On Screen

...yells a revenge-maddened Lawrence, and as his column swoops down murderously on the Turks, we are suddenly moved by the sight of the two big, foolish ladles clanging away, uncomprehending, into a massacre...

...Naked feet of men and camels struggle and fray themselves across these sands and rocks...

...in goes a therapeutic suggestion...

...not even one of the better known African deserts, jaded by the admiration of travelers and blasé about cameras...

...The transition from neurosis to cure becomes almost as accelerated as those life cycles of flowers or insects in nature documentaries...

...You have not merely been transported to the desert...

...Charming not merely in the Cary Grant or James Dean way...

...It is by far the best of that opprobrious genre known by such names as "spectacle" or "superproduction...

...Sigmund Freud's was a conquest of depth, a dimension not readily accessible to the camera, especially when the deep is that of the human psyche...

...out comes a trauma, and pop...

...in fact, and this is the supreme tribute, one is never aware of its size, and almost never of its length...

...No matter: Lawrence remains one of those rare films that cannot be merely watched but have to be lived through...

...the episode combines pictorial beauty, suspenseful cutting, profound emotion, extreme restraint to achieve a mounting tension and its release in a series of climaxes— one of the two or three greatest bits of movie architectonics ever...

...Lawrence of Arabia does not close that perfectly upon itself, but some of its parts are worth many another good film whole...

...A hoofer like Larry Parks plays Dr...

...When God is mentioned in Robert Bolt's sinewy and thoughtful dialogue, he is mentioned to good purpose...

...As for the dream sequences, photographed mostly in negative or overexposure, they belong not on the couch of Dr...

...Freud but in the Cabinet of Dr...

...this is a mysterious, deep-rooted, magically compelling emanation which can move men, women, mountains— even four-hour movies...

...There is, for instance, Lawrence's solitary return into the desert to find a straggler...

...No prisoners...

...Lean's camera plots are marvelous—as when we see Lawrence skipping along the tops of Turkish railway cars he has just derailed: David dancing before the Ark, while a horde of ecstatic Bedouin looters follow him in the sand below...

...In the film, patients are hypnotized at the first wave of a pencil or cigar...

...The last climax: Sherif Ali, the haughty Arab who was hitherto more rival to than collaborator with Lawrence, is utterly awed by Lawrence's impossible achievement...

...It is a virgin desert, and it unfolds its loveliness shyly, dune by dune, vale by vale: white or oyster or red in the daytime, seagreen before dawn, sheer silver and quicksilver during a simoom...

...So periodically we get jolted by stereophonic pseudo-Tchaikovsky...

...And elementary though its analyses are, it had a supposedly sophisticated New York preview audience excitedly Probing Along With Sigi...

...twisters blow columns of sand over the landscape, pillars of fire that lead nowhere...

...As Lawrence's Arabs marched through the night, we had an occasional shot of two large ladles hanging from the bottom of a muledrawn field canteen...

...We can only guess at the expression of that far, burnoose-shadowed face, but the guess is more suggestive than any sight...

...a question is fired at them and pop...

...This is a desert its few Bedouins don't bother to look at, and few Westerners after Lawrence have had a chance to look at...

...Some of the last climaxes pall on us...

...They did, regrettably, feel obliged to show Martha Freud as a wife at first jealous of the pretty patients, yet later, when her "Sigi" is ready to quit, discouraged, nobly urging him on...

...Another director would now give us a close-up of Lawrence's happy smile signifying, "I have won—by winning over Ali and his men, I have conquered Arabia...

...Or take the poetry which Lean disengages from mere objects...

...the Bedouins, drunk with victory, follow only a shadow...

...But what is made abundantly clear is how one man could accomplish all those superhuman feats: Lawrence did it, very simply, by being Peter O'Toole...

...A nocturnal colloquy is interrupted for a shot of the desert sky full of overripe stars, a shot held for what seems like an unconscionable length of time...

...And Lean elicits superb performances from a large, fine cast—down to the very camels whose every whinnying and snorting becomes meaningful and endearing...

...They even show Freud's own neurosis, possibly overdoing it a little to accommodate Montgomery Clift's mad stare, which is rather more suited to Cagliostro or Dr...

...I suppose this is because it is not a hammy California desert accustomed to showing off to tourists and film crews...

...It is neither holier nor sillier than thou, does not have Kirk Douglas making noble speeches from a cross, and "the Christ," in Lew Wallace's phrase, does not appear in it either in effigy or in person...

...presenting some of the parochial Jewishness of the Freud family, though little or no hint of the anti-Semitism Sigmund had to contend with...

...If it does alert the uninitiated to the existence and importance of Freud's work, it will not have been made in vain...

...He is the unwobbling pivot of Lawrence of Arabia...

...I'm clearly an analyst and feel that synthesis presents no problems once you've got the analysis," Freud wrote in a letter...

...And Lawrence is, for all its enormous and somewhat excessive length, and despite the unanswered question at its core, a major film and a magnificent one...

...But they did try to stick to facts, albeit rearranged: attempting to show Freud occasionally bogged down or stumped or too upset to treat someone who then goes mad and dies...

...Lawrence's conquests swept across the plane of vision and are thus eminently photogenic...

...Films that have the makings of ordinariness about them, like Brief Encounter or Breaking the Sound Barrier, become extraordinary...

...Breuer, while a brilliant actor like Alan Cuthbertson has (like some other notables) a five-second, non-speaking part...

...The second is that psychoanalysis does not conform to dramatic or filmic necessity but lasts for years, flounders, goes around in circles, follows false scents, progresses by tiny and tedious steps...

...Not the least reason for this is that, unlike other such films, it does not have an impossible scenario with either typical Hollywood or typical Christopher Fry dialogue...

...That is the first strike against John Huston's Freud...

...At first we feel that nothing the men are saying matters in the presence of these huge, near, untransient stars...

...Next, we see only Lawrence's boots at the top of the screen and his enormous shadow scurrying across the sand at the bottom...

...The excellent composer, Maurice Jarre (Sundays and Cybèle), was not allowed to follow through on the terse drumbeats that enliven the best scenes—obviously the producer could not see a lot of drumming as a best-selling "original soundtrack album...

...But in the film foreshortening becomes—perhaps unavoidably—so great that analysis begins to look like a quick preliminary to a vast synthesis...

...The ladles are continually banging against each other, and their honest, ingenuous clatter has about it a canine fidelity to the riders...

...The effect is, in more than one sense, synthetic...

...The triumph of Lawrence is conveyed by a medium-tolong shot: a slight straightening of the exhausted body, the least bending of the head toward Ali...

...they wake up and lo...

...The casting is altogether peculiar...

...You feel the temperature rising unendurably at the back of your brain and you are parched down to the pit of your stomach...

...Under David Lean's direction and Fred Young's photography, it performs as never before...

...When a distant rider approaches through the heat-waves, your eyes ache as they try to keep his figure from deliquescing, as they try to distinguish between mirage and reality...

...Caligari...

...they are appreciably better...

...The third hero of Lawrence of Arabia is David Lean, the director...

...But there is no close-up, not till much later...

...The film has its flaws, to be sure, like leaving certain key actions hardly motivated...

...Even so, the film is respectful and, Lord knows, serious...

...Or again, much later, a crazed Lawrence with his bodyguard of assassins is about to butcher a Turkish company that surrenders to him...

...It does not examine Lawrence's psychological complexity deeply, does not come to grips with the Deraa episode, shies away from any hint of homosexuality...

...films that ought to be no more than gripping or engrossing, like In Which We Serve or Great Expectations, achieve a simple, incomprehensible perfection, a classic completeness, the possibility for the mind to see them in the round, as one views a statue...

...and certainly no studio sandlot...

...the desert has been inculcated in you...

...Miracle than to Sigmund Freud...

...but then we know better: that the most trivial thing said under the aspect of these stars becomes ratified by eternity...

...When the bewhiskered Parks and the bearded Clift jointly treat Susannah York by laying her psyche bare, she so far outacts them both that the scene seems like a retelling of Susanna and the Elders...

...Whatever film Lean directs turns to gold, or as much to gold as a director can make it...

...AU, on foot, is bringing his gourd —like a wreath to a conqueror— to Lawrence who has refused other water, and is barely able to keep on his camel...

...With jubilant veneration, Ali and his Bedouins reach Lawrence...

...Sometimes the desert yields to rock formations which look like prehistoric temples of savage magenta or sacerdotal mauve...

...Still, John Huston and his scenarists have made conscientious efforts in the direction of integrity...

...its pillar of strength and, for all I know, pillar of wisdom...

...O'Toole is everything a leading man—in or out of movies—should be: young, handsome, sensitive, talented, manly and charming...

...The second hero of the film is the desert...