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Apart from a short prologue in the form of an epilogue (Lawrence's death and the St. Paul's commemoration service) the film's action is concentrated into the period of the desert campaigns. Lawrence is first encountered as an untidy, disgruntled young lieutenant on the staff in Cairo, wanting only to get out into the desert. This he achieves through Mr. Dryden, of the Arab Bureau, who arranges for him to be seconded for special duty, to make contact with Prince Feisal and check on the progress of the Arab Revolt. In the desert Lawrence's guide is shot down at a water-hole by Sherif Ali - an incident which introduces Lawrence simultaneously to the ferocity of tribal rivalries and to the man who will become his firmest ally in attempting to unify the Arabs. Feisal is philosophically resigned to the absorption of his guerrilla army into the regular British forces. A miracle is needed to sustain the independent spirit of the Arab Revolt; and Lawrence provides it, crossing the Nefud Desert with Sherif Ali and a small force and capturing the Turkish port of Aqaba. To halt another tribal quarrel, Lawrence has to shoot down one of his own men. His realisation that he enjoys the act of killing sends him back to Cairo in a mood of remorseful self-doubt. But General Allen offers arms and money, and Lawrence goes back to a period of triumphant guerrilla warfare, hero-worshipped by his own men and made a world hero through the dispatches of the American journalist Jackson Bentley. On a scouting expedition with Ali into the Turkish-held town of Deraa, Lawrence is picked up by the Turks and savagely beaten. The discovery (as the film interprets it) that he is not invincible, that he could be broken by torture, persuades him that he should throw up his command. But Allenby, assisted by Lawrence's own sense of destiny, again sends him back to the desert. Lawrence's attack on a Turkish column becomes a needlessly brutal massacre. He leads his force into Damascus, sets up an Arab Council to run the city, and sees it collapse under the strain of tribal divisions. The politicians, Allenby and Feisal, are left to come to a settlement, while the idealist, Lawrence, rides away from Damascus.

The St. Paul's sequence, with an agile reporter asking questions on the Cathedral steps and getting only a series of dusty answers, offers a clear indication of what the film's attitude is to be: Lawrence remains an enigma, and we are not to look here for the solution. But to build a blockbuster lasting nearly four hours around a character about whose motives and drives the film admits its own uncertainty is already to take a sizeable risk. The story is by its nature episodic, despite the script's obvious determination to supply action climaxes at suitable intervals. Lawrence himself must hold the thing together; and before Lawrence the film in effect retires defeated, while Peter 0'Toole's performance, likeable, intelligent and devoted, lacks that ultimate star quality which would lift the film along with it. Breaking its character portrait down into a series of episodes, David Lean's film does better with Lawrence the exhibitionist, capering about the desert in his new Arab robes, or parading on the roof of a newly captured train, than with the introvert. The Deraa episode is almost an admission of weakness, shot (and played by Jose Ferrer) with louring sadistic overtones which find their justification not in the context of the film itself but in whatever an audience may be assumed to read into the scene. And when it comes to the massacre of the Turks, the film is not close enough to its central character to communicate a human rather than a spectacular experience.

But the strength of Lawrence lies in the fact that its makers have obviously felt the enormous fascination of the desert. Even if the camera offers too many slow stares at corrugated landscapes, too many mesmerised panning shots, at its best the film is trying not just to engineer a response, but to communicate something strongly felt. The most hauntingly effective moment is the first sight of Sherif Ali, the black dot riding out of the mirage, slowly transformed into the black horseman. This is wonderful; and there are fine scenes of preparation for battle. Any amount of production intelligence has gone into Lawrence, at all levels, but it is intelligence of the rule-book rather than the sweepingly inventive order. (The long sequence, for instance, in which Lawrence rides back into the desert for the man he will later have to execute has been built by Lean into an over-immaculate exercise in cross-cutting.) Imagination is let down with a thud by the score, with its insistent themes, and picked up again by much of the playing (Jack Hawkins' bluffly ruthless Allenby, Alec Guinness' impeccably intelligent if oddly accented Feisal, Omar Sharif's admirably straightforward Sherif Ali). Lawrence is not, as has been made clear, a biography: inventions in Robert Bolt's script have been severely criticised. But the fault is not that they are inventions but that they seem to belong to script conventions rather than taking us closer to the subject. This is part of the problem for a film which is trying to be everything at once; a film in which grandeur of conception is not up to grandeur of setting.

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