David Lean
Lawrence d'Arabia

Dating back to 1962, this masterpiece emerged from the mind of David Lean: a colossal, a film that at the time managed to win as many as seven Academy Awards, a work of art like few others in cinema. A film that tells the story of a man who truly lived but has now entered the realm of legend: the English colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known to the general public as Lawrence of Arabia, almost as if to express the almost complete symbiosis of the character with the environment where he operated during the First World War.

The film significantly contributed to permanently enshrining in legend this figure of a man straddling two worlds, between the West of great powers, the British Empire, and sophisticated diplomacy, and the East of the Arab Bedouins, whose language and customs he had learned during his university years. The cast assembled by the director features the most talented actors of that era: we have Peter O'Toole in the role of the adventurer and hero Lawrence, the great Anthony Quinn as the Arab raider Auda Abu Tayi, Omar Sharif who plays the sheriff Ali, and, the real cherry on the cake, the magnificent Alec Guinness, who here portrays Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. But Lean also presents another protagonist, always present at every moment: the Desert. An infinite sea of sand, omnipresent, enveloping and elusive at the same time, pounding even in its protagonism, an anvil where the sun relentlessly beats down, swept by the arid wind that gently shapes the dunes; and over all this, inseparable from the very presence of the desert, Maurice Jarre's historic soundtrack, a true masterpiece. It will be the desert that guides Lawrence's destiny, for the Arabs El-Orens, by the hand, allowing him to find a truer dimension of himself (to the question of an American journalist who reached him in the war zone about what attracted him so much to the desert, he would reply: "It's clean...") but at the same time dragging him towards the loss of his own self and to madness.

During the First World War, Lieutenant Lawrence was sent by the British Army headquarters in Cairo to Arabia to assess the situation of the Arab revolt and foment it, to create difficulties for the Turkish army in that sector. The young officer immediately takes the fate of the Bedouin guerrillas to heart and wins the favor of Prince Faisal, whom he even promises the conquest of Damascus with only Arab forces. Here, Lawrence begins to cultivate his ambitious and crazily generous goal: to free the Arabs from slavery and prevent his own country from taking the place of the Turkish occupiers. The lieutenant will succeed in the desperate task of bringing together the Bedouin tribes, hostile to each other, and winning over the raiders of Auda Abu Tayi to his side; he will occupy Aqaba, advance northward, obtain support from his homeland for this desperate endeavor, and even manage to capture Damascus before the arrival of the British army. But the complicated mechanisms of diplomacy begin to turn, and Lawrence, now too shaken by some war experiences, such as the torture he endured when he fell into Turkish hands, will be forced to step aside, as his dream seems to fall apart.

A remarkable directorial work, the caliber of the actors, a magnificent soundtrack, and the very story narrated, make this old film undoubtedly worthy of being rediscovered: in an era of digital movies, computer-generated effects, and incapable actors, it is right and proper to look back and bow before true Actors, Directors capable of creating true works of art even without today's highly sophisticated technological means. David Lean offers us here a masterpiece, with breathtaking shots, incisive dialogues and the silences and spaces of a desert which, though in distant Arabia, becomes an inner dimension both for the protagonist and the viewer. A film that personally made me dream from the first time I saw it, that made me travel to an exotic world, among Bedouin tents and the infinite monochrome of the solitude of the desert, a world that is now forever rooted within me: a bit of sand has entered even my soul.