Billy Idol • “Eyes Without a Face” From the soon-to-be platinum album “Rebel Yell” “Eyes Without a Face” The definitive mass-appeal single from the face of the 80′s… Billy Idol • Now on MTV • Extensive U.S. tour continues in May and June • Massive merchandising campaign including this new poster Direction/Management Aucoin Management, Inc. Chrysalis Records & Cassettes (May 5, 1984 Billboard magazine advertisement)
“The best of them won’t come for money. They’ll come for me”
David Lean’s grandiose sense of cinematic scale is an asset rarely seen in modern filmmaking, and seeing the towering achievement of Lawrence of Arabia for the first time at the London Film Festival (the new 4K restoration) is only making this fact harder to swallow. So, as this wonderful film turns fifty, now seems the perfect time to reflect on what must be the most extraordinary spectacle the cinema has ever produced, and celebrate the seemingly lost art of “big cinema”.
There aren’t many films as perfectly formed as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. It’s one of a select few - like Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Fitzcarraldo or Apocalypse Now - in which everything seems to align perfectly with a director’s vision, no matter the cost. In the case of this film, the director’s vision is one of extraordinary scale, boldness and ambition. Take the dramatic entrance of Omar Sharif’s Ali, for instance, which sees him appear on the distant horizon as if riding in from the sky. To capture this startlingly beautiful image, cinematographer Freddie Young had to use a 482mm lens designed especially for the shot - a lens that has not been used since.
This is one of a number of hints at Lean’s towering ambition for this bold film. The film was undeniably a large undertaking, but Lean had both the vision and the control to match the scale of the surroundings - surroundings in which he immersed himself, shooting mostly on location in Jordan and Morocco, with southern Spain doubling as desert for some scenes. As a result, the film looks gorgeous. Freddie Young’s spectacular cinematography captures the expansive vistas of Arabia, the chaotic battle sequences and the expression-filled face (and eyes) of Peter O'Toole as Lawrence with such simple majesty.
Of course, it helps when you have a cast as attractive as that of Lawrence of Arabia. The likes of O'Toole, Sharif, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn deliver knock-out performances - particularly O'Toole, whose portrayal of T.E. Lawrence was not only his breakthrough role but the finest he has ever been on screen. He makes for a captivating screen presence, bringing the complex character of T.E. Lawrence to life in the most charismatic of ways.
Another breakthrough role was that of composer Maurice Jarre, whose only previous experience had been scoring two films with Georges Franju, Head Against The Wall (1958) and Eyes Without A Face (1959), in his native France. When producer Sam Spiegel approached him to work on Lawrence of Arabia - he was the third choice composer - he had a mere six weeks to score the whole film. The finished result, a powerful score echoing the tumultuous life of T.E. Lawrence as well as the scale of the scenery, won him his first of three Oscars, all of which were for films by David Lean (Doctor Zhivago in 1965 and Ryan’s Daughter in 1970).
Lean’s film was also a launch pad for its editor, Anne V. Coates, whose only experience beforehand was an uncredited second editor role on the Powell and Pressburger film, The Red Shoes (1948), as well as a few assistant roles on small British films. Her virtuosic sense for cuts - particularly the “match cut” sequence, which is surely one of the most impressive jump cuts in film - and pacing won her a deserved Oscar.
All of these individual elements help to make Lawrence of Arabia as great an audio-visual treat as you’re ever likely to see on screen, but it’s in the characterisation of Lawrence that the majority of the film’s criticisms lie. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote of the film: “It is such a laboriously large conveyance of eye-filling outdoor spectacle that the possibly human T. E. Lawrence is lost in it. We know little more about this strange man when it is over than we did when it begins”, while Andrew Sarris of Village Voice labelled Lawrence of Arabia: “coldly impersonal”.
While these criticisms are relatively valid, and it is true that the film does not work particularly well as a detailed character study, this is only because it is not what Lean set out to do. He’s not trying to document the man, he’s trying to capture Lawrence’s spectacular achievements cinematically. This isn’t to say Lawrence is ignored as a character, as O'Toole imbues him with an almost effeminate aura, and a charm as great as his arrogance, but Lean is more interested in the drama than the facts - and who can blame him, he’s not a documentarian, after all.
But as Sarris suggests, one thing Lean’s film is not is a “Kane approach to the mystery of the hero”, but only because it doesn’t try to be. Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a celebration of Lawrence’s achievements, and the disregard of factual accuracy in the screenplay serves to offer a romanticised depiction of Lawrence and his achievements rather than an accurate retelling of his life.
Ultimately, these complaints are largely confined to a small number of critics and historians. The wider belief (including my own) is that Lawrence of Arabia is a searing indication of David Lean’s talent and ambition as well as an extraordinarily bold feat of filmmaking, the scale of which will probably never be seen again.
It’s a film that perfectly captures the magic of cinema and, as such, deserves to be seen on as big a screen as possible.
Privacy advocate Allie Funk was surprised to learn that her Delta flight out of Detroit airport would use facial recognition scans for boarding; Funk knew that these systems were supposed to be “opt in” but no one announced that you could choose not to use them while boarding, so Funk set out to learn how she could choose not to have her face ingested into a leaky, creepy, public-private biometric database.
It turns out that all of Funk’s suspicions were misplaced! It is as easy as pie to opt out of airport facial recognition: all you need to do to opt-out is:
* To independently learn that you are allowed to opt out;
* Leave the boarding queue and join a different queue at a distant information desk;
* Return to her gate and rejoin the boarding queue; and, finally
