The Best Adventure Movies: Lawrence of Arabia

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Outside Magazine, June 2005

Outside Goes to the Movies
A Perfect 10
Lawrence of Arabia

By Steven Kotler & The Editors

4. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Interviewed in 1989, Lawrence costar Omar Sharif was blunt about the chutzpah it took to make this stunning epic: "If you are the man with the money and somebody . . . says he wants to make a film that's four hours long, with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert, what would you say?"

Thankfully, producer Sam Spiegel said yes, and the result is cinema's grandest poem to sand and sky and the perverse joys of killing strangers in a strange land. Shot on location in Jordan, Spain, Morocco, and the UK, the film makes exceptional use of the big screen, scaling characters against landscapes with such precision and flair that you're sucked into the center of the dizzying spectacle of camels and sheiks and guns and desert. Granted, director David Lean does an incomplete and sometimes messy job of recounting the campaign by British soldier/adventurer T. E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) to unite warring Arab tribes against the Turks, but that hardly matters. Lawrence never falters as a visually triumphant masterpiece.

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