The Best Picture Countdown #35: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: David Lean
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharrif

Lawrence of Arabia is a film that shouldn’t work according to any traditional understanding of what makes a movie “work.” It’s long, there’s no girl to diffuse the tensions between the male characters, and the hero is deeply flawed and sexually ambiguous. There’s also the fact that much of its plot centers on issues of Middle Eastern autonomy, and that a great deal of the film is comprised of long, lingering shots of the desert. And yet this is a film that absolutely works, a visually stunning, fascinating (if not necessarily historically accurate) portrait of a man who became a myth. A lot of films are tagged as epics, but this one dwarfs them all.

From the beginning, we’re made to understand that T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) is an unusual man, troublesome, difficult to manage, but also strangely alluring. Before he’s even done anything, you believe that he can accomplish the impossible because that’s the way that he carries himself. At the request of Mr. Dryden (Claude Raines), a British politician, he’s sent into the desert to assess the situation with Prince Feisal’s (Alec Guinness) army of Bedouins, whom the British army hope to absorb into their own ranks. However, it doesn’t take Lawrence long to come up with his own ideas for the Arabs and talks Feisal into lending him fifty of his men, including Sherif Ali (Omar Sharrif), to travel across the desert and take Aqaba back from the occupying Turks. When the mission proves to be successful, Lawrence is promoted in the British ranks and is allowed to wage guerrilla war on the Turks with his army of composed of various Arab tribes. By this point, Lawrence the man and Lawrence the myth begin to conflict, and he begins to unravel in the face of his findings about himself and his realization that the Arabs will never be given autonomy, no matter what they accomplish.

The primary theme of the film is identity (“Who are you?” is repeated throughout). Lawrence is British, though he doesn’t feel British, and can never really be Arab, even though he feels that he is one. Similarly, while he’s embraced by people on both sides, he’s not fully accepted by either side (towards the end of the film, Feisal and the British General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) agree that it is in the best interest of both sides for Lawrence to be removed from the debate). Ali argues that Lawrence can be whoever – and whatever – he wants to be because Lawrence is a man who seems to transcend any traditional understanding of what is or isn’t possible. For a time, Lawrence believes this, rejecting his British uniform in favour of traditional robes and immersing himself in desert life. “Nothing is written,” he states, meaning that neither fate nor identity is predetermined and that it is possible to be the author of your own story. However, following a brutal attack after he’s captured by Turks, he’s more aware than ever that the divisions he thought he had transcended do in fact still exist. He points to his skin, informing Ali that it can’t be changed and he becomes a shadow of himself, a deflated figure inside his larger than life persona. That he would come to this is perhaps inevitable. When he says “Nothing is written,” it is specifically in reference to his turning around and riding back through the desert to find a man who had fallen behind. Later, the man kills a member of a rival tribe and, to keep the peace, Lawrence must execute him. “It was written,” Auda (Anthony Quinn) states when he learns that the man had already been given up for dead before. He was destined to die, sooner or later, in one way or another and Lawrence can’t change that, just like he can’t change his skin.

At the beginning of the film, we see Lawrence burning himself, which can be seen as a literal attempt to change his skin. “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” he says, giving us our first hint at the film’s other big theme, Lawrence’s love/hate relationship with violence. Lawrence is initially depicted as someone who is sickened by violence. After he’s executed the man he once saved, he throws his pistol away in disgust and seems unable to cope with what he’s done. However, he later confesses to his superiors that his abhorrence of violence stems from the intense pleasure he gets from inflicting it (“There was something about it that I didn’t like… I enjoyed it”). He’s horrified by this aspect of his personality, which essentially takes over following his beating and implied rape by Turkish soldiers, when he leads his army on an attack of a Turkish camp. “Take no prisoners,” he says, even though many of the opposing soldiers are ready to give themselves up. They are, instead, slaughtered by Lawrence’s army to the disgust of Ali and the American reporter Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), and Lawrence himself, who knows that he is now too far gone to be of much use anymore in this campaign.

What director David Lean accomplishes with this film is astounding. Its running time is about three and a half hours, but the pacing is so perfect that it doesn’t feel longer than an average film. And the way that Lean depicts the desert is genius, showing it at various times to be heaven and hell, wide open and suffocatingly constricted, beautiful and ugly. It is hard to effectively describe the scope and breadth of a film like this, which is so massive in what it undertakes that there’s not really anything else to compare it to. This is filmmaking at its most monumental and breathtaking.

The Best Picture Countdown #30: The Bridge on the River Kwai

Note: this post has been modified from a previously published post

Director: David Lean
Starring: Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, William Holden

The Bridge on the River Kwai takes place during World War II, but it’s a war film in only the broadest of terms. This is a psychological film, a battle of wills between two men from different sides of the war who are equally proud and equally determined to be an example to their countrymen. On the British side is Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), on the Japanese side is Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), and they find themselves united in their obsession with building a bridge across the river Kwai.

The film opens famously with the British soldiers marching into the P.O.W. camp whistling the “Colonel Bogey March.” They are met by Saito and it becomes immediately apparent that he and Nicholson are going to clash. Nicholson, a life-long military man, clings to the sanctioned rules of warfare and attempts to impose them on Saito, whom he assumes is simply unaware of them. “Do not speak to me of rules,” Saito replies. “This is war! This is not a game of cricket!” The two are deadlocked. Nicholson is tortured in an attempt to break him and thereby break his men, but instead he endures and it’s Saito who must give in, agreeing that officers will not be compelled to participate in forced labour. With that out of the way, Nicholson goes about his next task, which is organizing the building of the bridge. He is shocked to find that his men have been sabotaging the effort in his absence and rectifies it, believing that the honest effort of building the bridge will be good for morale. “One day the war will be over and I hope that the people that use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers,” Nicholson says. And while keeping up morale by giving the prisoners a chance to achieve and take pride in something is all well and good, as Major Clipton (James Donald) points out it also means collaborating with Britain’s sworn enemy. If the bridge is built – and built well – it will be used against Britain and the rest of the Allies, a fact which is lost on Nicholson in his determination to create a monument to British mastery.

As Nicholson and the British continue to build the bridge, Saito begins to come undone. In one scene he sits alone crying, unable to cope with the fact that Nicholson can build a better bridge than he ever could have hoped of doing himself. Saito isn’t a career soldier like Nicholson and slowly renounces his authority to the other man. In one exchange Nicholson lays out the necessities for finishing the bridge on time, which includes using some of the Japanese soldiers as labourers. “I have already given the order,” Saito says. Nicholson then suggests laying out a work quota for the Japanese soldiers. “I have already given out the order.” Saito is effectively broken at a time when he should be triumphant. The bridge will be finished and he won’t have to commit suicide in order to preserve his honour, but it’s spoiled because he has to rely on Nicholson’s knowledge and willpower to get it done. Guinness is wonderful as Nicholson and won the Academy Award for Best Actor, but Hayakawa (who was nominated as Supporting Actor) is more than equal to him, bringing a depth of humanity to the role that the film would have suffered without.

While Nicholson and Saito engage in their battle of wills, there’s another plot running through the film, that of the American P.O.W Shears (William Holden). Shears escapes through the jungle and spends time lounging on beaches with British nurses before being persuaded to return to the jungle to sabotage the bridge. I’ve always found this plotline rather unnecessary and the character of Shears ill-defined. He’s not really motivated by anything except what the plot requires him to be motivated by at any given moment. And while it’s true that Shears and his team bring about the film’s resolution, in that they provide the means for the bridge to blow up, it just seems like they belong in a different movie than the one about Nicholson, Saito and their shared, mad dream.

And mad is the only word for it. “Madness! Madness!” These last words are uttered by Clipton who still can’t believe that Nicholson doesn’t realize what he's done. Of course, what he doesn’t know – but we do – is that Nicholson does realize what the bridge means. “What have I done?” he asks then falls dead, landing on the detonator which blows up the bridge. In his last moment, he is redeemed, but what was the cost of his journey towards redemption? He and Saito are both dead, so is Shears, and the bridge, dedicated with a plaque to tribute the work of the British soldiers, is destroyed.

Madness.

Oscarstravaganza: Doctor Zhivago

* * *

Winner: Best Cinematography, 1965
Director: David Lean
Starring: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Rod Steiger

Big screens were made for David Lean's epics. I would imagine that even an IMAX screen could barely contain them. Doctor Zhivago is one of his biggest, most lavish productions, though it ultimately lacks the gravitas of his best films, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. Still, the strength of its production values makes up somewhat for the weaknesses of its script and much like with his previous films, Lean's ability to craft a story makes the time fly by.

Based on the novel by Boris Pasternak, the film tells the story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), born just in time to be caught in the transition from Czarist Russia to the communist Soviet Union. He's a young boy when his mother dies, leaving him in the care of her friends Alexander (Ralph Richardson) and Anna (Siobhan McKenna) and he grows up with their daughter Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), whom he eventually marries. With the outbreak of World War I, Yuri is sent to the front where he officially meets Lara (Julie Christie) who is working as a nurse and trying to locate her husband Pasha (Tom Courtenay). Until this point Yuri and Lara's lives have brought them within each other's vicinities, but they've never actually been able to speak to each other. Now, spending a great deal of time together in an intense situation, they fall in love, though it remains unconsummated. When the war ends Yuri returns to Tonya and their son and Lara sets off on her own course.

Moscow has changed in the time that Yuri has been gone. The Russian Revolution has taken place and the communists are now in charge, turning the Zhivago house into a tenement where Zhivago, Tonya, their son, and Alexander are forced to share but a single room. Eventually the family moves to Varynko, in the Ural Mountains, where Alexander has a country estate and where Zhiavgo learns that Lara and her daughter have set up residence in the next town over. They begin their affair in earnest but the always shifting political forces tear them apart at every turn.

All of this really just scratches the surface of Doctor Zhivago's plot, which also includes a framing device involving Yuri's half-brother (Alec Guinness), a girl who may or may not be Yuri and Lara's illegitimate child, Pasha's transformation into the iron fisted Red leader Strelnikov, and Lara's relationship with Komorovsky (Rod Steiger), a one-time "advisor" to her mother whom she alternates between needing and despising. There is also, of course, a cursory history lesson about the political changes sweeping through Russia, though the film never delves too deeply into these issues. Doctor Zhivago is about the Russian Revolution and civil war in the same way that Gone With The Wind is about the American civil war and reconstruction. Both films treat these events not as history worth exploring but as romantic backdrops for the intense passions of their protagonists.

The problem with Doctor Zhivago is that it doesn't really feel that passionate. We're given several cues to make us think otherwise (my favourite comes from the beginning, when Yuri and Lara pass each other on a crowded tram and the film cuts to a shot of sparks flying from the cable), but the romance ultimately feels a bit watery. Lean is very good at telling stories about men and their relationships with each other, but he seems less sure how to convey the complexities of relationships between men and women and, indeed, the relationship between Yuri and Lara takes up a relatively small amount of the screen time. The most dynamic characters are the ones on the sidelines - Steiger's self-important and self-loathing Komorovsky, Courtenay's hard line Pasha/Strelnikov, the minor characters who show up for a scene or two and then disappear back into the tapestry of the story. In comparison Yuri and Lara are a bit boring, their concerns rather run of the mill.

What saves the film is the grand spectacle of it. Lean may misstep here and there in telling the story, but he remains a master at composing brilliant shots, some of them absolutely staggering in their beauty. The one that most immediately comes to mind is Yuri and Lara's entrance into the ice palace, so delicately, perfectly rendered that you can almost feel the chill. I'm also very fond of the shot of the shovel breaking the ice on the train to reveal the countryside, and the shot of a sunflower fading into a shot of Lara's face. Lean is such a masterful visual storyteller that you feel compelled to forgive him his flaws. If Doctor Zhivago never reaches the level of Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia, it is still worth seeing for a variety of other reasons and it has aged fairly well.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharrif, Anthony Quinn, Claude Raines

Lawrence of Arabia is a film that shouldn’t work according to any traditional understanding of what makes a movie “work.” It’s long, there’s no girl to diffuse the tensions between the male characters, and the hero is deeply flawed and sexually ambiguous. There’s also the fact that much of its plot centers on issues of Middle Eastern autonomy, and that a great deal of the film is comprised on long, lingering shots of the desert. And yet this is a film that absolutely works, a visually stunning, fascinating (if not historically accurate) portrait of a man who became a myth. A lot of films are tagged as epics, but this one dwarfs them all.

From the beginning, we’re made to understand that T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) is an unusual man, troublesome, difficult to manage, but also strangely alluring. Before he’s even done anything, you believe that he can accomplish the impossible because that’s the way that he carries himself. At the request of Mr. Dryden (Claude Raines), a British politician, he’s sent into the desert to assess the situation with Prince Feisal’s (Alec Guinness) army of Bedouins, whom the British army hope to absorb into their own ranks. However, it doesn’t take Lawrence long to come up with his own ideas for the Arabs and talks Feisal into lending him fifty of his men, including Sherif Ali (Omar Sharrif), to travel across the desert and take Aqaba back from the occupying Turks. When the mission proves to be successful, Lawrence is promoted in the British ranks and is allowed to wage guerrilla war on the Turks with his army of composed of various Arab tribes. By this point, Lawrence the man and Lawrence the myth begin to conflict, and he begins to unravel in the face of his findings about himself, and his realization that the Arabs will never be given autonomy, no matter what they accomplish.

The primary theme of the film is identity (“Who are you?” is repeated throughout). Lawrence is British, though he doesn’t feel British, and can never really be Arab, even though he feels that he is. Similarly, while he’s embraced by people on both sides, he’s not fully accepted by either side (towards the end of the film, Feisal and the British General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) agree that it is in the best interest of both sides for Lawrence to be removed from the debate). Ali argues that Lawrence can be whoever – and whatever – he wants to be because Lawrence is a man who seems to transcend any traditional understanding of what is or isn’t possible. For a time, Lawrence believes this, rejecting his British uniform in favour of traditional robes and immersing himself in desert life. “Nothing is written,” he states, meaning that neither fate nor identity is predetermined and that it is possible to be the author of your own story. However, following a brutal attack after he’s captured by Turks, he’s more aware than ever that the divisions he thought he had transcended do in fact still exist. He points to his skin, informing Ali that it can’t be changed and he becomes a shadow of himself, a deflated figure inside his larger than life persona. That he would come to this is perhaps inevitable. When he says “Nothing is written,” it is specifically in reference to his turning around and riding back through the desert to find a man who had fallen behind. Later, the man kills a member of a rival tribe and, to keep the peace, Lawrence must execute him. “It was written,” Auda (Anthony Quinn) states when he learns that the man had already been given up for dead before. He was destined to die, sooner or later, in one way or another and Lawrence can’t change that, just like he can’t change his skin.

At the beginning of the film, we see Lawrence burning himself, which can be seen as a literal attempt to change his skin. “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” he says, giving us our first hint at the film’s other big theme, Lawrence’s love/hate relationship with violence. Lawrence is initially depicted as someone who is sickened by violence. After he’s executed the man he once saved, he throws his pistol away in disgust and seems unable to cope with what he’s done. However, he later confesses to his superiors that his abhorrence of violence stems from the intense pleasure he gets from inflicting it (“There was something about it that I didn’t like… I enjoyed it”). He’s horrified by this aspect of his personality, which essentially takes over following his beating and implied rape by Turkish soldiers, when he leads his army on an attack of a Turkish camp. “Take no prisoners,” he says, even though many of the opposing soldiers are ready to give themselves up. They are, instead, slaughtered by Lawrence’s army to the disgust of Ali and the American reporter Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), and Lawrence himself, who knows that he is now too far gone to be of much use anymore in this campaign.

What director David Lean accomplishes with this film is astounding. Its running time is about three and a half hours, but the pacing is so perfect that it doesn’t feel longer than an average film. And the way that Lean depicts the desert is genius, showing it at various times to be heaven and hell, wide open and suffocatingly constricted, beautiful and ugly. It is hard to effectively describe the scope and breadth of a film like this, which is so massive in what it undertakes that there’s not really anything else to compare it to. This is filmmaking at its most monumental and breathtaking.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

Director: David Lean
Starring: Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, William Holden

The Bridge on the River Kwai takes place during World War II, but it’s a war film in only the broadest of terms. This is a psychological film, a battle of wills between two men from different sides of the war who are equally proud and equally determined to be an example to their countrymen. On the British side is Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), on the Japanese side is Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), who find themselves united in their obsession with building a bridge across the river Kwai.

The film opens famously with the British soldiers marching into the P.O.W. camp whistling the “Colonel Bogey March.” They are met by Saito and it becomes immediately apparent that he and Nicholson are going to clash. Nicholson, a life-long military man, clings to the sanctioned rules of warfare and attempts to impose them on Saito, whom he assumes is simply unaware of them. “Do not speak to me of rules,” Saito replies. “This is war! This is not a game of cricket!” The two are deadlocked. Nicholson is tortured in an attempt to break him and thereby break his men, but instead he endures and it’s Saito who must give in, agreeing that officers will not be compelled to participate in forced labour. With that out of the way, Nicholson goes about his next task, which is organizing the building of the bridge. He is shocked to find that his men have been sabotaging the effort in his absence and rectifies it, believing that the honest effort of building the bridge will be good for morale. “One day the war will be over and I hope that the people that use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers,” Nicholson says. And while keeping up morale by giving the prisoners a chance to achieve and take pride in something is all well and good, as Major Clipton (James Donald) points out it also means collaborating with Britain’s sworn enemy. If the bridge is built – and built well – it will be used against Britain and the rest of the Allies, a fact which is lost on Nicholson in his determination to create a monument to British mastery.

As Nicholson and the British continue to build the bridge, Saito begins to come undone. In one scene he sits alone crying, unable to cope with the fact that Nicholson can build a better bridge than he ever could have hoped of doing himself. Saito isn’t a career soldier like Nicholson and slowly renounces his authority to the other man. In one exchange Nicholson lays out the necessities for finishing the bridge on time, which includes using some of the Japanese soldiers as labourers. “I have already given the order,” Saito says. Nicholson then suggests laying out a work quota for the Japanese soldiers. “I have already given out the order.” Saito is effectively broken at a time when he should be triumphant. The bridge will be finished and he won’t have to commit suicide in order to preserve his honour, but it’s spoiled because he has to rely on Nicholson’s knowledge and willpower to get it done. Guinness is wonderful as Nicholson and won the Academy Award for Best Actor, but Hayakawa (who was nominated as Supporting Actor) is more than equal to him, bringing a depth of humanity to the role that the film would have suffered without.

While Nicholson and Saito engage in their battle of wills, there’s another plot running through the film, that of the American P.O.W Shears (William Holden). Shears escapes through the jungle and spends time lounging on the beaches with British nurses before being persuaded to return to the jungle to sabotage the bridge. I’ve always found this plotline rather unnecessary and the character of Shears ill-defined. He’s not really motivated by anything except what the plot requires him to be motivated by at any given moment. And while it’s true that Shears and his team bring about the film’s resolution, in that they provide the means for the bridge to blow up, it just seems like they belong in a different movie than the one about Nicholson, Saito and their shared, mad dream.

And mad is the only word for it. “Madness! Madness!” These last words uttered by Clipton who still can’t believe that Nicholson doesn’t realize what he's done. Of course, what he doesn’t know – but we do – is that Nicholson does realize what the bridge means. “What have I done?” he asks then falls dead, landing on the detonator which blows up the bridge. In his last moment, he is redeemed, but what was the cost of his journey towards redemption? He and Saito are both dead, so is Shears, and the bridge, dedicated with a plaque to tribute the work of the British soldiers, is destroyed.

Madness.