Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

For some values of "loves"

Up next on TCM is a day of movies dedicated to Shirley MacLaine. One that I hadn't heard of before the last time it showed up on TCM is Two Loves; it gets a showing tomorrow, August 13, at 8:15 AM. And now, having watched it, I can see why I hadn't heard of it before.

After the credits, some titles inform us that the setting is North Island, New Zealand, although I wonder how much northern California stood in when they have establishing shots and how much is the MGM back lot. A car shows up at a severely underfunded school, and getting out of the car is one of the teachers, Anna Vorontosov (Shirley MacLaine). She's an American who wound up teaching here presumably to get away from America, and perhaps to do good work, since she's teaching a class of mostly Maori children. Anna has unorthodox ideas about teaching, but fairly orthodox ideas about life, which might be part of why she ended up in New Zealand, as she never found anyone to marry.

As she makes it to school today, she's informed that there's a new chief inspector of school who will be visiting, William Abercrombie (Jack Hawkins). But before that, we meet another of the teachers who's come here from far away to teach: Paul Lathrope (Laurence Harvey). Now, as you might guess from a title like Two Loves, Paul is likely to be interested romantically in Anna. But there are a couple of catches, like his having served in the war and that scarring him emotionally. It's also led him to drink and take all sorts of inappropriate risks on his motorcycle. Anna also doesn't want to go too far too fast with him.

Eventually, Abercrombie also gets to know Anna better. Abercrombie is originally from the UK but came over to New Zealand. His wife and kids, however, didn't like New Zealand, so they went back to the UK although the wife will never grant him a divorce. Abercrombie reads a book that Anna has put together of stories from the Maori kids that talk about social issues "proper" white kids would never discuss and, while Abercrombie is shocked about it at first, he thinks their stories have potential.

One more subplot involves an adolescent Maori student, Whareparita (Nobu McCarthy), and the way she fits into the life of the school with the teachers. She's asked to be an assistant with Anna as it's thought this will make Anna's clasroom look better in the eyes of Abercrombie. But it's really Lathrope who is of more importance to Whareparita's subplot.

I mentioned at the top that I hadn't heard of Two Loves and that this was for good reason. The reason is that the movie got savage reviews at the time of its release. It's based on a book, and apparently the author of that book said the movie deserved the bad reviews and that the direction mangled her story. The story lines here are very muddled and it feels hard to have much interest in any of the characters: the Maori are almost cartoonish; Lathrope is, at least as played by Laurence Harvey, over the top; and Anna isn't really given much depth.

But, as always, judge for yourself when you watch Two Loves.

Oh, tomorrow is Easter

Tomorrow, April 20, is Easter Sunday, at least for those who follow western strands of Christianity. There's a set of Hollywood films dealing with the biblical tellings of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that seem to get trotted out every year, one of which is the 1959 sound version of Ben-Hur, which kicks the day off at 6:00 AM.

This version of the story runs something like 3½ hours, depending on how you want to count the overture and intermission. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a reasonably well-off man in Jersualem during the era when Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor and that famous carpenter was roaming around Judea preaching the gospel. He lives with his mom and sister, as well as servant to whose daughter Esther (Haya Harareet) Judah has been betrothed. Judah learns that his childhood friend and Roman citizen Messala (Stephen Boyd) is coming back to Judea. Unfortunately, Messala wants to exploit his friendship with Judah to get Judah to betray rebellious Jews, which Judah refuses to do, knowing fully well this will mean trouble should things go any more sour.

Of course they will, as a good 50 minutes into the movie the Romans are parading past Judah's villa when his sister knocks a roofing tile off, falling just inches from the governor. That's unforgivable, so Messala makes Judah a galley slave and imprisons Mom and sister, who eventually get leprosy, although that story line is at least another 90 minutes away. Judah is put on the ship captained by consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), eventually saves Arrius' life, and gets freed and made Arrius' adopted son as a result, enabling him to go back to Judea to look for his family. Esther, rather than telling Judah his mom and sister are lepers, tells him they died, which leads Judah to seek vengeance on Messala.

That desire for vengeance is why Judah finally decides to take part in the famous chariot race, which we know he'll win, and spend the last 50 minutes or so looking for Mom and Sis since Messala tells him the truth. Along the way at several key points, Jesus shows up, filmed only from the back, and has a profound effect on the various characters in the story, including ultimately Judah.

I said at the beginning that this version runs long, and I do mean long. It's a good hour longer than the Ramon Novarro silent, as I mentioned in a brief post in 2013. I stand by the comments I made in that post. The 1959 version of Ben-Hur won a ton of Oscars, and the technical categories it won are probably mostly deserved, since I can't really be bothered to look through the entire list of Oscar nominations to determine whether some other movie had better costume design. The music, art direction, cinematography, and all that stuff are indeed of a very high standard.

But the acting and screenplay? I think they take a back seat to the much tighter Novarro version. A lot of the scenes feel like they go on way too long, notably for me being the time between being sentenced to the galleys to actually winding up rowing a boat. And then there's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hugh Griffith playing an Arab sheik and the financial backer of Judah in the chariot race. I'm surprised I didn't come across a bunch of modern reviews arguing he was a bad stereotype.

My criticisms aside, Ben-Hur is considered an epic, and for understandable reasons. Becuase of that, it's one that should definitely be on any film buff's list of "Essentials", even if you only watch it once.

Gideon of Scotland Yard

I movie that I saw on TCM ages ago, quite possibly before I started blogging, is one called Gideon's Day (when first released in the US, it got the title Gideon of Scotland Yard). Recently, I noticed that one of the streaming services had it, and since a search of the site claims I haven't done a full-length review of it here before, I decided to sit down and watch it to do a review here.

Both titles are descriptive, and in some ways, there's not a whole lot of plot to describe. George Gideon (Jack Hawkins) is a Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. He lives in one of the leafy boroughs of London with his wife Kate (Anna Lee) and adult daughter Sally (Anna Massey), who is studying at the Royal College of Music. One of the many subplots involves Sally, who is supposed to take part in a recital that evening. Kate wants George to return home early so they can dine before the concert, and more importantly to bring home some salmon since some other relatives are going to be over for dinner. George's not having the salmon and the possibility of missing that concert are the running comic-relief plot, although the rest of the movie isn't exactly heavy.

Since it's a running subplot, you can guess that things happen to break up Gideon's day and that he keeps getting called off to different duties. One short example is that he's expected to testify in court as a witness for a criminal trial, and it turns out the barristers only need him for one question to the point that you wonder why he had to break up his day for that. The two darkest parts of the movie involve a detective who has been on the take; Gideon has to approach the man's wife about it and she doesn't want to believe it. There's also an escaped murderer/mental patient who has returned to London from Manchester, and the police desperately want to catch him before he kills again.

These plots are not so much episodic like an anthology movie, although some are resolved fairly early. Instead, it's more like one of those old all-star movies in that the plots mix in and out and at least one character is involved in multiple subplots. On the way to taking his daughter to school, Gideon runs a red light because there's no oncoming traffic. A constable on the beat, PC Barnaby-Green (Andrew Ray) sees this, and pulls Gideon over, showing him no mercy because after all everybody is supposed to obey the law, especially a chief inspector like Gideon. Gideon just somehow has the great good (or bad) luck to keep running into Barnaby-Green throughout his day.

One other crime involves a gang who engage in a comic kidnapping of an executive who has the payroll for a company, then taking the payroll. They then try to break into a bank vault after hours, and their crime breaks up Gideon's adventures at various points. Meanwhile, there's still that salmon Kate wants for dinner....

Gideon's Day is an excellent slice-of-life movie with just the right mix of comedy and drama. I think I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Jack Hawkins, an actor who isn't so well remembered on this side of the Atlantic mostly because he didn't do much in the way of Hollywood movies. Hawkins handles both the serious stuff and the light relief with aplomb, while the various crime stories are all done well, with the possible minor quibble that everything has to get wrapped up way to quickly since it's a movie.

Supposedly when the movie was first released in the US, it was edited down and only released in black and white, but both times I've seen it, it's been a color print with the "full" running time of a shade over 90 minutes. It's a winner of a movie, and 90 minutes of fine entertainment.

You are not Number Six

Another of the box sets that I picked up some time back was an set of "war movies" released by Columbia. One of them isn't really a war movie, but it's a movie that really deserves more attention: The Prisoner.

In an unnamed eastern European country sometime after the end of World War II and the Communist takeovers in those countries, an unnamed Roman Catholic cardinal (Alec Guinness) is presiding over Mass. The Communists were officially atheist, although the extent to which various Communist countries suppressed organized religion varied from country to country. It's fairly obvious why the Communists would see the Roman church as a threat, and sure enough, the Communists in this country see the Cardinal as a threat. So after Mass, the Cardinal is arrested.

Now, the government could simply put the Cardinal in prison on trumped-up charges and let him languish there. That, however, presented a substantial political problem. The Catholic church still had a substantial following, and imprisoning the Cardinal would turn him into a cause célèbre at best, or a martyr at worst. This would be even more the case if the government summarily executed the Cardinal on whatever charges. No; the government realizes that they need a show trial in which the Cardinal can be forced to "confess" his "sins" against the state, much like the Costa-Gavras movie The Confession that I blogged about some time back. Now, in that movie, the defendants were all already devoted communists who couldn't understand why they had been put on trial, so it was easier for the state to get the confessions they wanted. With a devout Catholic like the Cardinal, that's going to be much more difficult.

To that end, the government brings in an unnamed Interrogator (Jack Cardiff), a devout communist who can probe the Cardinal's mind and figure out what to use as a wedge to crack it open and get that confession. The Cardinal and the Interrogator also have a past together, having jointly been part of the resistance against the Nazis during the war, although they didn't always resist in the same way. The Cardinal had even been tortured by the Nazis, which is why the government knows they can't simply torture a confession out of the Cardinal. The Interrogator knows all of this, and has to come up with more subtle measures. And, he's a pretty darn smart man himself, so he has a bunch of tricks of his own up his sleeve.

In between all of the verbal sparring between the Cardinal and the Interrogator, the Cardinal is sent back to his prison cell, where he's attended to by a Jailer (Wilfrid Lawson), whose plot purpose is more to be somebody neutral and release the tension of the plot. (I have a feeling that in real life, the government would have used a jailer who was more or less spying on the Cardinal, much like in the US Army's World War II training film Resisting Enemy Interrogation.)

That's pretty much all there is to the plot of The Prisoner, as the movie is as much a character study of the two main characters (and especially the Cardinal) as it is a traditionally-plotted movie. And if The Prisoner has one weakness, it's in that scanty plot. It feels a lot like a plot that starts somewhere a bit past the beginning, and ends somewhere before the end. The characters know each other and know what was going on before the events of the movie, but we don't.

The movie also requires a bit of knowledge of history above and beyond what I mentioned about the anti-clerical nature of the eastern European regimes. It's based on a play (if you couldn't tell from the relatively small number of sets) that was loosely based on real events. The Cardinal is most likely based on Hungarian Jószef Cardinal Mindszenty. He was arrested in 1948 after the Communist takeover of Hungary; at the time of the play and movie he was languishing in prison. He would be released in the abortive revolution of 1956, but after the Soviets invaded Mindszenty was forced to take refuge in the US embassy in Budapest, where he'd spend the next 15 years. European audiences of the 1950s probably would have recognized Mindszenty as a human rights prisoner; modern-day audiences, especially an ocean away, perhaps not so much.

However, the plot we do have works, and the performances are outstanding. I don't think anybody should be surprised by Guinness' performance. But those who don't know Jack Hawkins, since he isn't as well remembered by people who aren't film buffs, might not realize just how good an actor he could be. And The Prisoner is one of his best roles.

If you want a thoughtful movie with good acting, The Prisoner is one I can recommend in spades.