Great Movies To Stream: Lawrence of Arabia
Premiere Calls Peter O'Toole's Performance the Best in Film History
Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence
Lawrence of Arabia (1957)
Columbia Pictures (Horizon II). Directed by David Lean. Oscars (7): Best Picture, Director (Lean, again), Cinematography, Set Decoration, Sound, Editing, Music. Also starring the Rub-al-Khali, the world’s most treacherous desert. Rotten Tomatoes: 97%. AFI 100 #5.
Despite the fact that Peter O’Toole didn’t win a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in this role—the statue went to Gregory Peck for his Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird—Premiere Magazine calls Peter O’Toole’s performance as T. E. Lawrence the best achievement by an actor or actress in film history.
T. E. Lawrence wasn’t universally loved. His critics called him the “Wild Ass of the Desert,” and that he certainly was. A polymathic genius without a day’s combat training, Lawrence wrested Arabia from the internecine squabbles of tribal warlords and won World War I in the Middle East, driving north as far as Damascus. In the process, he shaped the future of Arabia and the contemporary Near East.
He also went mad. Captured, beaten to a bloody pulp, and sexually assaulted by the Ottomans, Lawrence, whose masochism showed early in life after beatings by his mother, became both obsessively masochistic and sadistically vengeful during his sojourn in the desert. He suffered psychological disfigurement for the rest of his life. The scene in which Lawrence professes pleasure at the deaths of others is one of the most emotionally wrenching ever filmed.
When Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident at 46, Sir Winston Churchill grieved that the British Empire was “impoverished” by his passing. Robert Bolt’s extraordinary screenplay and deeply insightful characterization of this mad genius made him immortal.