Lawrence Of Arabia

DAVID Lean’s follow-up to Kwai won him another Best Director Oscar, while the finished film would become the favourite of Steven Spielberg. The British master of the epic first considered Marlon Brando, then Albert Finney, to play TE Lawrence, but ended up with Peter O’Toole – who is quite brilliant, both tender and tough as the enigmatic leader of men. Lawrence is a complex, confusing man, who never quite emerges from the shadow of his own legend – which is just as it should be. This is a film happy to allow for uncertainty, just as it’s a movie whose powerful images linger longer than the story (ostensibly about Lawrence’s attempts to unite Arab tribes against the Turks in the First World War). The shot of Omar Sharif emerging from the desert’s heat-haze is one of the greatest in cinema. Watch it on the biggest screen you can.