For episode 5 we finally sat down with Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean's 1962 Best Picture winner about T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt. At four hours, it's the longest thing we've covered so far, and neither of us watched it in one sitting.
The production is the story
What struck both of us first wasn't the plot, it was how the thing was actually built. This is all pre-CGI: the massive battle and desert shots use what must have been thousands of extras, many of them supplied by the Jordanian army. David Lean shot across Jordan, Spain, and Morocco over more than 300 days, and the production returned to the real locations decades later, down to finding train cars still sitting on the tracks from the original shoot.
Lean started his career as a film editor before he directed, and it shows. The cut everyone should watch for: Lawrence blows out a match, and the film cuts straight to the sun rising over the desert. It's the kind of transition that tells you everything about the scale of what's coming before a word is spoken.
An idealist who breaks
The arc is what carried the movie for both of us. Lawrence starts as a young idealist who leads early, successful raids and is adored by the men around him. Then he's captured and tortured, and the back half of the film is a slow unraveling of his sense of self. It's the same shape we've seen before in Paths of Glory and the broader World War One story: you go in an idealist, you come out hardened or broken.
Lawrence spends the film genuinely fighting for Arab independence, but by the end he's cut out of the negotiations entirely, watching the British, the French, and the Arab tribal leaders settle the war's terms without him. He helped win it as part of the imperial power structure that then decided the outcome from a distance, whatever he wanted for the people he fought alongside. One line near the end stuck: war is for young men, and bargaining is for the old ones.
Where we landed
Matt kept his five out of five. This one's in his personal top five Best Picture winners of all time, and he was in awe of what Lean pulled off on camera without a single visual effect. He'll admit the four hours felt more like a chore to get through this time than he expected, and he half-joked that someone should remake it as a four-part miniseries.
Jeff landed at four out of five. He found it long and, at points, slow, and thought Peter O'Toole's theater background shows through in a performance that tips into overacting here and there. But the character arc won him over, and he noted that it's long been one of our grandma's favorite movies, which tracks: it's the kind of epic built to be somebody's all-time favorite, even if it took us this long to get to it.