"Nothing Is Written": How Lawrence of Arabia Saved My Irish Soul, Part I
“Women who strive to be equal to men lack ambition.” Timothy Leary
When Lawrence of Arabia opens in Toronto’s plush Odeon Carlton Theatre in December 1962, I am an introverted 12 year old prep boy vibrating with the first flushes of puberty, trapped in a desert of a school cleansed of girls. Perhaps, then, a tad perverse of me to over-attach to an exhilarating “Boys Own” adventure story bereft of a single female character.
Like an ocean liner curving down the street, the elegant, moderne 1948 movie house – “the Showplace of the Dominion”[1], complete with a Honey Dew restaurant, is a trip unto itself with its 2,300 reservable orchestra, mezzanine and balcony seats of velvet green and gold, the colour scheme echoing Maple Leaf Gardens, our cathedral of hockey, mere steps eastward.
As the organist beside the stage plays God Save the Queen, my brother Mike and I rise with practiced reluctance. Then, like a disrobing goddess, the swish of the gold curtains and the wash of Maurice Jarre’s soaring theme music, the hot, new technology of 70mm “Super Panavision” flooding the gilded frame of the technicolour dream factory.
As the opening credits roll, the camera looks down from a bird’s eye view a man polishing his motorcycle, preparing for a trip down a narrow rural road that will deliver him to his accidental death. Cut to his funeral, and then, a la Citizen Kane, we are engulfed in an extended flashback, or in Pauline Kael’s memorable phrase, “an intimate epic.”
Loosely based on Thomas Edward Lawrence’s magisterial tome, The Seven PIllars of Wisdom, the story revolves around a complex, conflicted alpha/beta male, part archaeologist-diplomat, part poet-warrior, whose influence on Middle East geopolitics a century ago endures to this day. Character is destiny.
Director David Lean’s casting of a lanky, intense Irish actor with the gloriously priapic name of Peter O’Toole[2] proved a canny choice, despite the nine inch height difference – 6’ 2” to ‘5’ 5” -- with the real-life Lawrence. The bastard offspring of an Anglo-Irish nobleman, Sir Thomas Chapman, and a family servant, Tom Junior inherited a lifelong identity problem when his father left his wife in Ireland and moved to Oxford to live with the servant and the boy, changing the family name to Lawrence to escape social shaming. As Lean correctly intuited, O’Toole, being Irish, understood “brilliant madness” in his bones.
As artists tend to do, Lean and the screenwriter, Robert Bolt, bent the historical facts to enhance dramatic effect. In 1917, an insolent, over-educated misfit British army lieutenant (O’Toole) stationed in Cairo is sent to appraise the prospects of Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness) in his faltering revolt against the imperialist Turks. (What a revelation to learn that the Ottoman Empire was not a furniture warehouse).
We are given an early clue of our hero’s masochism when he extinguishes a flaming match with his fingers without flinching. An astounded soldier tries the same stunt, only to scream in pain. What’s the trick?
“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
When Lawrence ignites and blows out a second match, we jump cut to the yellow crescent of the sun rising over the Sahara Desert.[3] I am pulled into a womb-like trance, rescued from the daily travails of being 12. I mean, those smooth, undulating sand dunes are downright erotic.
Travelling by camel to meet Feisal, Lawrence and his Bedouin guide stop at a well. In the far distance, a lone rider emerges from a shimmering mirage – a dazzling cinematic effect and a sublime entrance for Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif). When Ali shoots the guide for stealing his water, Lawrence rants:
“Sherif Ali! So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel – as you are!”[4]
The racist British generals dismiss the disunited Arab tribes as “a nation of sheep-stealers” and the Arabian theatre “a sideshow of a sideshow,” the real war being fought against the Germans on the Western Front. But Lawrence identifies with the “wog” underdogs (underwogs?) and forges a tie with Prince Feisal who astutely perceives in the blonde, blue-eyed firebrand “another of these desert-loving English.” Lawrence experiences the furnace of the Sahara as “fun.”
Taking it upon himself to unite the Arab tribes against Turkish oppression, Lawrence conceives a surprise attack on the enemy port of Aqaba whose guns face the Suez Canal. By approaching by land across the infernal Nefud Desert, “the sun’s anvil”, he proposes taking the Turks from behind, as it were. Before setting off with 50 warriors on what Ali considers a suicide mission, Lawrence adopts two teenaged orphans, Daud and Farraj, as his servants; in real life, Lawrence may have indulged in a little hebephilic, inter-racial hanky panky (“One hump or two?”), but in 1962, such scenes were not ready for prime time.
During the death-defying slog across the Nefud, moving at night to minimize the murderous heat, one of the Arabs, Gasim, falls off his camel but his absence isn’t noticed till morning. His fatalistic tribesmen tell Lawrence it’s too late to go back as the sun’s anvil will crush Gasim within hours. His time has come -- “It is written.” But the “civilized” Anglo rides back and saves the man’s life, proclaiming in triumph, “Nothing is written.”
Earning reverence from the tribesmen, “El Aurens” officially “goes native”, donning the honorary white robes of a tribal chieftain and gazing narcissistically into his own reflection in the long blade of his knife. He persuades the ferociously macho Auda (Tony Quinn), the leader of the mercenary Howeitat tribe -- aka the Gordie Howe of the Sahara -- to join in their mission, promising a box of gold. But the planned attack is almost derailed when one of Ali’s men kills one of Auda’s in a blood feud. To preserve the fragile alliance, Lawrence volunteers to execute the culprit with his pistol. It turns out to be Gasim, the very man he had saved from the Nefud. His face riven with horror, Lawrence riddles his friend with bullets, then throws away his gun. “So, it is written!” sneers Auda.
In a rousing set piece, the Arabs storm Aqaba. (O’Toole was nearly killed when he fell off his camel during the charge – a hell of a price to pay, a la James Dean, for incipient fame -- but he was saved when the beast hovered over him, fending off the extras on stampeding horses). When the mercenary Auda realizes there is no gold in the captured stronghold, as Lawrence promised, he tells Ali: “He is not perfect!”
To report the victory to the British in Cairo, Lawrence sets off on a Moses-like trek across Sinai with his two young servants. In a sandstorm, Daud is sucked into a sinkhole. Like a zombie, Lawrence trudges on, his face caked with guilt and sand. Suddenly, floating above the dunes, a cargo ship cuts through the blue waters of the Suez Canal. On the other side of the canal, a man on a motorcycle (played in a cameo by the director David Lean), stops and shouts: “Who are you? Who are you?”
A close-up of Lawrence’s blank face reveals: he has no clue.
In the officers’ club in Cairo, Lawrence orders two glasses of lemonade for Farraj and himself, but the Brits want to 86 the “dirty wog.” When Lawrence says he has taken Aqaba, his superiors sputter incredulously.
“Taken Aqaba? Who has?”
“We have. Our side in this war has. The wogs have…”
Reporting to General Allenby (Jack Hawkins), Lawrence makes a confession of such subversive, universal import that it should be nailed above the bunk in every military barracks the world over:
“I had to execute a man with my pistol. There was something about it I didn’t like.”
“Well, naturally.”
No, something else.”
“I see. Well, that’s all right. Let it be a warning.”
“No. Something else.”
“What then?”
“I enjoyed it.”
“Rubbish!”
There it is: the deep, secret taboo that generation upon generation drives countless soldiers of conscience around the twist.
War is hell -- and a sexual rush. Bloodlust, with stress on the lust.
Promoted to Major, Lawrence, half-mad, vascillates from wanting to retreat to soft, green England or renew his passion for desert fighting and drive his “brilliant bit of soldiering” to the next level. Lawrence demands, but does not receive, assurance that the Limeys do not harbour secret designs on oil-rich Arabia, filling the vacuum left by the defeat of Turkey. General Allenby supplies Lawrence with guns, explosives, money, and armoured cars to escalate his guerrilla war, unscrupulously manipulating “that poor devil riding the whirlwind.”
Swish of the gold curtains. Intermission. My brother and I head to the watering hole for an iced Pepsi and box of Smarties.
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[1] In the 1970s, psycho-impresario Darth Grabinsky dynamited our childhood dream palaces and spread a plague of tiny, cheesy Cineplex rat mazes. An unforgivable sin. In a logical regression, kids nowadays watch Lawrence of Arabia and 2001 on their iPhones. Next up: brain implants.
[2] In his debut movie role, the blond, blue-eyed O’Toole (whom Noel Coward dubbed “Florence of Arabia”) was robbed of the best actor Oscar by Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Marlon Brandon was considered for the part. Stanley Kowalski on a camel? The horror!
[3] I nominate the flaming match/rising sun for the Jump Cut Hall of Fame, right up there with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when a prehistoric ape flings a bone skyward, morphing into a 21st century space station, conflating the evolution of man into a split second. Nice!
[4] One late night in the early 1990s, I walked from my downtown apartment over to Bistro 990, a Toronto film festival hotspot frequented by the glitterati, as I knew one of the baristas would slip me free champagne. As I approached the front door, out strode Omar Sharif, alone, fixing me with that charismatic smile and liquid Egyptian eyes. For a few seconds we both stood still -- do you recognize me, he seemed to be asking, wordlessly -- then he brushed past. To my eternal regret, I failed to seize the moment and recite in an ironic tone O’Toole’s “greedy, barbarous and cruel” speech that I had committed to memory. But this effete Anglo lost his nerve.