Please Consume
Posts
one for the ages.

one for the ages.

Today, we’re going foreign baby! This film was actually a huge influence on the Indy franchise and Spielberg as a filmmaker.

Tyler Clark
June 27, 2023

Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, the newsletter that loves movies more than Harvey Keitel loves showing his dick on camera

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Today, we’re going foreign baby!

This film was actually a huge influence on the Indy franchise and Spielberg as a filmmaker.

It’s a movie so well renowned just looking up an analysis of it will lead you to papers, interviews, and essays from some of the most renowned critics, historians, and filmmakers the medium has produced, from A.O. Scott to Martin Scorsese.

Today we will be looking at David Lean’s brilliant Lawrence of Arabia!

The Elephant in the Room

Before we begin, we have to address a few things that have become a part of this film's legacy.

First, the film takes some liberties with its history, specifically around the British’s role in T.E. Lawrence’s endeavors and their raid on allies and enemies. The film also gets swirly around their depiction of certain aspects around Lawrence himself. It leaves out Lawrence’s sexual assault no doubt because that’s inherently unheroic, plus many historians now believed it was an initially romantic encounter with another man that turned bad.

On top of all that, when watching this film you have to reckon with certain aspects that have aged poorly, especially Alec Guinness who plays a very important historical figure in brown face.

We say all this because it’s very easy to brush over these issues or to make them the full focus, when we as film lovers believe the best thing you can do is discuss them, but not allow that to take over a film entirely.

It's important to understand the era in which your film was released and use that as a metric to show how we have grown as a culture and where we can still grow.

Pushing Forward

Cinema is about moving forward. It’s constantly evolving and creating new techniques and technologies.

Oftentimes these are small steps, but in the case of films like Lawrence of Arabia, they are giant leaps.

Every once in a while, you see movies like this, The Wizard of Oz, Raging Bull, or 2001: A Space Odyssey movies, that have grabbed the old way of thinking about movies and lifted them into a completely new era that will forever change the way we make and watch them.

David Leans masterful use of mash cuts for instance, changed the medium forever. It's not a coincidence that any time you watch a video essay on his work they always close with that image of TE Lawrence blowing out a match. Filmmakers like Danny Boyle say it stands alongside the bone in 2001 as the greatest cut in history.

Miracle of Cinema

To close, we’re going to specifically talk about how this film affected Steven Spielberg.

When he was making Indiana Jones, he and George Lucas set out to make an action film that takes out all of the boring middle stuff. And that’s exactly what they did.

Lawrence of Arabia is astounding, but it’s nearly 4 hours long, so Spielberg went in and actually recut the movie to something that felt extremely fast paced.

However, he never got to finish re-cutting it when they were working on the restoration and yet even still, it feels so controlled in a way that Spielberg is obsessed with.

In all the interviews I could find with him about this film, which are many, the moment he always points to is the Mirage sequence and the fact that it was so perfectly done to the point where you couldn’t even see the camel's footsteps in the sand. To him, that is what makes it an epic. It’s not just these giant shots, but it’s also the attention to detail and the feeling of spontaneity, even though everything is planned down to the footstep.

He even called the scene the greatest miracle he’s ever seen on film.