David Lean's films to be shown at British Council

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): The British Council continues to screen quality films by the best British directors and this month it's big movies with big hearts. David Lean is the man of the moment, best known for his love stories Doctor Zhivago, Brief Encounter, Ryan's Daughter and his epic war stories Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai and the wartime classic In Which We Serve.

A connecting link between such different narrative impulses of love and hate suggests itself in Lean's handling of the essential human drama, when fear and desire wrestle with honorable intentions.

Integral to all three films of the Lean season -- The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India -- is a protagonist challenged by the cross-cultural experience, by the ex-pat dilemma. There is the British officer who has surrendered with his men to the Japanese in Burma in World War II; a scruffy young lieutenant sent into the Arabian desert to observe the situation who unites fractious tribes against the Ottoman Turks during the Great War; and two English women in the 1920s who visit colonial India, a subcontinent heaving with unrest.

How do you write about such classic epic films? You can begin safely with the best and mention that Lawrence of Arabia gets a five-out-of-five in the current Virgin Film Guide and that a caravan of Academy and other awards were hitched to it on its release in 1962. You can say that you saw it on again this summer in London in a mid-city cinema. Or you can simply claim that it was a film that took root in the imagination of a generation of filmgoers.

Lawrence of Arabia is based on the true exploits of a 27-year- old English officer (Peter O'Toole), fresh out of Oxfordshire, sent on a mission to make contact with Prince Feisal and to assess the extent of the Arab revolt under the Ottoman Turks during World War I. Set loose in the desert, Lawrence is in no time at the head of a small band of Arabs, tribes led with quiet dignity by Sheriff Ali (Omar Sharif) and the with a wild hunger by Auda Abu Tayi, played with relish by Anthony Quinn. Lawrence leads them to victory over the Turkish-held port of Aqaba. It was easy once you got there as all the defensive gun emplacements were facing the sea. But to mount an overland attack there was the small matter of crossing the uncrossable Nefud Desert.

Lawrence is crazy and courageous enough to attempt it, defy fate and become "he for whom nothing is written". He is given the clothes of an Arab chief. But danger signals begin to sound as, believing himself alone, he leaps around in his new clothes like a kid in a new Batman cape. He even pauses to check his reflection in the blade of his new knife.

Along the way to Aqaba, Lawrence is forced to dispense justice to preserve peace among the tribes. Later to his commanding officer he acknowledges his pleasure in the taking of a life -- a life which he had risked his own to save from the desert furnace. General Allenby's response to the startling admission is to make sure that Lawrence enjoys recognition for his achievement in taking Aqaba -- and then send him back out into the desert again.

But the genie has already escaped. "El Aurens" behavior becomes more bizarre, capering along the tops of captured trains in a victory progress, reveling in the brutality of a massacre. Lawrence could lead his Arab forces all the way into Damascus, but the cloak of nobility had already long gone. No hagiography this, the film is happy to raise and leave unanswered questions about the nature of heroism.

Talents

Lawrence of Arabia brought together formidable talents, some while still young. It introduced two young actors to the cinema screen, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif. Both of them never looked back, O'Toole took on a lifelong procession of roles as a crazy Englishman and Sharif became the card-playing sophisticate.

David Lean had already shown with his war 1957 epic The Bridge on the River Kwai how skillfully he could master the complicated detail of human drama across a spread of panoramic material. Maurice Jarre composed a haunting theme to Lawrence's exploits with his glorious musical score. Screenwriter Robert Bolt gave his characters substance, intelligence and thoughts worth imparting.

Passage to India, based on the E. M. Forster novel, was both written and directed by Lean. It concerns a Mrs. Moore, an elderly English woman played by Peggy Ashcroft, who goes to visit her son Ronny, the city magistrate of Chandrapore. She is accompanied by a young lady who is his intended bride. Miss Adela Quested is played by Australian actress Judy Davis, who, like O'Toole, is not unused to playing characters teetering on the edge.

Both women are sympathetic newcomers and prepared to be fascinated by India, but they come across an expatriate community interested in the club, repertory theater and polo. Miss Quested is longing to see something of the "real India, but finds cucumber sandwiches. Dissatisfied with the pastimes of the expatriate community, they accept an invitation from Dr. Aziz to a picnic at the Marabar Caves high in the nearby hills.

By the time the well-intentioned and adventurous Adela finds herself alone in one of the caves she has already succumbed to paranoia of the unknown (is it schizophrenia?) and she flees her Indian host in panic, after some suggestion that she is a little drawn to him. As soon as Aziz gets back to Chandrapore, a charge of attempted rape is clapped on him which unleashes in the Indian community pent-up forces of righteous indignation and national independent self-assertion. More genies.

Mrs. Moore, the key witness to help Dr. Aziz in his plight, is bundled off back home to England by her son and the good doctor looks set to pay dearly for his hospitality towards the "gentle" Mrs. Moore and the young lady he once described as "not beautiful and with practically no breasts".

Feelings run hard and harsh on both sides. It is not until it is possible to relocate the action to Dr. Aziz's new home beside a clear lake below the snowy slopes of the Himalayas that events can change course. Aziz's only other loyal English friend, Richard Fielding (James Fox) arrives with his new wife (Mrs. Moore's daughter) pregnant with a child whose invisible presence seems to signify a new dawn and a new beginning. I don't know why Lean felt the need to tidy up quite to this extent but there you have it, a resolution to set things right. Kind of.

All films will be shown at the British Council this month. See our "Where to go" column for times and dates.