What's Right (and Wrong) in 'Lawrence of Arabia'

David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is routinely voted among the greatest films ever made; it is also a work of considerable fiction about a man who wrote his own considerable fictions. With the restored 4K print back in circulation, it's worth keeping a ledger against Lawrence's memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the historical record.

Right: the improbable outline is true. Lawrence really was an Oxford archaeologist turned liaison officer; the crossing of the Nefud and the taking of Aqaba from the landward side happened; the railway demolitions were his signature. The film's portrait of imperial double-dealing — the Sykes-Picot betrayal shadowing every promise to the Arabs — is, if anything, understated.

Invented or compressed: Sherif Ali is a composite; Omar Sharif's entrance, cinema's greatest, corresponds to no event. The two boys lost in the desert compress several deaths. Lawrence's height: O'Toole had nearly a foot on him ('a Prince of our disorder,' one biographer sighed, 'played by a prince of Ireland'). And the film softens the memoir's most disturbing passages rather than contradicting them.

The deeper truth survives translation: a man who mythologized himself, caught between empires and increasingly horrified by his own legend. The memoir is longer, stranger and more self-lacerating — the film is what memory does to it.