1lawrence of arabia and american culture the Making of a Transatlantic Legend
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| Ali: He is dead.
Lawrence: Yes, why? Ali: This is my well. Lawrence: I have drunk from it. Ali: You are welcome. Lawrence: He was my friend. Ali: That? Lawrence: Yes, that. Ali: This pistol yours? Lawrence: No, his. Ali: Then I will use it. Your friend was a Hazimi of the Beni Salem. Lawrence: I know. Ali: I am Ali of the Beni Harish. Lawrence: I have heard of you. Ali: So, what was a Hazimi doing here? Lawrence: He was taking me to see Prince Feisal. Ali: You have been sent from Cairo? Lawrence: Yes. Ali: I have been in Cairo for my schooling. I can both read and write. Lord Feisal already has an Englishman. What is your name? Lawrence: My name is for my friends. None of my friends is a murderer. -114- Ali: You are angry, English. He was nothing. The well is everything. The Hazimi may not drink at our wells. He knew that. Salaam. This dialogue, like the scene, does not occur in Seven Pillars. It is a Wilson invention used to dramatize the divisiveness of the various Arab tribes when Lawrence arrived in Arabia. Wilson's script reads: Ali: He is dead. Lawrence: What was he to you? Ali: A blood enemy. Of the Hazimi tribe. I am Ali of the Harith. Lawrence: He was an Arab patriot. He fought Turks. Ali: And so do I. But my people have been fighting the Hazimi for a hundred years. Have you traveled far? Lawrence: From Cairo. Ali: I have never seen Cairo. Have you far to go? Lawrence: To the camp of Prince Feisal. Ali: I will take you. Believe me, English, he was worthless. Lawrence: He was a man. [ Lawrence gestures to Tafas's corpse.] And therefore precious. Ali: Is a man so precious to you Christians, when millions die in blood feuds you call wars? Lawrence: I'll ride alone. Ali: You will not find Feisal's camp without a guide. There are no other wells. If you get lost. Lawrence: I won't get lost. Ali: God be with you, English! 16 Much of the rest of the Lean-Spiegel film uses altered dialogue and scenes that are taken directly from Wilson's screenplay and that do not occur in Seven Pillars. Several other sequences perhaps suffice to demonstrate this use at a detailed level. One sequence occurs after the taking of the Turkish fortress at Aqaba, when Lawrence must cross the Sinai Desert to report the Arab victory to British Headquarters in order to get needed arms and money to carry on the revolt. In Seven Pillars, Lawrence makes the expedition with a band of eight bodyguards. In the film, as in Wilson's screenplay, Lawrence travels instead with two Arab youths. The first, Daud, dies when he is swallowed up by quicksand (in Lawrence's account, Daud dies from exposure long afterward), and the second, Faraj, accompanies Lawrence to Cairo. Lawrence's encounter with General Allenby in Cairo is a pivotal sequence in the story because the meeting determines whether Lawrence will -115- remain liaison officer to Feisal's forces in Arabia, but the encounter is hardly dealt with in Seven Pillars. By contrast, the episode occupies twenty pages in both the Wilson and Bolt scripts and is substantially prefigured by Wilson. In the film, the sequence begins comically with Lawrence, in soiled Arab robes, bursting into the British officers' club and ordering a lemonade, over the objections of his fellow officers, for his Arab companion. In Seven Pillars, Faraj did not accompany Lawrence to Cairo, nor would Lawrence have taken a child with him on such an important mission. A final example of Bolt's appropriation of the Wilson script is Bolt's concluding fade-out, which is meant to suggest Lawrence's alienation as he is driven out of Damascus after the Allied-Arab victory over the Turks. In Seven Pillars, Lawrence ends his account in Damascus. His departure from the city is not described. In the film, as in Wilson's screenplay, Lawrence, having been dismissed by Allenby, is driven out of the city by a chauffeur. Along the road toward Beirut, they pass a group of Bedouin on camels who have abandoned their victory to British administration of the city and are returning to the desert. In the final scene, Lawrence is shown slumped in the passenger's seat. He strains to identify the Arab tribesmen as he passes them in the car. Failing to do so, he stares vacantly ahead as the car speeds past the Arab riders and off into the dust. These various incidents, and the opening and closing scenes of the film, are inventions directly attributable to Wilson's screenplay. It is not likely that Bolt would have imaged these scenes, and many others, exactly as Wilson had. They indicate that Bolt had not, as he claimed, merely relied on Seven Pillars but had in fact seen and borrowed heavily from Wilson's script. When Wilson finally took the dispute to the British Screen Writers' Guild, it found that he had forfeited his legal rights, but the Guild voted unanimously that Michael Wilson was morally entitled to a credit. Morality, however, did not win out and Wilson did not get a credit. 17 Wilson quit as screenwriter for Lawrence of Arabia, literally walking off the job during a script conference trip to Jordan in December 1960, but he felt he had been forced to resign. He believed his "removal," as he worded it, was not based solely on Lean's dissatisfaction with his work but instead on Spiegel's discomfort with his HUAC "unfriendly witness" status. Referring to the machinations of Spiegel's solicitors, he imploringly wrote to Bolt: There is more to their fuzzy irrelevancies than meets the eye. For the past eleven years I have been one of the blacklisted American writers. If I could tell you the -116- enormous pressures the top brass of this production put on me to "clear myself," you would see this is the heart of the matter. If I were "clean," my name would already be alongside yours as co-author of this picture. 18 By the late 1950s, HUAC had been discredited, but the stigma of having been blacklisted continued for writers like Michael Wilson. Without solid evidence that he had been pressured by Spiegel to "clear himself," he could not sue Academy Pictures on grounds that he had been discriminated against. His threats of legal action, however, raised the unpleasant specter of HUAC. As with earlier films on which Wilson had worked and that had been nominated for Oscars, including Friendly Persuasion ( 1956), his name was not listed in the screen credits for Lawrence of Arabia, presumably because he refused to sign a statement recanting his radical past. Lean seems to corroborate this in a letter to Spiegel in which he, too, was puzzled by Wilson's resignation. Lean could not have been too dissatisfied with the screenplay Wilson conceived because Bolt's final version closely resembled Wilson's earlier drafts. The comparison of the Wilson and Bolt screenplays also suggests that the Screen Writer's Guild was correct in its assessment that Wilson deserved equal credit on the film. The Guild, which voted Lawrence of Arabia the Best Dramatic Screenplay for 1962, gave their award to both Wilson and Bolt on the basis that Wilson had contributed at least one-third of the script. 19 The credit dispute was only one of several preproduction snags. Casting the lead role was another. Spiegel's first choice, Marlon Brando, traveled to Paris to discuss the role with David Lean. It was announced he would play the part of Lawrence. Shortly thereafter, he changed his mind and signed on instead for the lead role in Mutiny on the Bounty being filmed in Tahiti, a more alluring location for Brando than the deserts of the Middle East. Lean was relieved because Brando had acquired a reputation for being difficult to work with. Instead, he ran extensive screen tests on Albert Finney, who looked like Lawrence and excelled in the part. After considerable outlay by Lean and Spiegel, Finney refused to sign a contract for the same reason Brando had. The well-known actors did not want to commit themselves to a possibly long production process and a notoriously meticulous director. Finally, Lean and Spiegel settled on the relatively unknown Peter O'Toole, a stage actor who had studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Lean was immediately impressed with the newcomer, but in many ways O'Toole was physically unsuited for the role. He had to have -117- plastic surgery on his nose and he also dyed his hair for the part (staying blonde ever since). Lowell Thomas criticized the casting of O'Toole because, among other differences, he was "nearly a foot taller than Lawrence." Other Americans recruited were Anthony Quinn, who had an extraordinary physical likeness to the desert bandit Auda Abu Tayi, and Arthur Kennedy who would play Jackson Bentley ( Lowell Jackson Thomas). Bentley was portrayed as an obnoxious camera-toting journalist and Thomas was naturally irritated. 20 The cost of production was astounding. Filming in Jordan, Spain, and Morocco took nearly two years and cost an estimated thirteen-plus million dollars; the Columbia Pictures advertising brochure records that water costs alone sometimes reached $80,000 a day to sustain 15,000 personnel, 5,000 camels, and 500 horses in remote filming locations. Lawrence of Arabia premiered in London on 10 December 1962 and opened in New York a week later. Admission price in New York was an unprecedented $4.80, and in Los Angeles $3.80, the highest admission fee to that date in motion picture history. 21 RECEPTION The London World Premiere of Lawrence of Arabia was a stylish charity benefit held at the West End's Odeon Theatre and attended by the queen. Seat prices ranged upward to 100 pounds, and a portion of the profits went to the Save the Children Fund. Most viewers were awed by the film's spectacular cinematography, but they were puzzled by the portrayal of Lawrence. Reviews were mixed. A young Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard wrote: "Lawrence of Arabia is an unprecedented kind of multimillion-dollar spectacle. Here is an epic with intellect behind it. An unforgettable display of action staged with artistry. A momentous story told with moral force. What on earth has wrought this miracle?" William Connor of the Daily Mirror failed to see the miraculous or the moral force behind the story, but instead was struck by the film's blatant distortion of fact: "history is put through a mangle and comes out tattered, torn, and largely unrecognisable. History as written by Columbia Pictures and Professor Sam Spiegel is not for me." More typical of initial British reaction than either of these two extremes was a review in the 11 December 1962Sunday Observer titled "Blood, Sand and a Dozen Lawrences." It quoted one cinema-goer as saying after the film: "[ Lawrence is] more of an enigma than ever." The reviewer concluded: "In the performance that Peter O'Toole gives there seem to be at least 10 incompatible men living under the same skin, and two or three -118- women as well." An American Newsweek account, "All Star, All Good," concurred that the film confused the viewer but considered this a virtue: it was "so faithful . . . to the truth of Thomas Edward Lawrence that a viewer leaves the picture with no idea whatever of what Lawrence was really like." 22 Although Lawrence of Arabia was generally praised by British reviewers, they typically complained of the film's length (nearly four hours), and a few were clearly rankled by the unflatteringly sensational portrayal of Lawrence. Even the extraordinary cinematography of Freddie Young was criticized in several British reviews. Young's camera work, which made the sand of the desert "sumptuous," was unfavorably compared to a contemporary BBC television documentary produced by Malcolm Brown about Lawrence that captured the bleakness of the desert. According to the Sunday Observer, American actors were well received in Britain, but Anthony Quinn's American accent was criticized. The reviewer thought Quinn sounded "more like Davy Crockett" than a Bedouin. 23 The week between the London premiere and the New York opening, Life Magazine ran a review of the film comparing Peter O'Toole to swashbuckler Errol Flynn and, like subsequent reviewers in Show and other film magazines, praising the cinematography. America awaited a film that had merited a command performance for the queen of England. Unfortunately, the record of immediate reaction to the film by American reviewers is limited because a printers' strike in New York shut down all nine city newspapers from 11 December 1962 to the end of the month. The film opened in New York at the Criterion on 16 December. David Lean recalled the highly respected New York Times critic Bosley Crowther saying on the radio that the film was "as devoid of humanity as the parched desert sands it portrays." Crowther also published a highly critical review of the film in the 17 December Western Edition of the Times, which was not affected by the New York strike. He found the film "vast, awe-inspiring, beautiful . . . and devoid of humanity." He harshly attacked Bolt's screenplay as "lusterless and over-written," but zeroed in on the main criticism of the film that Lawrence's biographers and surviving fellow officers and friends would lodge: the film was a camel-opera that distorted Lawrence beyond recognition. Stanley Kauffman for The New Republic also cited the shortcomings of the Bolt script. 24 Perhaps the most insightful review, in part because the author did not have access to his colleagues' opinions, was written by Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice. Referring to the newspaper strike, he confessed that working without the comments of other reviewers was lonely business. -119- Sarris found the Lawrence film "simply another expensive mirage, dull, overlong, and coldly impersonal. Its objective is less to entertain or enlighten than to impress and intimidate . . . on the whole . . . calculating and condescending." The major shortcomings of the film were that it "grossly oversimplifies the murky politics of the Middle East" and "is full of inaccuracies." Sarris was one of only a few reviewers to note that, with no concrete evidence that Lawrence was homosexual, the film was highly speculative, using the rape scene as "a gimmick." Sarris was also the only critic to question the underlying assumption of the film that people would be passionately interested in Lawrence forty years after his Arabian adventure. 25 There was great fanfare for the Los Angeles opening on 21 December, a charity event with seats selling for $50 and $100 dollars apiece. But even in Los Angeles, a city friendly to film extravaganzas, reviewers criticized the length of the film. Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheurer wrote, "Obviously, Spiegel and Lean's besetting sin is that they fell in love with their own film and refused to cut it." In fact, the American release had been cut by twenty minutes to fit exhibitors' needs to schedule two shows daily. In Los Angeles, Spiegel narrowly avoided a public relations disaster when his young stars, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif, were arrested after a night carousing with controversial nightclub comedian and heroin addict Lenny Bruce. A sober Omar Sharif called Spiegel from jail, and the producer, who had millions of dollars invested in the film's success, arrived shortly afterward with a battery of lawyers. Sharif recalled it cost Spiegel "an arm and a leg" to get charges dropped. Despite seemingly endless problems, and negative reviews from influential critics on both sides of the Atlantic, the general reception of the film was overwhelmingly positive, and the SpiegelLean epic swept several categories of Oscars, including Best Picture of the Year. 26 LICENSE WITH HISTORY The film, however, proved to be nearly as controversial as its subject matter. As reviews suggest, the portrayal of Lawrence apparently created more problems for a public trying to understand the complicated Englishman than it solved. People who had known him were also deeply offended. The "Lawrence Bureau," led by biographer Basil Henri Liddell Hart, bitterly complained that the portrayal of Lawrence as a sadomasochist with homosexual leanings was a grossly unfounded misrepresentation. Bolt's screenplay for the film was lively and intelligent, but it lacked the historical -120- and political background Michael Wilson had given the film. In simplifying the story in order to get it on the screen and still explore Lawrence's complex character and motivations, Bolt telescoped the action and portrayed Lawrence primarily as a romantic adventurer. As Andrew Sarris noted, the film relied on "gimmicks" to do this, emphasizing the reputed torture and rape Lawrence endured in Deraa and his "nervous breakdown" in Damascus. More disturbing to Lawrence's friends and family and contradicting historical accuracy was the film's manipulation of incidents during the Arab Revolt, specifically an attack on the Turkish Fourth Army at Tafas, to suggest that Lawrence was a sadist who actually enjoyed killing. In two very critical ways, Bolt and Lean, as writer and director, commit historical fallacies that result in distortions of truth. First, Bolt took literally passages of Seven Pillars that were meant to be read differently. He interpreted Lawrence's "we" in his account of the bloodbath at Tafas--a reprisal against retreating Turkish and German soldiers during the Arab advance on Damascus for the rape and murder of Arab villagers--as not just an assumption of responsibility by a commander but as an admission by Lawrence that he had actively participated. As a result, Bolt misread Lawrence's participation in the event and his reaction to killing. In the film, Bolt has Lawrence, burning with vengeance against the Turk, hysterically murdering surrendering soldiers (a departure from the Wilson script). There is little doubt that Lawrence bore a grievance and that the destruction of the retreating Turkish Fourth Army took place. But the facts of the incident, as recorded by Lawrence's fellow officers, do not add up to the sadistic impression of Lawrence that the film propagates. Because Robert Graves and other Lawrence authorities had been hired as advisers for the film, Bolt and Lean had access, if they had wanted it, to the facts of the incident and the conclusions of experts. Had they sought out this advice and not simply dismissed what had been written about Lawrence as a "tangle of contradictory facts," they might have avoided this error. 27 The makers of Lawrence of Arabia commit a second historical fallacy that has less serious consequences for the historical record but is equally misleading. They superimpose upon Lawrence's age their own midtwentieth-century cynicism and completely ignore the Hellenistic revivalism of the late 19th and early 20th century. By so doing, they misconstrue Lawrence's statements and therefore his sexuality. To demonstrate the erroneousness of the Bolt-Lean reading of Lawrence's character, one can turn to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. In a chapter entitled "Soldier Boys," Fussell sets up a context -121- for the homoerotic tradition in war and, in particular, the British Victorian and early modern literature of war. Reaching back to Greek and Roman mythology, he explains "the curious intercourse" between war and love, and how the language of war and love overlap. Finding in the memoirs and poetry of soldiers from the period a great deal of homoerotic sensibility, Fussell asks if "the British have a special talent for such passions." Quoting J. B. Priestley, he finds that British youth at the turn of the century lived "a wholly masculine way of life uncomplicated by Women." They had been "prepared by public-school training to experience . . . crushes" on other boys, a phenomenon which became abundantly apparent in British writing about the war. Fussell writes: "No one turning from the poetry of the Second World War back to that of the First can fail to notice there the unique physical tenderness, the readiness to admire openly bodily beauty of young men, the unapologetic recognition that men may be in love with each other." Much of this writing emphasizes, as does Lawrence's writing, the postwar longing for male comradeship and laments the wanton destruction of beautiful young men, but it does not necessarily imply active homosexuality. 28 Certainly, World War I produced its actively homosexual poets and memoirists. But to suggest that Lawrence was a homosexual, as Bolt did in the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia and in a New York Times apologia, on the strength of his lack of interest in women and admiration for young men, is to disregard the sensibilities of the age, or perhaps more particularly of class. By these standards, as Fussell points out, the most manly figures of the period, such as Cecil Rhodes and Lord Kitchener, could also be viewed today as homosexuals because of their homoerotic excitability. In his debunking biography, Richard Aldington concluded that Lawrence was a homosexual because he dedicated his Seven Pillars to an Arab youth, was reputedly tortured and raped by the enemy during the war, wore Arab robes, never married, and avoided women. Apparently, Bolt and Lean, wanting to present a sensational portrait, ignored the evidence and testimony of Lawrence experts and his fellow officers and followed Richard Aldington's lead instead. Rather than clarifying Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt for the public, or exploring the causes of Lawrence's trauma and masochism, Bolt and Lean perpetuated a misreading of Lawrence, with Peter O'Toole batting his eyes at friend and foe alike. 29 The license with which the filmmakers portrayed Lawrence and his contemporaries, in particular General Allenby, offended viewers who had known them. A. W. Lawrence captured some of these objections in an article -122- that made the front page of the New York Times shortly after the film was released in the United States. I did not recognize my brother in the film. But neither my brother nor I would have objected to a cowboy-and-Indian style treatment. But the film tries to tell an adventure story in terms of a psychological study which is pretentious and false. They have used a psychological recipe: take an ounce of narcissism, a pound of exhibitionism, a pint of sadism, a gallon of blood-lust and a sprinkle of other aberrations and stir well. 30 Sam Spiegel replied to A. W. Lawrence later that month in the same newspaper, chiding him for trying to maintain "an aura of Victorian cleanliness" about his brother and not wanting "family skeletons rattled." Spiegel admitted, however, that "a good deal of material furnished by [ Lawrence] biographers had been ignored" and that the movie departed from Seven Pillars. He explained the movie's fictions with the statement: "We think life should imitate art, not the other way around." The gross misrepresentation of Lawrence seems deliberate because experts were hired as consultants (if only to secure their literary rights) and a massive amount of research was done. 31 Lawrence of Arabia is just one of many examples of Hollywood distortions of history and biography. The film, however, did more than misrepresent Lawrence and skew the historical record. Gary Crowdus, film critic and editor for Cineaste, a magazine devoted to the art and politics of the cinema, noted that the Spiegel-Lean epic also disparaged the Arabs, propagating the old Western stereotype of the Arabs as subservient, savage, comic, and incapable of ruling themselves, thus pandering to the preconceived notions of Western audiences. The viewing public, however, was not particularly interested in whether Lawrence of Arabia was a racist film or a historically misleading one. It won seven Academy Awards in a competitive field but significantly neither for best script nor best actor. The best actor award that year went to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, a film that dealt with the subject of race with greater sensitivity. 32 The Lawrence of Arabia of the Spiegel-Lean film would, of course, ride again with the fanfare of the film's reconstruction and re-release in 1989. The film remains remarkably popular with the viewing public, and because it has reached such a large audience, it has dramatically altered the popular perception of the Lawrence legend. Bolt and Lean's historical license and amateur psychologizing have stigmatized him as a deeply disturbed sadomasochist homosexual. |