David Lean's 70mm desert epic. Three hours and forty minutes that established what scale could do on film.
1916-1918. T.E. Lawrence, a British army lieutenant on the Arabian Peninsula, is assigned to liaise with Prince Faisal and the Arab forces fighting the Ottoman Empire alongside the British. Lawrence becomes increasingly identified with the Arab cause. He leads a Bedouin force across the supposedly-impassable Nefud desert to take the port of Aqaba from the rear. He fights the Ottoman army through Damascus.
The film follows Lawrence across roughly two years of campaign. He becomes a near-mythological figure to the Arab forces and to the British press. He is also progressively brutalised by what the campaign requires of him. The film's final act covers the British post-war betrayal of the Arab independence promises and Lawrence's return to England, where he is killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935 (which the film opens on).
Lawrence of Arabia is, by general critical consensus, the apex of the classical Hollywood epic. The film was shot in 70mm Super Panavision, in the actual deserts of Jordan, Morocco, and Spain, with crews of thousands and live camel herds. The production took two years. The final cut runs three hours and thirty-eight minutes including overture, intermission, entr'acte, and exit music — a format that almost no contemporary cinema would attempt.
The film won seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director. David Lean's direction of large-scale exterior sequences was the foundational influence on later epic directors. Stanley Kubrick studied the film for 2001. Steven Spielberg has cited it as the foundational text for his own approach to historical scale. Ridley Scott's Gladiator is in some sense a direct descendant.
The most-discussed transition in Lawrence of Arabia is the cut from Lawrence blowing out a match in a British military office to a wide shot of the desert sun rising over the Arabian peninsula. The cut occurs roughly forty minutes into the film. The transition is, in editing-class shorthand, perhaps the most-quoted match cut ever performed.
What the cut does is collapse the entire transition from European bureaucracy to the desert into a single visual move. Lawrence is, after this cut, in a different world. The cut is the audience's transition as much as it is the character's. The editor was Anne V. Coates; she won the Best Editing Oscar largely on the strength of this single decision.
Peter O'Toole had been a working theatre actor with limited film experience before Lawrence of Arabia. He was 30 during production; Lawrence was 28-30 during the events depicted. The performance is built on O'Toole's specific physical and vocal qualities — the height, the blue eyes, the slightly unstable charisma, the willingness to play extremely intense interior states without external resolution.
The performance has been argued about for sixty years. Some critics consider it the greatest film acting of the post-war period; others find O'Toole's mannerisms distracting. What's not in dispute is that the role required something almost no previous biographical-epic performance had attempted: the gradual psychological collapse of the protagonist across the runtime, ending on a man who is recognisably broken by what his earlier self set in motion.