Madmaximus Rants About LAWRENCE OF ARABIA In 70MM!!

Size matters. It really, really does. Upon viewing Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, being content with DVD home-viewing now seems ludicrous. If DVD is all you have, get on a plane and see it how it’s meant to be seen. While this review isn’t necessarily news, this film is such a huge part of our cinema geek legacy I thought I’d send it in anyway. Perhaps Harry or Moriarty will pontificate on how this film inspired Spielberg, Lucas, and others to create their own desert sagas. Seeing it this big, you understand why it was so influential. After a 70mm infusion, you’re compelled to attempt your own recreation in any bastardized form that comes to mind. I even thought about filling my living room with sand and sculpting (even though that’s a different movie). You understand why Spielberg’s print is only shown to Dreamworks employees and select friends and why he numbers the times it’s shown!

This print was unique in one regard, though, it restored screen credit to Michael Wilson (Bridge on the River Kwai) who was blacklisted. Robert Bolt fans can no longer claim sole credit for this film.

Size matters. For one thing it allows you to live inside the picture. You feel like you traveled to another world, not just saw a movie about it. Like in the opening of the film when Lawrence races along English lanes. To see the cottages at life size and wish you could live in them. To ride the road. To feel sick at the speed and bumps. Even the map Lawrence paints in the basement is big enough to sail into. And the camels – black and beastly -- clomping outside the windows cause heart-skip! The rooms are so vast, they swallow voices. ‘But there must be artillery,’ the general says. And between him and Mr. Dryden (the Smoking Man of the 1960s?) is a painting of artillery – gloomy cannons of blue, black, and gray. Tell me you picked that out on DVD!

At the first shot of the orange desert horizon, vast and empty, with a sun rising, all living room experiences with Lawrence forever fade. The music swells and I’m into the vast, curved dunes with two camels pushing over one hill. They kick the sand – small puffs even on this giant screen. And I marvel and wonder. Have you ever just driven into the wilderness and stepped out of the car? Where you’re alone in vast silence? The sky and mountains humble you. And if you’re there at night, the stars are lampposts in heaven. This movie this way (and I must admit I was in the front row – a vista I highly recommend as there’s still 25 feet between you and the bottom of the screen) gives you that. No smaller screen size can. Sand gusts off ridges. It dances and swirls, ghosts of a desert empire. You can see particles and they sting. You’re lost in wonder, in the size and purity of this land where you truly are a guest. And you know in spite of your best you could never make this, nor imagine it.

Much has been said of the shot where Sherif Ali approaches across the white desert. On DVD, one gets bored. Does Lean have to show the sky for so long? You say this because you can’t see the speck approaching, which even on this screen is but a golfball – a spectre shimmering, with no bottom, disappearing into the haze. But here it’s awesome. Lean has shrunk a building-sized image to a pinhead – for all you see is a black dot. It stretches space into eternity. Out of the silence comes the pit-pat, pit-pat, pit-pat, pit-pat slowing. A camel emerges ridden by Death himself in funeral cloak (Darth Vader anyone?). And after the gunshot, we see blood flowing from the guide’s wound at the far right edge. Seeping slowly. I love that there’s no music in this meeting of Lawrence and Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif). Only silence. Because it’s the desert – it’s supposed to be silent.

Later, Lawrence singing is humorous because his tiny songs bounce off cliffs thousands of feet high. When the biplanes emerge from canyon clefts, they are but sparrows. Though they deliver the film’s first grief – strafing the valley of tents. Amidst bloody cries, the sand warriors have but swords to wave futilely as two worlds collide. It’s not much of a leap to imagine star fighters strafing Tattoine with laser fire. Did our best modern movie adventures find their conception in a large screen viewing of this film? With Prince Feisal’s (Alec Guiness) army of thousands on the move, I realize we’ll never see a movie like this again. If anyone tries this scope, the armies will be computer generated. But it adds to the awesomeness knowing these are thousands of people and animals. Isn’t visual spectacle part mental? If you know it’s fake, isn’t it slightly less spectacular? I loved the spectacle shots in Clones, but these were different. They were real. Thousands of men and beasts streaming across miles of sand. It’s awesomely exhilarating. Can you imagine Lean shouting ‘Cut, let’s do it again?’ (Not quite the same as Lucas requesting another computer rendering is it?) I think Spielberg mentions this on the DVD documentary, watching camels lay prints and wondering how Lean did a second take. Did he spend all day erasing the prints? It boggles the mind to imagine how this movie was made. It boggles the mind to be in its presence, to be taken to its world.

And here’s my justification for this rant. Lawrence sits in Prince Feisal’s tent and despite being urged to keep quiet must speak. And Prince Feisal lets him. ‘Young men are passionate – they must have their say,’ he says. Isn’t that one of the purposes of this website? Passion? Isn’t that what fuels the words of Harry and Moriarty and all of us who write in? We must have our say. What a scene this is, with the swaying, creaking tents and the ghostly wind outside – ancestors listening in on Arabia’s fate. ‘It’s time to be great again, my Lord,’ Lawrence says, the blue-eyed British rebel, invoking that youthful passion. And after Prince Feisal says ‘We need a miracle,’ faint strings underscore a shot of Lawrence outside the tent. And we just know it: he thinks he could be that miracle. Then into the night he goes alone with white sand brushing dark dunes.

Shadow sentinels line the cliffs, their cloaks wafting as smoke swirls below and camels rise to join Lawrence’s mad desert campaign. Fifty men will defy death to become legend, so that fifty more might join them. Only on this screen do we feel the great divide of this impassable desert, where no water can be found, only sand twisters and still hills and camels like ants beneath them.

I know I’m repetitive here, like a gushing kid that can’t quite tell his girl how swell she is, but the movie is just so different when the ground and sky is vast before us and we are so small and at the mercy of it. Not larger than, with a cabinet we can close and a TV we can turn off. We are at the mercy of this life unspooling – leave the room and we will miss something. It does not pause for us. It does not stoop to our size to make us comfortable. We are a speck within this world and it is crucial to Lean that we feel so, for it is true. Just like wee cannot make God in our own image, we cannot squeeze Arabia into our TV set or into a paperback we take on a plane. Movie making at this size gives us worlds, takes us to and plunges us into worlds we could never go to. It’s front row grandeur. And there’s no other artform like it.

Fatigue presses in on these travelers and this viewer. The desert crossing is expertly placed in the script -- we experience their experience. I nod as Lawrence nods, slide off my seat like the boy, nearly tip into cheerful chatter like Lawrence as the end approaches. But then the empty camel pulls Lawrence back into death with life a wisp away. He returns by choice into death to deny a death. Here, he and Sherif Ali split and the dream dies. Part of me echoes Sherif Ali’s cry, ‘English, English!’ and his throwing down the head band. Meanwhile, miles back, the dead man stumbles out of the furnace. The sun stalks him hot and bright, burning even me in the front row. The walking corpse sheds bullet belt and gun pouch. Lawrence, tiny on his camel, continues back. The shimmering man falls on cracked ground as the army’s camels plunge snouts into water. And then -- a toothpick on the horizon. A scratch on the film? The servant boy urges his camel closer and quicker as the music picks up and we wonder ‘Can it be?’ Now the camel is at gallop and we cut to Lawrence, arm raised, the man of dusty death clinging to his back. Life has triumphed! This day, the desert claims no dead. By the will of man, by the pride of Lawrence. And it is not just a man that emerges, but a miracle. Perhaps even a messiah. Now the men will follow him to the ends of the earth; they will lay their whole life down for him because they know no man will be left behind. It is the beginning of the end for the self-imagined, death-defying, miracle-working messiah. Mad at the start, mad through the middle. ‘Nothing is written,’ Lawrence glowers, accepting water from Shari. Nothing except the mad will die mad. The man who proclaims himself to be god will be torn, crushed, and – though it may take a hundred years – forgotten.

Lawrence chooses a new name, his English duds are burned, and now he’s robed in white and gold. The anointed one for whom nothing is written can now write his own script. One of power and glory. One of humiliation and death. And now he’s believing it, worshipping his image in the sword hilt, bowing to his shadow and cavorting past a puzzled Aud abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) and son. One man’s fancy slapping against the rigid face of the desert.

Then through the cliffs we go, out of crags to thousands of tents. Even John Ford in Monument Valley was never a tenth of this -- with that great central rock where a Masada of Arabia might once have stood. Though the air is thick with the dust of a thousand hooves, the sky stays blue. And then a little girl’s eyes – is this the first woman we’ve seen? ‘Yet I am poor because I am a river to my people,’ Aud abu Tayi says.

And when two tribes unite, the march on Akabah begins – with great procession and red flags furled. As the fighters move against stiff wind, the women watch in veiled shadow. The mighty throng flows like a river between great cliffs where women chitter. Is it celebration or lament? And then the shot of all shots. Five women on an outcrop and miles below twelve divisions of horses stream through dust under red-grooved sandstone many millennium high. Camping outside Akabah, a fight erupts demanding one fighter die. To keep peace, Lawrence must kill. He who saves life must now take it. ‘I will execute the law,’ he says with raised pistol only to see the face of the man he defied desert death to save. And so begins the horrific cost of proclaiming oneself king above the written, a member of no tribe. He ages before our eyes as men scramble for his fired gun.

And then the charge on Acabah. Has there ever been a shot like it? No models here, just hundreds of horses blitzing the town. Guns swivel but hooves are past, trampling fleeing men. And all this is shot from a cliff top, behind a massive gun, panning to the blue of a sea. It is done. And while looters fan the flames, the man-god wades his camel into an endless sea. It is not water he can drink but it is life nonetheless. He grimaces at his hand, at what he’s done. Red petals float in the foam. ‘Garlands for the Conqueror,’ Sherif Ali says, so Lawrence scrambles to collect them. But they are like blood in his palm. When Aud abu Tayi confronts him about there being no box of money, Lawrence signs on behalf of the King of England, promising gold and artillery to come. In the meantime, will take the two boys and cross the Sinai like Moses. ‘With these,’ Tayi asks pointing at the boys. ‘They’ll be safe with me,’ Lawrence says. Safe indeed. He adds prophet of God to his self-proclaimed titles. He promises the finest sheets in the finest hotel to his boys, but a truth emerges. Lawrence can lie – he can promise more than he can deliver. Into the storm they go, but the compass is dropped. ‘No matter,’ says Lawrence. ‘Due west.’ But it does matter. He has lost his way, in more ways than one. And one of the boys will lose his life for it. The sand consumes him as it will consume Lawrence. The messiah Moses must watch his charge choked by carnivorous sands. He and the other boy emerge from the dust as spectres. Caked with sand, they are ghosts or grief-etched victims under toppled towers. Their white clothes are soiled. But the wind pushes them on. Finally barbwire greets them, like that of a war camp or a bombed settlement. It reflects the ruin of a man’s dream, a country’s conquest, and of all futile plans when power be our aim.

Then the cry sounds from a soldier on the canal’s other side. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ Lawrence’s blue eyes salute a blue sky. Does he know, this soldier dreamer, now sand-swabbed killer of men and leader of nations? He must, dragging crusted cloak back to the halls of military privilege, comfort, and power. Perhaps that is why his hand shakes holding the lemonade glass – will he crush it? Perhaps the enormity of it all presses him. Will he break under the savage strain of his dream? ‘I’m promoting you to Major,’ his superior says. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ Lawrence responds. He’s cracking under the weight of kill and liking it. ‘I enjoyed it,’ he says and truth rings out: the satisfaction of power, the luscious scent of it. It feels like his last chance of escape – if his superiors will accept it – this admission of heavy guilt. But with pageant pomp underscoring it being proclaimed ‘bloody marvelous,’ and to the march of victors’ horns, he descends from on high with the General himself to the salute of fellow officers. His window of salvation is snapped shut by older men who need his youthful vigor in their silly games. The young man accepts promotion for his soul… he who gains the whole world… ‘I’ve got orders to obey, thank God,’ says General Allenby to Mr. Dryden as they stride the causeway of conspiracy. ‘Unlike that poor devil – he’s riding the whirlwind.’ The sacrificial lamb stands in the fountain courtyard, officers encircled, pressing against glass. It is the end for Lawrence, we know. But, pity him, he thinks it the beginning.

INTERMISSION (if you can possibly believe it’s only that!! Doesn’t it feel like you’ve already lived five lives, watched ten films, been on three world cruises? And not just because of my writing that drags like a lizard tail through sand, but due to the sheer size, scope, and story packed into this first half film of the man who would be god – all makers of Alexander, Napolean, and any other historical god-like emperor biopics please observe…)

At the opening of part two, an American photographer, Bentley, and a tank roll across the screen and we immediately know it’s a different movie now. The modern world has intruded on our historic, adventurer’s dream. Now it’s expanding empires. ‘In this country, the man who gives victory is the man most prized,’ says Prince Feisal. ‘I’m looking for a hero,’ Bentley replies. ‘You are looking for a figure who will draw your country toward war,’ Feisal says. Some things never change.

Then they blow up the train and it dives off the track like a great worm. I love this sequence! The soldiers lining the dune rush the smoking carcass, spears branded. Can’t you just see Dune leaping into Frank Herbert’s mind after seeing this? A great, wrecked worm on its side with shrouded soldiers charging? Then Lawrence jumps onto the train, his sand shadow leading the masses. Silouhetted on the roof, I see Indy. And a photo is snapped. America will have its hero to lead them to war. The grand adventure will be ably chronicled -- the lie passed on or glossed over. The blood and madness left in the sands to be blown by the wind. Was there an American director of the time who would have shown the madness and the horrific ruin of this dreamer and adventurer? To the question of what attracts him to the desert, Lawrence earlier responds, ‘It’s clean.’ It is. Pure. Vast. Clean. Until man spoils it. And a great leader like Aud abu Tayi is reduced to scrambling for a clock in the quest for something honorable or to walking under a broken umbrella. All of this and the 157 deaths for the spoils of war. For this great chief his hunger is satisfied with one white horse. Not one with wings. Not the only one of its kind. Just a horse. And with it he rides home… he has no use for this war now that he has a white horse. And the absurdity creeps in. Oh, the spoils of our great games. Death, broken umbrellas, smashed clocks, and a white horse. The effort unravels, the legend – now shot in the shoulder – diminishes. Gone is the splendor of the film’s first half – the grand and exalted dream. It’s being revealed for what it is – a silly pawn in modernity’s warmongering. Still they press on – lighting fuses in sand storms where steel tracks are cloaked. And now even Lawrence’s last servant boy shall be lost as a detonator pierces his flesh. Lawrence must take his life, too. Lying in the sand, face to face, his gun to the boy’s temple where blood spatters. ‘What will you do now,’ Sherif Ali asks. Indeed.

‘Do you think I am just anybody,’ Lawrence screams. ‘Who will walk on water with me?’ He’s upped the ante. From Moses to Jesus. Blue eyes blazing, blond hair neatly combed, in his zeal he walks through mud, laughing, invoking invisibility, a white man trying to pass for an Arab. It is the test of his fate. Who am I, he seems to ask himself. Am I the messiah, the promised one? This will tell me. I will walk unafraid and poorly disguised into the enemy city. I will stare down their general and I will be shown for what I am – vulnerable, breakable, penetrable man. The general unrobes Lawrence’s white, wounded, reddened flesh. Unwrapped from princely robes he is but sallow, pasty, markable flesh. And he will be beaten. Upon a rack he will try not to mind this pain. No cries will come from him until he is spit into the dark, now marked before Ali as mere man. Picking him from the puddle, they must begin again. Their tattered dream is now cut like Lawrence’s clothes, flapping in the wind.

The snow comes and Lawrence is a different man. He has seen his end, his core. This is his second chance for salvation. To end the campaign of self-flagellated glory. But it has him now, this mighty quest. ‘I’m going,’ he says. He thought it was true a man could be whatever he wants. But now he sees truth: he is but flesh, he is any man. And he will appeal to Allenby for a job any man could do. Here, tragedy settles like a blanket of steel. He can not escape. The old men whose games he plays will not let him. It is so with all old men and young. And we young would be wise to heed.

Who should be there for his resignation, but Mr. Dryden, General Allenby, and Prince Feisal. The games these old man play. Treaties, power, pawns. And our naïve Lawrence steps into it all. ‘The truth is I’m an ordinary man and I want an ordinary job.’ So lies the fate of all enlisted men who pledge themselves to a corrupt higher authority. Though you try, you cannot escape. Unless one gives his life for you, takes your place in that dreaded regime. But Lawrence is alone. Alone he was born and alone he’ll die. As blood beads through his uniform, Allenby lays on the big push. Talk of destiny and all, promises of lots of money… and that deranged dream of Damascus flares again in Lawrence’s piercing eyes. Faced with the devil and no way to get out, he has only money and death to pursue. And he will, till he gets one or the other. The dream is soiled now, our stomachs sour. Perhaps the lie of it is now bare enough to be picked apart by scavengers and left to blanche in the sand of time.

But there’s still time for one more pageant. And Lawrence rides proudly with murderers for bodyguards. When Sherif Ali stands against him, Lawrence speaks his new motivation: revenge. It is hell from here on out. In the name of revenge, under the shattered guise of freedom, murderers lead murderers to death so that other murderers might split the Turkish empire and Lawrence might die on a motorbike. ‘God help the men that lay under that,’ Sherif Ali says observing the night horizon lit by bombs. ‘They’re Turks,’ Lawrence says. ‘God help them,’ Ali replies. Women lie raped and murdered. Blood incites blood. And yet Lawrence has another chance. Bypass the army and continue towards Damascus, the original objective. But his purpose is revenge now. He will slaughter, despite Sherif Ali’s pleas, to avenge the deaths of innocents and his own plunge into the abyss. Covered now with war blood, he can but proceed to more blood. So they ride, these avengers, into damnation. Lawrence grins gleefully, firing at will. Fleeing enemy are run down and slaughtered. Cowboys and Indians. Some stories never change. It’s target practice for the drunken desert messiah, his white clothes stained in blood as he shoots any and every thing – a corpse, a man through the head. He is mad now, not even recognizing Sherif Ali -- his hand and dagger sticky red, his lips quivering, dust and sweat staining his face. On they go, a death march to Damascus leaving corpses, overturned cards, and fluttering flags behind. When Bentley arrives in their wake, Jesus is the only name he can invoke. ‘Jesus wept,’ he says – twice. Jesus did. Jesus does. Catching up to them, Bentley snaps another photo of Lawrence – a rotten, bloody one, he says, for a rotten, bloody newspaper.

And in Damascus – the new seat of the Lawrence-led United Arabia? Bedlam. Once again Lawrence must mediate between warring tribes. Here, at what should be the coronation of his dream, he momentarily regains his sanity only to lose it as the realities of running a divided empire set in. General Allenby and Mr. Dryden sit back and wait for the collapse so they can ride to the rescue. By candlelight, Lawrence writes in the deserted hall. Aud abu Tayi urges him to return to the desert, to his heart. ‘This is nothing,’ he says, gripping Lawrence’s arm. But Lawrence scribbles on. ‘I pray that I may never see the desert again, hear me God,’ says Lawrence. That once clean place is now blood-soaked for him yet Aud abu Tayi tells him it is the only place for him. One more voice to tell Lawrence he is bound, trapped, and unable to resign from his life. Unable to loose his weak flesh, enslaved to the pursuit of bloodshed and domination under the fluttering guise of freedom and glory.

Lawrence must now face the ruin of his life. He walks softly among the dying, their mouths covered with buzzing flies. He stumbles, seeing them. He goes for water but there is none to give. And then General Allenby and the Red Cross roar in. He, the blood-soaked shiek, can only laugh madly at their outrageous reactions and get slapped by the hand that promoted him.

Around polished mahogany, the politicians grant Lawrence another promotion. It seems that’s the result of obedience to the point of murder and madness. Lawrence’s ‘thank you’ is as vacant as his soul. And then comes the key speech. About the virtues of young men being sacrificed to the vices of old men. ‘What I owe you is beyond evaluation,’ Prince Feisal says quietly after Lawrence is through the curtain. The politicians return to negotiating. And Lawrence is free at last to go but utterly destroyed. ‘Lawrence is a sword with two edges,’ the men say. ‘We are both glad to be rid of him, are we not?’

And that’s what the grand dream boils down to, a British waterworks with an Arab flag on it. ‘Do you think it was worth it,’ Mr. Dryden asks. And General Allenby once again abdicates his responsibility. He is, after all, only a soldier. And Lawrence’s fellow officer Brighton, eyes wet at this betrayal, runs from the room.

So are the virtues of young men sacrificed to the vices of old men – in this age and everafter. And so shall there never be a movie again like the great Lawrence of Arabia.

Thanks, man. I share your deep, abiding love for the film, and would urge anyone who has the chance to see this in 70MM to get their asses out to the theater as soon as possible...

"Moriarty" out.