100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #49: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Directed by David Lean. Written by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. Starring Peter O'Toole.
I hope the money men don’t find out that I’d pay them to let me do this - David Lean
The two most famous hard cuts in all of cinema may be the cut to space in 2001: A Space Odyssey and this cut towards the beginning of David Lean’s magnum opus Lawrence of Arabia.
Keep in mind that up until this time the majority of movies- when depicting faraway places- shot their films either on studio backlots or in the nearby, convenient deserts of California. And even the ones that did shoot on location- most notably William Wyler’s Roman Holiday- still made the decision to shoot in black-and-white so as to not “distract from the story”. The top grossing color films that came before Lawrence were all mega-budget films that were shot on soundstages including The Ten Commandments, White Christmas, and Ben-Hur. Shooting on location was the impractical, expensive, and arduous option when compared to shoots that never had to leave the studio.
Circle all the way back to the 1940s: a young editor named David Lean is working for the legendary directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (also known for frequently shooting on location) on their excellent early black-and-white features including The 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft is Missing. In 1942 he directs his first film in collaboration with Noël Coward, In Which We Serve, and from there begins a career of specializing in British dramas, finding great success with his adaptations of Dickens’ Great Expectations and Oliver Twist.
The real game-changer for Lean ended up being The Bridge on the River Kwai (#28 on our list), a massive epic shot almost entirely in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The film’s use of real locations enhances the experience for the audience as they are immersed into the world of the Japanese POW camp that Sir Alec Guinness’ Colonel Nicholson and his company inhabit. The titular bridge itself is a wonder to behold and the site of its construction is now a popular tourist attraction in the area.
As his films became bigger, so did they become more infrequent (Christopher Nolan, anyone?), and Lean ended up rejecting a lot of offers for gigantic movies such as Mutiny on the Bounty, Spartacus, and Ben-Hur.
What Lean opted for was much bigger in scope than any of those movies ended up being.
“He was the most extraordinary man I ever knew”- Col. Brighton, Lawrence of Arabia
In a recent interview with the Times of London that has generated a lot of discussion, Dune1 director Denis Villeneuve lamented about the lack of memorable images in modern cinema:
Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today…Movies have been corrupted by television. In a perfect world, I’d make a compelling movie that doesn’t feel like an experiment but does not have a single word in it either. People would leave the cinema and say, ‘Wait, there was no dialogue?’ But they won’t feel the lack.
Lawrence of Arabia is a film filled with dialogue, and very memorable dialogue (penned by A Man for All Seasons playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt) at that. But that’s not what people remember it for, they remember it for the incredible images captured by Lean and his trusty DP Freddie A. Young:
In a Hollywood that has become increasingly dependent on greenscreen and “The Volume” it’s truly astounding to watch this film in the modern era. The images put on the screen of the locations shot in Jordan, Morocco and Spain are absolutely extraordinary. Without this movie, there really is no Star Wars or Indiana Jones, and a multitude of directors would never have been inspired to take up their craft.
With the terrifying advent of AI-generated video “content” generators (I’m looking at you, Sora) I think the sheer magic of this film is an important reminder of the fact that no matter how good you make your digital images look there’s really no substitute for the real thing: the VFX wizardry of the films of Lucas, Spielberg, and James Cameron would not be as successful as they were in making you believe the impossible without the necessary grounding in real locations and practical effects. As the wild success of Oppenheimer proved, people are hungry for films that feel epic and at the same time are a magic trick: making you ask “How did Nolan create a real-life nuclear explosion?,” “How did they shoot the plane sequences in Top Gun: Maverick,” or “How did they simulate quicksand in a real desert in Lawrence of Arabia?”
In the longstanding debate on shooting on film versus shooting on digital, Quentin Tarantino makes one of the most interesting arguments:
As far as I’m concerned, digital projection is the death of cinema as I know it…The magic of movies is connected to 35mm because everyone thinks that when you’re filming something, you’re recording movement. You’re not recording movement; you are just taking a series of still pictures. There’s no movement in movies at all. They are still pictures, but when shown at 24 frames a second, it creates the illusion of movement.
What Tarantino is essentially getting at here is that cinema at its essence is a practical illusion: for its entire first century films were presented by loading still, sequential images (film reels) onto a projector and played at high speeds. In the age of digital projection, its needless to say that something has been lost, and most films feel more akin to commercials in how smooth and clean they tend to look.
So what am I getting at with all this? Am I just saying to watch Lawrence of Arabia because it’s beautiful to look at? Plenty of bad movies are great to look at (sorry, Zack Snyder) but should probably be avoided.
Every Catholic should watch Lawrence of Arabia because, tying back to the points made earlier by Villeneuve, it’s doubtful any other film has come as close in the past few decades to fully capturing the reason why we go to the theaters to watch 2-3 hour long films in a dark room with strangers. I’ve barely touched upon the plot of the film or Peter O’Toole’s brilliant performance in the title role because that’s exactly the point: we watch the film because of the transportive quality imbued by the images on the screen, and those images tell us a story in a way that a novel or painting never could. To achieve this exact, immersive quality can never truly be achieved by filmmakers who do not ground themselves in the hands-on, gritty aspects of their craft: Marvel movies look and feel the way they do because they were made in the easiest and cheapest ways possible. Compare any shot in Avengers: Endgame to one in Iron Man (one of the few Marvel movies shot on film) and you will see a remarkable difference: the real grime, dirt, and sweat on Tony Stark’s clothes and forehead and the practical suits used in the film really sell you on the story and make you believe a man is really flying in that iron suit.
The late films of David Lean are stark reminders that if you want to create a meaningful, memorable film, you need to be willing to put in the work and, to quote Nolan’s The Prestige, “get your hands dirty” if you really want to engross and convince your audience of the reality of your fantastic story.
To quote Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1979 film Apocalypse Now probably best exemplifies the above thesis and who is literally putting millions of his personal money on the line for his upcoming film Megalopolis:
An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?
It’s worth noting that it’s very likely that this film was a huge inspiration for Frank Herbert to write the original Dune novel: the similarities in the plot are uncanny.