17 Reasons Why You Need To See Lawrence of Arabia

REPOST FROM A FEW YEARS AGO, IN HONOR OF SIR DAVID LEAN'S BIRTHDAY

Greatest movie of all time, and here's a bunch of reasons why. Most of this has been taken from either IMDb or Wiki:

1) Almost all movement in the film goes from left to right. David Lean said he did this to emphasize that the film was a journey. (See Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and you will notice that the "good guys" at the end of the film are moving from right to left when attacking the Separatist army. This was done purposely.)

2) They named a lens after David Lean because they figured out a way to film a close-up of a mirage for this movie. To film Omar Sharif's entrance through a mirage, Freddie Young used a special 482mm lens from Panavision. Panavision still has this lens, and it is known among cinematographers as the "David Lean lens." Check out the scene HERE.

3) During an appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" (1962) in the 1970s, Peter O'Toole was describing just how long the movie took to make by referring to the scene when Lawrence and Gen. Allenby, after their meeting, continue talking while walking down a staircase. According to O'Toole, part of the scene had to be reshot much later, "so in the final print, when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I'm a year older than I was when I started walking down them."

4) The rescue of Gasim from the Nefu Desert, followed shortly by the greatest line of all time: "Nothing is written."

5) Shooting began on 15 May, 1961 and ended on 20 October, 1962.

6) The use of the locations in Almería, Spain for the train sequences and others made that region popular with international film makers. Most famously, it became the setting of virtually all of the Spaghetti Westerns of the '60s and '70s, specifically those of Sergio Leone. (Watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for the scene where Tuco forces Blondie to walk through the desert.)

7) Steven Spielberg considers this his favorite movie of all time, and the one which convinced him to become a film maker.

8) Screenwriter William Monahan, who scripted Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed is a fan of Robert Bolt and has stated on numerous occasions that viewing Lawrence is what inspired him to be a screenwriter. When he was awarded the Oscar for his work on The Departed, he remarked how great it was to win with Peter O'Toole in the audience, because Lawrence of Arabia was the greatest screenplay he'd ever read.

9) Perhaps the second most famous (I myself prefer it to the one from 2001) match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg as inspiration for his own work. Watch it HERE.

10) "Who are you?"

11) Back to Spielberg: David Lean once screened Lawrence of Arabia with Steven Spielberg. Lean gave Spielberg a "live director's commentary." Spielberg said it was one of the best moments of his life, learning from a true master. Consequently, Spielberg stated that it helped him make better pictures and that commentary directly influenced every movie he has made since.

12) It's an epic that ends on a downbeat.

13) TE Lawrence is considered by many historians to be a somewhat enigmatic figure. Instead of doing the typical Hollywood thing, the creators of the film did not give us an explanation so much as a riddle to puzzle over. Producer Sam Spiegel once explained that the purpose behind the movie was not to solve the mystery of who Lawrence of Arabia was, but rather to perpetuate it.

14) The score. RIP Maurice Jarre.

15) The raid on Aqaba.

16) "No prisoners!"

17) Though it deals with philosophy, politics, religion, World War I, and foreign policy - and deals with all these things wonderfully - the film essentially boils down to one thing: the question of personal identity.

David Lean Knew How To Make A Movie

Sir David Lean is my favorite director of all time. The guy knew how to shoot a film and make it BIG. He wasn't afraid, like a lot of directors seem to be nowadays, to make a movie "cinematic" and demand that his audience be intelligent.

We watched A Passage to India last night. It was one of those movies I wanted to see but kept pushing off, because of its lukewarm critical reception. Good, but not great, seemed to be what everybody said about the film. Almost an afterthought in Lean's oeuvre.

And for the first hour or so, I was in agreement. APTI, despite the typical Lean flourishes of loads of extras, exotic locales, and theatrical dialogue, came off as a very "modest" film in the early-going. That's probably more a result of the source material (the novel by E.M. Forster is excellent by the way), than anything Lean was doing, but still, the film felt big while the story felt small.

But slowly, inexorably, the story caught up to the film. APTI became less about images and dynamic moments, though Lean's handiwork is marvelous throughout, and more about emotion. Thematically, APTI constantly asks somewhat rhetorically "Are we able to connect with other human beings?" and alternatively answers the question, retracts its answer, subverts the answer and the retraction, and ultimately leaves it up to us to decide. It was the perfect way to present Forster's famous, succinct command: "Only connect," while showing us just how simple and yet difficult that can be. In Forster's mind, it is only through relationships that we are able to grow, that we are able to see our own strengths and shortcomings, and that are we able to become better people.

Read the book, see the movie. Or, see the movie, read the book. Each is wonderful enough not to spoil the other. APTI is not Lean's best, but it's a close second to Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai so long as you're not waiting for sweeping battles and epic journeys across time and country. APTI just might be Lean's most personal work, though I have to qualify that by saying I have not seen much of his pre-Bridge films, including Great Expectations.

The Book Is Better Than The Movie

For starters, I'll go off on a tangent and talk about novelizations. The general rule that "the book is better than the movie" is untrue when you're talking about novelizations. I haven't read too many, but most seem kind of pointless. (If you're reading this and are a publisher and thinking of asking me to write one or several, I'd be happy to change my opinion without shame, of course.)

Novelizations might offer some deeper insight into what the characters of a film were thinking, and in some cases, that actually makes the characters' motivations more plausible and consistent. But from what I've gathered, the ironclad rules of a novelization are to remain faithful to the screenplay, flesh out the story but only a little bit, and make sure the style doesn't get in the way of the story.

And there's also another strange phenomenon I've observed with novelizations. Whenever I discover that a book I've read is being made into a movie, 99% of the time, I'm interested to see how the story will play out on the big screen. With novelizations, again, the rule is reversed. I'm usually never interested in seeing how a movie is translated into a novel. Maybe if novelizations were given more leeway and were more adaptation, less paint-by-numbers, then that wouldn't be the case. That would be an interesting experiment, though, adapting a movie into a novel.

So let's put novelizations aside, unless of course you want to comment about them below ;)

Most people say (I know this is very scientific) that "the book is better than the movie."

Of course, there are always exceptions. The first one that springs to anyone's mind is The Godfather, with which I'd agree. The only other example I can think of is Lawrence of Arabia. It source material, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is one of the few books I've never been able to get through. But with the case of Lawrence, the comparison of book to movie is unfair (see my apples to oranges disclaimer at the bottom of this post).

Aside from those two stories and a few other obvious ones I'm probably missing, it's been my experience that the general rule holds true. The book is better than the movie.

Why is that?

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. So then shouldn't the movie be better? A movie is a collection of carefully-chosen pictures. And after all, a movie is not just pictures, it is also language, sound, music, movement, and probably most importantly, it is acted. Unlike a novel, a film doesn't have to rely solely on language to tell its story.

A four second establishing shot is much more vivid than a paragraph describing a house. Or at least, it should be, if a picture really is worth a thousand words. A film wraps itself up, on average, anywhere between 80 and 180 minutes. If you're not blessed as a natural speed-reader (like my wife), then chances are a movie is going to tell its story much more quickly, more pointedly, than a novel. So it should be much more powerful.

A lot of people say that books are better because you're forced to imagine things for yourself. You have to create the characters and the setting as much as the author does, essentially filling in the gaps, or the gaps as you perceive them. I've never understood why that would make a book better than a movie. If you have to do more work to understand a novel, then surely it's not as powerful a medium as film.

So...why then?

Perhaps the statistics are skewed. Only the people that have read the books which are being made into movies are the ones saying that the books are better, after all. The people who enjoy going to the movies but don't like to read will never say, "The movie was better than the book," because they haven't read the book. And let's face it, there are probably a lot more people that enjoy going to the movies but not reading than there are people that enjoy going to the movies and reading.

For those of us that do read a lot, we usually read the book before we see the movie. So chances are we're naturally inclined to like the book more because that's what we encountered first. There has to be a fancy psychological concept for that.

So...why? There must be a good, scientific reason for this.

My theory is three-fold.

1) A film can only sustain itself for so long. In some rare cases, a four hour movie works, but usually, an audience can only sit for close to two hours. No matter how sweeping or epic the story might be, a film is constrained by simple logistics. But not so with a novel. Some books require a week's worth of reading, or more, to finish. You can take a break when you need to. You enter the story when you can. A novel is more of an escape, a full immersion. You become friends with the characters; their journeys become your journey. You see a movie, but you grow with a novel. A book paces itself, you play along at the same beat. A novel, while it must have a major story arc, is permitted to have several minor arcs as well that can reinforce, subvert, or add complexity to, the bigger picture. They're not as "simple," for lack of a better term, than movies.

2) Novels are better at psychologically penetrating characters. You understand the players better in a book. In that way, novels become much more personal adventures than movies are or can be, even if the story being told is grand in scale, big in scope. You know what a character's hopes and dreams and quirks and faults and good qualities are--they are fully-realized, fully human. They are you, or some part of you, or who you used to be, or who you want to be.

3) Novels are better means for discussing, challenging, and revealing universal truths. This is really an off-shoot of points 1) and 2). When done right, a novel can be longer and more complex, and is peopled by more fully-rounded characters than a film. So naturally it follows that a book is better suited to exploring the age old questions of what it means to be human, the nature of good and evil, our place in the universe, etc.

Of course, there is always the apples to oranges argument to make. The two media shouldn't be compared, because different rules apply and different tools are used. Who knows. Probably someone smarter than me.

What does everybody think?