Six Pillars of Wisdom

Extract

Professor A. W. Lawrence has complained that the Speigel-Lean film which has his brother for its hero is false to the spirit, and certainly to the text, of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It has to be admitted that Mr Robert Bolt’s admirable script has little in it of the Doughty-and-Authorized-Version grandeurs, and inevitably some foreshortening of the epic was necessary to make the film at all. As it is, you are imprisoned for four hours, and, however voluntary a captive you may be, enough in this context must mean a good deal less than a detailed recapitulation of the book.

The narrative is simple, confined almost entirely to the desert campaigns that led to the capture of Aqaba and the entry into Damascus. There is mercifully little attempt to use Lawrence as the peg for an interpretation of abnormal psychology. His illegitimacy is referred to (by himself), and the humiliation of his treatment at Deraa is indicated (though with much less sadistic detail than the book itself supplies). In effect we are shown a resolute, romantic Englishman who has a deep love and understanding of the Arabs and who is convinced that he can win them unity in their common revolt against the Turks. The film is an account of how this happened, and how in the end Lawrence’s hopes were betrayed by the politicians and by the Arabs’ failure to preserve into peace the resolve they had known in battle.

In a curious way we know little more about Lawrence in the end than we did in the beginning. Peter O’Toole’s much praised performance preserves an odd reticence, not only of word and gesture (which the character of Lawrence requires) but of understanding.