This Day in Film History (Death of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Composer Maurice Jarre)

Mar. 29, 2009—Maurice Jarre, a French composer and conductor who netted three Oscars among his 150 movie soundtracks, died at age 84 of cancer at his villa in Malibu, Calif.

You might wonder why I picked a photo of Peter O’Toole to illustrate a brief account of someone else. Well, it’s because that picture instantly brings to mind the first of Jarre’s memorable Oscar-winning scores: Lawrence of Arabia.

Accomplished film composers have existed for nearly as long as there’s been a Hollywood, but except for John Williams, I don’t think that one has emerged as a name brand in his own right—and the latter’s fame was surely enhanced by his 14-year association with the Boston Pops.

But once you see that picture of O’Toole, more likely than not, the majestic theme of Lawrence of Arabia will resound in your head—as distinct a contribution to that epic’s grandeur as the spectacular cinematography of Freddie Young.

So indelible were the sounds created by Jarre that his soundtrack for the film was voted #3 on the American Film Institute’s 25 Greatest Film Scores of All Time, surpassed only by Williams’ Star Wars and Max Steiner’s Gone With the Wind.

Yet the soundtrack that Jarre produced for Lean’s next epic, Doctor Zhivago, produced an even more inescapable melody: “Lara’s Theme,” a hit international single.

Oscar honors came yet again for Jarre for his work on that 1965 film, then again 19 years later for what turned out to be Lean’s last big-screen epic: A Passage to India.

As Jarre’s agent and friend Richard Kraft noted in a 2009 appreciation for The Hollywood Reporter, Jarre came to the U.S. when pioneering symphonic-oriented film composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were passing from the scene, replaced by Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith interested in new sounds.

Although Jarre’s conservatory training leaned heavily on percussion, he shared the younger composers’ interest in different musical textures, using instruments that evoked the settings of his films, as seen in:

*The Man Who Would Be King, featuring sarangi and sarod, or Indian lutes;

*Ryan’s Daughter, with eight harps among the “lot of little experiments in the sound, music and concept” that Jarre mentioned in an August 1993 interview with Susan King of the Los Angeles Times;

*Witness, relying on synthesizers;

*The Dead Poets Society, with Celtic harp and flute layered over synthesizers.

Hired by producer Sam Spiegel, Jarre found Lawrence of Arabia a far more complex and high-stakes job than any he’d experienced in French theater and cinema. It was on a grand scale, requiring more than two hours of music; Lean was editing the second part of the film first, so Jarre would have to compose out of chronological order; and he had only six weeks to compose and conduct.

Making matters worse, as Sheila O’Malley noted in a perceptive 2007 blog post, Adrian Boult was engaged to record the soundtrack because British subsidies would not fund a foreign conductor, even though the first rehearsal made it plain that Boult didn’t know key aspects of what he was about to take on, such as keep an eye on the chronometer and an eye on the screen. (Boult ended up on the film credits, even though he didn’t record a note.)

Early on in researching this post, I wondered what Jarre’s personality was like—an inquiry triggered by Williams’ recent comment in an interview with Variety Magazine in which he discussed the older breed of film composers: “Alex North, David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith and others — brilliant, beautiful talents. All unhappy.”

I’ve come to think that, while Jarre might have been a “brilliant, beautiful” talent, he was far from “unhappy”, with these traits among his most prominent:

*Perfectionism: Lean helped instill this characteristic, Jarre explained in commentary for a tribute concert for the director recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

*Loyal: Jarre worked on the last four films completed by Lean and was starting on a fifth, an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel Nostromo, before the project died with the director’s death from cancer.

*Convivial: At the time of the composer’s death, Bernard Miyet, then leader of French musicians’ guild SACEM, praised his friend’s “eternal good nature, a way of living and a simplicity that became legendary.” Jarre loved to regale listeners with anecdotes spotlighting the films and personalities he had known over the years, including how during an L.A. recording session, his entire orchestra stopped playing after spotting actress Sophia Loren in the technician’s booth.

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on Lawrence of Arabia’s Defective Literary Style)

“You will see that your colons before buts and the like are contra-indicated in my scheme, and leave you without anything in reserve for the dramatic occasions mentioned above. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced in camp life.”—George Bernard Shaw, October 7, 1924 letter to T.E. Lawrence, quoted in Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003)

George Bernard Shaw could insult with such geniality and creativity that, I suspect, most of the recipients of his letters regarded it as a kind of badge of honor. That appears to be the case here in this letter to T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia (pictured here).

What accounts for the Anglo-Irish playwright’s asperity, at least in this instance, is that, after two years of trying to arrange publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by the leader of the Arab Revolt in the First World War, he had only now gotten his hands on the manuscript. Of course he knew that the former British Army intelligence officer was a brilliant linguist, but—knowing Shaw—I wouldn't have put it past him to be cheeky enough to urge the younger man to master English first before going on to anything else.

Lawrence had been dead seven years before Robert Graves and Alan Hodges took Shaw to task for his own affronts to the English language in The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1942). Still, it’s doubtful that this most enigmatic of men would have felt unfairly abused by Shaw. The playwright had, in the end, provided one of the most glowing tributes to Seven Pillars of Wisdom (“The work is a masterpiece, one of the few very best of its kind in the world”).

(Shaw and his contemporaries might have concerned themselves less with Lawrence’s knotted prose and more with his knotted memories of events. In an article in the Autumn 2014 issue of MHQ Magazine on how Lawrence and a co-founder of modern irregular warfare, Orde Wingate, contributed doctrines that proved fatal to the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, Douglas Porch called Seven Pillars of Wisdom “an exaggerated, semiautobiographical account of the desert war that appealed to interwar tastes for desert escapism.")

When Lawrence cast about for a (relative) cloak of anonymity to hide his participation in the Royal Air Force, he took the name T.E. Shaw, in tribute to his growing friendship with the playwright and his wife Charlotte. The playwright acknowledged the compliment and repaid it with Too True To Be Good, his 1932 satire in which “Private Meek”—who drives the top brass up the wall with his unconventional dress, before it is revealed that he is actually a colonel (and military genius) who prefers the rank-and-file where he will have a “freer hand”—is, unmistakably, Lawrence. (See my prior post on how the real-life Lawrence compares to the character depicted in David Lean’s classic film, Lawrence of Arabia.)

Peter O’Toole, Hollywood—and Irish--Legend

“All he knew was that within him, simmering in the smithy of his soul, were confusion and conflict, and they were probably all linked somehow with Ireland and the Church, with his smashing up so many cars that his license had to be taken away, and with marching in Ban-the-Bomb parades, with becoming obsessed with Lawrence of Arabia, with detesting cops, barbed wire, and girls who shave under their arms; with being an aesthete, a horse player, a former altar boy, a drinker who now wanders streets at night buying the same book (‘My life is littered with copies of MOBY DICK’) and reading the same sermon on that book (‘...and if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves...’); with being gentle, generous, sensitive, yet suspicious (‘You're talking to an Irish bookie's son, you can't con me!’); with devotion to his wife, loyalty to old friends, great concern over the uncertain eyesight of his three-year-old daughter, now wearing very thick glasses (‘Daddy, Daddy! I broke my eyes!" "Don't cry, Kate, don't cry--we'll get you a new pair’); with theatrical genius that is equally moving whether performing pantomime or Hamlet; with anger that can be sudden (‘Why should I tell YOU the truth? Who are you, Bertrand Russell?’) and with anger that quickly subsides (‘Look, I'd tell you if I knew why, but I don't know, just don't know...’); and with the as yet unrealized contradictions in the Peter O'Toole who, at this very moment, was about to land in Ireland...where he was born thirty-one years ago...where he would have his next drink.”-- Gay Talese, Fame and Obscurity: A Book About New York, a Bridge, and Celebrities on the Edge (1970)

Given the way he loved to be center stage, it was probably just as well that Peter O’Toole died when he did in 2013. Had he passed away too early, he might have gone overlooked by any number of lesser film immortals who died afterward; had he died in the last couple of days of the year rather than two weeks ago, he would have been left off the retrospective lists altogether. His timing was exquisite.

Not that he would have seen it as such. He had made his own way, part of his plan as an 18-year-old acting student in his adopted country, when he wrote in a notebook: “I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity.” In other words, timing—and luck—be damned.

So let’s stipulate: the actor’s style and talent were larger than life. So were his resentments, particularly towards Mother Church in Ireland, as evidenced by the “Quote of the Day.” 

In a way, I groaned a bit to myself when I heard about O’Toole’s passing—not only because we would never again see on the big screen one of the performances that made him a force to be reckoned with in the Sixties, but also because I knew there would be an inevitable media allusion to a private life that was, for all too many years, rambunctious.

And sure enough, the reference came from an expected source: The New York Times. The deceased, (British) critic Benedict Nightingale announced in the first sentence of his Page 1 obituary, was “an Irish bookmaker’s son with a hell-raising streak.”

Surely, Faithful Reader, you caught the close conjunction of “Irish” and “hell-raising,” a nice synonym for “alcoholic,” right? The Gray Lady positively falls over itself to avoid stereotypes with most minorities, but the relevant paragraph about Celtics seems somehow to have been lost in the Editor’s Memo about such writing-usage issues.

(There is, also, the matter of exactly where he was born and how this connects to ethnicity. While his father was Irish and he identified himself with Connemara, O'Toole said that he possessed birth certificates for both Ireland and England, as he was raised in the city of Leeds.)

The actor’s friend Richard Harris would have chuckled over the problem. He was fond of saying that stories about him were of two types: “British Actor Wins Award” and “Irish Actor Arrested in Pub Brawl.” (Old media habits die hard: in a 2007 New York Times article about O’Toole and the making of The Tudors, the Newspaper of Record mistakenly identified the cable series star, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as British rather than Irish. That, of course, was before his rehab stint. We'll see how those references work out from now on.)

Not that Harris didn’t contribute to such perceptions. The same goes for O’Toole. Reading the above quote from Talese’s classic mid-Sixties profile in Esquire, you would be bound to conclude, following one memorable fulmination after another about the nuns of his childhood, that, to paraphrase Auden on Yeats, Mad Ireland hurt him into acting.

After years of reading about abuses by priests, not to mention the Magdalene Laundries, it is useless to defend the Irish Church against the various offenses perpetrated in its name over time. At the same time, one wishes the actor might have acknowledged, to some extent, the role of his immediate family (i.e., his bookmaker dad) in the “confusion and conflict” in his own nature—and especially, if you want to know the truth, the concept of “free will” undoubtedly drilled into his head by those nuns. Actually, the last idea should have been the one he embraced the most from his youth, as it was the one that guided him throughout his career, if not his personal life.

At some point, I hope to read the first two published volumes of O’Toole’s projected three-volume autobiography, Loitering With Intent, especially to see how he viewed his religious upbringing from the passage of decades, not to mention the events that changed his life very close to its midpoint: the end of his alcohol-driven sprees (he continued to consume the occasional red wine into his 70s) amid assorted health crises (including removal of his pancreas) in the mid-1970s.

While rejecting the authority of any institutional church, O’Toole appears to have been left with with an irreducible belief in God. There are signs that he felt deeply about faith. The aforementioned Times article about The Tudors includes this poignant O’Toole assertion: “No one can take Jesus away from me. There’s no doubt there was a historical figure of tremendous importance, with enormous notions. Such as peace.”

I had wondered why plum movie parts for the actor became fewer in the Eighties and Nineties, and especially whether his health issues played a part. But various obits I came across note that he put great effort into his new role as a single father, becoming a licensed soccer coach at age 60 to spend more time with his son.

As he aged, O’Toole was largely content (save for one last role, in his Oscar-nominated Venus) to take secondary, albeit striking, roles in larger productions, and to view his younger days with amused detachment. You get a sense of the latter in a marvelous photograph, by the Earl of Snowden, in the November 1995 issue of Vanity Fair photographs. Filled with as much delicious irony as cinema history, it showed O’Toole and Harris enjoying laughs and cups of tea (from the photographer's own set of china). (You can see that image, as well as several other striking ones, in this 2010 Daily Mail article about the former in-law of Queen Elizabeth II.)

In the many retrospectives that have appeared these last two weeks, critics and fans have inevitably recalled O’Toole’s career-making turn in Lawrence of Arabia. But, given the change in the calendar and the toasts made invariably this time of year, I think of another role of his in concluding this post: Alan Swann, the Errol Flynn-inspired, fading swashbuckling hero of My Favorite Year. The comedy—mostly raucous, with a touch of melancholy—ends with a solitary gravesite toast--by the Mel Brooks-type young sitcom writer who had been given the impossible task of getting Swann to the set in decent shape--to the character that O’Toole, one suspects, understood very, very well: a magnificent disturber of the peace.

O’Toole’s remains are being taken to Connemara. “We’re bringing him home,” daughter Kate has announced. That should settle questions on how the actor viewed his identity. As for his place in film: despite the lack of a competitive Oscar (he was awarded an honorary one after eight losses), that niche—as the man who embodied countless restless souls—was attained a long time ago. Requiescat in pace.

(The image accompanying this post comes--of course--from the trailer for Lawrence of Arabia.)

Quote of the Day (T.E. Lawrence, on His ‘Whirling Campaigns’ in Arabia)

“We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1922)

T.E.Lawrence—a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia—was born on this date 125 years ago. One of the first great celebrities of the 20^th century because of his role in the Arab Revolt against the crumbling Ottoman Empire in WWI, this British intelligence officer also was one of the last century’s most paradoxical figures—someone whose Arab apparel made him stand out among the officer corps, but whose reticence eventually led him after the war to enlist in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name (T.E. Shaw, a tribute to good friend George Bernard Shaw).

In some quarters, Lawrence remains a somewhat controversial figure—or, in the words of Ephraim Karsh, in a Wall Street Journal article from last week, “an exceptionally gifted charlatan with a keen eye to networking and self-promotion, who successfully cast his spell on far more senior and accomplished contemporaries, such as Allenby and Winston Churchill.”

But, as the United States continues to cope with its place in the Middle East, the example of Lawrence from a century ago looms large. In this regard, the quote above from the hero’s memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom seems particularly relevant. It evokes the dispiriting conclusion of the David Lean masterpiece about his life, Lawrence of Arabia (which I posted about here), in which the hopes for Arab self-determination are quashed after the war at the negotiating table. The dawning of the “new world” he fought for remains elusive.

This Day in Film History (Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—and History’s)

December 16, 1962—Lawrence of Arabia, an unconventional epic that would go on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, premiered in New York City. 

Fittingly for a biopic about the British intelligence officer in WWI that consistently asked questions about his essential identity, archaeologist A.W. Lawrence, after watching the masterpiece, remarked that he did not recognize in it his older brother, T.E. Lawrence.

The younger Lawrence was nonplussed for reasons besides the fact that the actor embodying his brother, Peter O’Toole, stood eight inches taller than the short military hero who aided the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. 

(Nor would A.W. recognize his brother’s frequently dirty, desert-coarsened face in O’Toole’s well-lit, cosmetically enhanced visage. “If he were any prettier, they’d have to call it Florence of Arabia,” Noel Coward famously cracked.)

As the blogger “Groggee Dundee” wrote in a fine post on the blog Nothing Is Written, the film “is handicapped because historians do not agree on Lawrence’s importance, motivations or personality”—disputes that have abated little in the half-century since the movie’s premiere, even after the release of official military records not available up to 1962. Some difficulties arise from a personality that, even Lawrence himself admitted in a 1927 letter, was complicated.

Yet the process of giving a focus to a figure with so many different facets resulted in distortions that should lead the film to be thought of as historical fiction rather than biopic or docudrama. 

To embody particular points of view, for instance, composite characters were created, such as Claude Rains’ wily Arab Bureau diplomat Dryden, or Anthony Quayle’s Colonel Brighton, a representative for elements in the British Army who moved from disgust to admiration of Lawrence. 

The American journalist who transforms Lawrence into a figure of worldwide renown, Jackson Bentley, was strongly suggested by Lowell Thomas.

The family of General Edmund Allenby, Lawrence’s commander in the pivotal months of the Arab Revolt, lodged a formal protest over his representation in the Columbia release. The descendants of Auda abu Tayi and Sherif Ali pressed a lawsuit against the studio before finally dropping it 10 years later. Moreover, the film’s account of Lawrence's alleged capture and rape by guards under the control of the Turkish governor, Hajim Bey, remains hugely controversial.

Most accounts of Lawrence of Arabia treat it as an example of pure cinema—a perfectly valid approach that rightly celebrates the achievement of director David Lean. But seldom in cinema analysis is it more helpful, and even necessary, to consider the importance of the screenplay to a film’s success. 

This, after all, is a film about one man’s attempt to change and rewrite history—or, in its hero’s protest against the Arab status quo, “Nothing is written.” The movie itself is, in a sense, a revision of history.

For awhile, there was a serious question whether it would be made at all, given that so many players did not appreciate this version of history. Independent producer Alexander Korda secured the rights to Lawrence's memoir Revolt in the Desert all the way back in the 1930s, with Leslie Howard in mind for the soldier-scholar. 

Yet even the death of Lawrence in a motorcycle accident in 1935 did not give real creative freedom to Korda, who was told by the British government that a movie on this subject would not be helpful at that time. (The Turks didn’t like any implications that they had tortured prisoners; the Arabs hated the thought that they needed British aid to win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire; and British diplomats balefully eyed the prospect of unrest in what is now called “the Arab street.”) 

Korda sold the rights eventually to producer Sam Spiegel, as freewheeling a character in his way as Lawrence. More actors would see their names peddled in connection with the project—including Olivier, Brando and Albert Finney—before Spiegel and Lean turned to the young stage actor Peter O’Toole.

The screenplay, itself nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, flew in the face of other historical epics of the time because it was an anti-war satire about a military genius. 

Making possible the filming of a similar Hollywood treatment of a war hero, the 1970 film Patton, its creation, in turn, was facilitated by the success of Lean’s prior film, another Best Picture winner, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The two movies have more in common than a single man at the creative helm. In a sense, Lawrence is a brother under the skin to Colonel Nicholson, the protagonist of Bridge. Eccentric, flawed heroes, they perform their tasks far better than anyone can reasonably expect, only to come a cropper in a changed military/political environment.

(Those similarities must have been too pointed to ignore by Bridge’s Alec Guinness, who expressed a desire to play Lawrence for Lean, too—a wish the actor might have felt perfectly appropriate, considering he had played the hero in Terrence Rattigan’s play Ross. Told bluntly that he was too old to play the legend of Arabia, Guinness took another significant role in the production—Prince Feisal.)

Spiegel got much for his money out of the services of screenwriter Michael Wilson in Bridge: a WWII intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps who understood in his bones the frequent absurdity of the military’s command structure and objectives, as well as a scribe who could be bought cheaply because his blacklisting left him desperate for work. 

(Wilson and co-screenwriter Carl Foreman, unable to accept their Oscars because of the blacklist, watched as the prize was awarded to Francophone novelist Pierre Boulle, who delivered what is believed to be the shortest acceptance speech in the history of the award ceremony: “Merci.”) 

The producer was hoping for similar magic with the story of Lawrence.

But, after two years and a massive script, Wilson disappointed Lean and Spiegel. The director found dialogue that was not as sharp as he liked it; Spiegel, on the other hand, was concerned that the script was too anti-military, or so it is said. 

In truth, however, the producer had nobody to blame but himself for the latter: Not only had Wilson’s original screenplay for Friendly Persuasion looked sympathetically on the Quaker characters’ pacifism, but Bridge on the River Kwai was absolutely scathing about the folly of war, and the writer’s prepared testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee had lambasted that body for its threat to the world's well-being (“I am not surprised to be hauled before a Committee that is trying to make peace a dirty subversive word”).

By Wilson’s own estimate, no more than 10% of the dialogue in the finished film was in his screenplay. But, if Spiegel was hoping for a script with a more benign view of the military from replacement Robert Bolt, he was terribly mistaken. 

The playwright of A Man for All Seasons possessed inclinations every bit as strong as Wilson’s against armed force. In fact, production in Spain had to be halted on the second half of the film when Bolt was arrested for participating in an antinuclear demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square. 

Bolt refused, More-like, to renounce his conscience, and languished in jail for several weeks without access to his typewriter. Nobody knows what combination of threats and blandishments Spiegel used to get Bolt to back down and get released early, but the screenwriter was so disgusted that he never spoke to the producer again.

If the first half of the film could be almost wickedly satirical about the military brass’s attitude toward the “balmy” Lawrence (General Murray: “I can't make out whether you're bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted”; Lawrence: “I have the same problem, sir”), the second half was dispiriting in tracing how the stress of fighting led to Lawrence’s terrifying recognition of his egomania and sadomasochism.

In a sense, it reflected not just the preoccupations of Wilson and Bolt, but also the vision of Lawrence presented by George Bernard Shaw’s 1932 play, Too True to be Good.

I first saw this play at the Shaw Festival in Canada in 1994. Though the first act was fine, the play truly snaps to attention (so to speak) with the introduction of the puckishly named “Private Meek” in Act 2. Shaw’s physical description of the character left little doubt about who was being depicted:

“He is an insignificant looking private soldier, dusty as to his clothes and a bit gritty as to his windbeaten face. Otherwise there is nothing to find fault with: his tunic and puttees are smart and correct, and his speech ready and rapid. Yet the colonel, already irritated by the racket of the bicycle and the interruption to his newspaper, contemplates him with stern disfavor; for there is something exasperatingly and inexplicably wrong about him. He wears a pith helmet with a pagri; and in profile this pagri suggests a shirt which he has forgotten to tuck in behind, whilst its front view as it falls on his shoulders gives a feminine air of having ringlets and a veil which is in the last degree unsoldierly. His figure is that of a boy of seventeen; but he seems to have borrowed a long head and Wellingtonian nose and chin from somebody else for the express purpose of annoying the colonel.”

And annoy the colonel, Meek promptly does, in much the way that the Lawrence of film does with Generals Murray and Allenby: “If I could get hold of the recruiting officer who enlisted you, I’d have his stripes off.” 

By the time that the soldier is revealed as a quartermaster’s clerk, interpreter, and intelligence officer—not to mention a colonel who prefers the ranks, where he has a “freer hand”—the playwright has described unmistakable terms the longtime friend who, when he entered the Royal Air Force, did so under the assumed name “T.E. Shaw.”

Whatever its pretenses as history, Lawrence of America has also become, in another sense, prophecy. Instead of Britain, another world superpower has found itself in the Middle East, sure that, under its guidance, ancient prejudices can be erased because “nothing is written.” 

Ironically, like Lawrence at the film’s end, the United States now can’t wait to extricate itself from this cat’s cradle, finding that geopolitical gamesmanship which might have begun with the best intentions only ends in moral ambiguity.