Shot for some $12 million and with literally no female speaking roles in its nearly 4-hour length Lawrence of Arabia is the biopic of T.E. Lawrence as adapted by screenwriter Robert Bolt from Lawrence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Using a flashback structure following the death of its subject to frame the story along with the journalist Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy) the movie details Lawrence's experiences in the Arab world as a British adviser and military leader during the First World War.

It begins with the young lieutenant Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) fulfilling his assignment as British observer for Arabian Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness), the leader of a splinter force of tribal subjects willing to do the Prince's bidding in the struggle against Ottoman Turkish aggression. Lawrence is faced with reporting through his military chain of command but instead digs into the native culture as one of Feisal's most trusted allies and advisers.

His leadership sent an army of sand peoples against Turkish and Central Powers forces and ultimately brought the War's Arabian struggle to a standstill through their guerrilla tactics. Significantly the internecine struggles among various tribes vying for control of Palestine and Arabia was also a secondary subject in the film though such political struggles naturally extend far beyond the scope of the biographical orientation.

For many audience members and filmmakers alike, Lawrence of Arabia was, and is, a watershed experience. All subsequent movies have been forced to deal with the technical execution and artistic audacity of director David Lean's depiction of the incredibly enigmatic and heroic real-life figure T.E. Lawrence who is, somehow, a thematic forebear for the director.

Like him, Lawrence was a free-thinking and disciplined maverick sent to the Arab front in the war as much as a reward for his soldierly skill as for his chaffing at the bit of his superiors in constant conflict with him. Ever the artisan and perfectionist Lean's creative leadership was similarly characterized by a sense of independence and excellence. Despite these parallels in personal likeness, however, the historical backdrop of Lawrence's experience can't be overlooked as influencing the resulting film.

While World War I was a trench war on the Western Front and a conflict of massed armies engaging in wholesale slaughter in the East, in the less populated areas of Africa and Arabia fighting was almost totally built upon border skirmishing and guerilla raids. To disrupt strategic positions and gain the upper hand terrorism was sometimes used just as overwhelming strength in numbers was only a partial guarantee of success.

Into this complex world was inserted lieutenant T.E. Lawrence as the symbolic personage of the British colonial empire coming into conflict with its neighboring colonial powers, the Germans, Turks and Austria-Hungarians, as well as seeing a shift in geopolitical circumstances towards nationalism rather than the continued expansion of empire. Noted for his assimilation into Feisal's tribal army Lawrence was a figure at odds with his heritage. At once a gifted tactician, warrior and leader of men, he was also a relic of an older time with entrenched ideas about well thought action and the charity of justified struggles for right and wrong.

The 20th century shaped up as a period of rapidly changing social circumstances and among the most sweeping changes was the increased mechanization of military power from hand-to-hand combat to weapons of mass destruction. In the deserts of Palestine, Arabia and Mesopotamia during World War I such distinctions were unimaginable and were used to create some of the most celebrated images from Lawrence of Arabia.

Among them is the advance of Feisal's troupes on camels with turbans whipping off fighting men wielding single shot rifles and depending on surprise attacks with instantaneous disappearance into vast, hostile spaces for their survival. Such military technology was anachronistic in the period from 1914-1918 but the romance surrounding this theater of war is that it could be waged with camels and bullets alongside an appreciation of windstorms, sand dunes and scorching sunshine.

When casting the movie Lean originally wanted Albert Finney for the title role but was persuaded by Katharine Hepburn who first urged producer Sam Spiegel to cast the relative newcomer Peter O'Toole. Generally considered his big screen debut, at least in a film of this magnitude, O'Toole's performance is doubtless one of the main reasons for the film's spectacular quality.

Also giving it a sense of truth and savage naturalism is the location shooting that lent the film its aesthetic qualities that have since become legendary. The desert environs also contributed certain settings of real-life skirmishes between Lawrence's soldiers and the Turkish army and were used in the film. Some of the trains wrecked in his raids were even found and recreated where they lay in the sand to benefit a sense of verisimilitude.

Voicing the common complaint of film purists everywhere, Lawrence of Arabia really must be scene projected because of its overwhelming images, sweeping tableau and production design that can only be appreciated in the ultra-widescreen format afforded by projecting its 222 minutes in Super Panavision 70. Yet this celebration of cinematic specificity is also tempered by my sense of realism.

I saw the reissued Lawrence of Arabia at the Hollywood Cinerama Dome following years of painstaking preservation by the likes of such donors as Martin Scorsese. I also sat through its entire duration that included a 20-minute intermission and left the theater exhausted, not simply from the film but from its size as a movie behemoth of unmatched weight that beat me into submission as much as I was seduced by its achievements.

Viewers in 1962 were similarly faced with the size of the film and its unavoidably high quality but they were also faced with a 4-hour long test of patience. The resulting Academy Awards race of which Lawrence of Arabia was the prime beneficiary was filled with eye opening blockbusters, a few noteworthy dramas and genre films and a couple of important foreign films that were largely overlooked but have since become part of the global film culture.

In the first category belong three of the Best Picture nominees including The Longest Day, a now-dated all-star laden depiction of the D-Day landing at Normandy beach, The Music Man, Robert Preston's cinematic triumph following literally hundreds of Broadway performances, and Mutiny on the Bounty, the 1960s reworking of the classic mutineer's tale. To the second category of important dramas and genre films belong the fifth Best Picture nominee To Kill a Mockingbird, the non-nominated but seminal Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Three other noteworthy classics were left out of the major American awards and have retrospectively distinguished themselves as great pieces of movie art. This acclaim rests both on what they represent in terms of nailing the prevailing mood of their times but also in terms of how they stretched the number of realizable subjects for movies.

Perhaps foremost among them is Jules and Jim, the French story of a complex ménage a trois with fatalistic overtones. Now seen as a cornerstone of the French New Wave which was introduced through the group of critics once closely associated with the Cahiers du Cinema, Jules and Jim is a masterwork without adequate compliment in American movies.

Not that Academy voters were exclusively unwilling to assimilate foreign films into their awards categories, English-speaking and British-originated films excepted. The Manchurian Candidate is a remarkable American film that was largely quashed through studio confusion and audience disinterest. Its tale of political intrigue resonated strongly after Kennedy's assassination and can now be rightly viewed as ahead of its time.

The third film with a considerable post-1962 reputation is slasher movie grandfather Peeping Tom that, along with Psycho, created a new way to impose the apparatus of making movies into horror movies. Thus the camera was freed to assault viewers and on-screen actors as never before with the activity of shooting moving pictures likened to murder through the acts of the film's "peeping tom."

Altogether these varied films point out that while Lawrence of Arabia is one of the great aesthetic achievements in moviemaking, not least because of its awesome cinematography and austere beauty. But this short list of films, idiosyncratic by all accounts when considering other titles that have also distinguished themselves, points out how one movie, regardless of its merit and excellence, can sometimes overwhelm critical judgment of other works as being equally worthy of regard and acclaim.

In short, the Best Picture awarded Sam Spiegel for his production of Lawrence of Arabia is demonstrably the just rewards for a veteran filmmaking staff even if more thematically exciting was being worked out in other films that didn't require 4-hours running time and an intermission.