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The haunting soundtrack of this 1962 film presentation of one of the twentieth century’s most ambiguous heroes is not the only thing that leaves one wondering how such artistry could flourish among the certainties of that historical moment.
If it is impossible to know who and what T.E. Lawrence really was, this film deftly refuses to make everything clear.
That an English soldier immersed in ‘Arabia’ (the Hejaz, mostly) could successfully skirt ‘blasphemous conceit’ and still pull off a decisive role in the Arab uprising against the imperium that was then abbreviated as ‘the Turk’ is improbable at best. That this stunning wide-screen retelling of his story-cum-history could remain compelling forty years later at a time when few viewers could endure its plodding pace is a tribute to its genius.
‘Nothing is written’, Lawrence insists to Arab tribal leaders who believe everything is written. He seems to remake possibility by sheer force of eerie will. Lawrence comes across as the quintessential English Impatient, seeing more than Arab realists and out-of-touch colonialists could imagine.
In the end, the Turk did go home and Arabia was set free to be re-enslaved by men of a different accent and set of blood loyalties.
Who knows who really won the Levant campaign? So many claimed to have done so. Sixty years later, it still isn’t clear.
But the consideration of that question is more entertainingly carried out with the stunning imagery of this film on one’s shelf. Its widescreen sequences of men on camels in almost borderless desert stretches the imagination.
The very strangeness of Lawrence’s odyssey is painted the better for the novelty of what writers, directors, and camera operators managed to pull off in a year when the world lurched towards nuclear confrontation and the legacy of one very odd Englishmen had still not been settled.
See the movie. Download the soundtrack. Make L of A one of your legacy films.
Canter Bridge 
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