Retrospective Film Review

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) • 60 Years Later

An English officer unites and leads diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks.

As David Lean’s monumental Lawrence of Arabia approaches its halfway point — as lesser movies would start to wrap things up before the end — T.E Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) reaches the Suez Canal with his young Arab servant Farraj (Michel Ray). After their long trek across the desert, its cool water is a welcome sight, of course, and water is a persistent motif in Lawrence. One Arab leader even boasts of being “a river to my people.”

But it’s also a symbol of British colonial rule. And so it’s appropriate, at this place where the Arabian sands run up against the realities of western civilisation and commerce and politics, that an apparently routine question thrown across the canal at Lawrence and Farraj by a British soldier on a motorcycle sums up the single biggest issue of the film.

“Who are you?” the motorcyclist asks.