.
EDIT, JANUARY 28, 2021: So I took video of most of the Malört shots I took for this project, just in case any donors wanted definitive proof that I fulfilled my promise. Just came across the video I took for this Lawrence of Arabia viewing, and thought I’d add this in to the post for posterity’s sake, and also so you can enjoy my pain.
