I avoided Lawrence of Arabia for years because I thought it was just another old Hollywood historical epic, you know, fabulous costumes, soft colonialism, casts of thousands. I finally watched it. Folks, I wish I had seen it sooner.
Director David Lean's story of an oddball British officer who leads an uprising in the Middle East during WW1 is a strange, hallucinatory deconstruction of a legend. In politics, there are no heroes, only chess pieces. Peter O'Toole, in his debut, is captivating, a man covered in gilt. His simmering romance with an iconic Omar Sharif is as blistering as the Arabian sun.
My main takeaway: never trust well-educated, well-intentioned, unwise narcissists who clamor for revolution.
It's not perfect: too many non-Arab actors play Arab characters, including Alec Guinness in Brownface. But Lean exquisitely rails against empire. The desert isn't desolate. It is beautiful until human ambition floods it with blood.