i watched
Lawrence Of Arabia -
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056172/reference/
I previously rated this 10/10. I may have to lower it slightly, maybe even down to as low as 9/10.
The good, and the bad:
The production is just mind-boggling. LoA is firmly into the "Epic" film category (didn't they use to call these "Colossals"?), with idk how many thousands of extras, between men, camels, sets, 'splosions, there is just so.much stuff being directed into this production. And frankly, it's impressive how well they were directed. IRL just to get 10 people to do at the same time the most basic thing can often lead to a fuckup; Ian McKellen had 35 years of acting experience when he filmed LOTR, and even he can't fucking take his watch off during filming.
The primary antagonists - or, rather, what *I* see as the primary antagonists, Faisal (Alec Guinness), Sharif Ali (Omar Sharif), Auda (Anthony Quinn) - are superbly acted, and a fantastic representation of the characters from the book. I say "antagonists" because, while they ride with Lawrence, he is struggling throughout the film to maintain control over them, and they can at any time explode into a tribal war and fuck up the entire mission. The Turks are not really the antagonist, they are just slaughter cattle.
The book is different; this happens during the start of the Arab uprising, but changes during the prolonged campaign against the railroads, which the film compresses into hardy an hour. Ok so, the book is 800 pages long - i give you that.
Lawrence, and Peter O'Toole, not a big fan of. Certainly the real Lawrence was a weird man, almost certainly a repressed homosexual, naive to the point of life endangerment, almost an alien in human skin, but O'Toole makes him .. idk, just "weird"? I guess it's difficult to summarize Seven Pillars so briefly, but Lawrence seemed to have been a man with his head completely in the clouds, with an unwilling yet very strong Protagonist Syndrome, which made him the perfect candidate for what was essentially a suicide mission.
if you have not read the book .. what is wrong with you. Seven Pillars is one of the greatest masterpieces of human literature, i would put it up there with History of Western Philosophy (Russel).
Anyway,
the action is a bit shit. The blood is fake. The turks just die
en'masse when an arab casually swings a sword in their general direction. 'Film is from 1962 so it's to be expected, but today it's a bit disappointing.
O'Toole maybe was not a great casting choice. A more down-to-earth Lawrence would probably have been better, but the rest of the cast is solid. I particularly liked Gen Allenby (Jack Hawkins), who hides well his admiration for the ideals of Lawrence, but manages to just so slightly give it away, to let you know he is on Lawrence's side.
The extras are excellent. God knows what kind of insane administration was necessary to manage, pay, house and feed all these people.
The photography is grandiose, but i wouldn't call this a visual film. There's scenes where the photography is used as introduction to a scene, and then it's quietly forgotten until it's needed again. There's more modern films that have done this better, to be honest.
The music is good, but i wouldn't go further. But the sound is also very good for a film of the sixties.
Having devoured the book, i think LoA is more of a story *inspired* by Seven Pillars, than an attempt to reproduce the book. The book is a war story, the film is not - it's a spectacle of showing you these colorful Arabs on their horses, the desert, the Bri'ish generals getting their noses rubbed in into their cultural ignorance, all salient points of the book, but omits the grime, the sweat, the pain of a prolonged insurgence campaign that destroyed a ridiculous amount of turkish war materiel, all done on a shoestring, and by an alliance held together with spit, gum and string.
You know what, it's fair to say
10/10 - a masterpiece that is simply impossible to recreate.
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