“It is impossible to imagine this film apart from its photography,” wrote critic Stanley Kaufman. “Its visual experiences almost touch the other senses.” Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence in this widescreen color spectacular, presented here in a beautiful Technicolor print from the Academy Film Archives. Cinematographer F. A. Young, who won an Oscar for his work on Lawrence of Arabia, brings out the exquisite fragility and the pitiless constancy of the desert in images that are framed, as it were, by the sun's shimmering, hazy heat. The battle scenes are some of the most memorable ever filmed, which in part makes up for the film's concentration on Lawrence, the desert warrior, to the detriment of Lawrence, the writer and diplomat: “General: ‘I cannot make out whether you're bloody bad mannered or just half-witted.' Lawrence: ‘I have the same problem myself!' This homeric adventure was criticized for failing to unravel the enigma of Lawrence. But it is surely David Lean and (writer) Robert Bolt's thesis that such men are beyond objective analysis, and their film is arranged as a continuous mirage.... And like Lawrence...Lean becomes haunted by the clean, unspoiled beauty of the desert; though the search for destiny is long (and unfulfilled), one ultimately understands the director's, and his hero's, reluctance to leave” (National Film Theatre, London).