What Should've Won That Could've Won: 1962

The Year: 1962

What the Nominees Were: Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, The Music Man, Mutiny on the Bounty, To Kill a Mockingbird
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s crazy that John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance didn’t get a nomination. You’d also think The Miracle Worker would make the cut. It’s less surprising, but still disappointing, that the Academy passed over The Manchurian Candidate, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Orson Welles’s hallucinatory The Trial. Overseas, more masterpieces kept rolling in, like Jules and Jim, Knife in the Water and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Lawrence of Arabia
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence would be very worthy winners. As with West Side Story, this movie casts white actors in brownface make-up, so I was tempted to disqualify it for that, but ultimately this movie is so good that I just couldn’t take its Oscar away…

Director: David Lean
Writers: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, partially based on “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T. E. Lawrence
Stars: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy

The Story: British Officer T. E. Lawrence goes rogue during World War I and convinces Arabian tribesman to follow him into war against the Turks. Lawrence soon develops a messiah complex, becomes disillusioned, and finally abandons his troops when they are on the verge of getting their own independent state. He goes home and dies quietly in a motorcycle accident.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It also won Director, Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Score and Sound. It lost Actor, Supporting Actor for Sharif and Adapted Screenplay.
How It Won: The Academy does love epics, and this might be the most epic American movie ever made, but it’s still impressive that it was able to beat out some of its truly amazing competitors.

Why It Won:

1. O’Toole ignites the screen every time we see his quivering crystal blue eyes. His intensity is almost unbearable. It’s so unfair he had to go up against Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird, who beat him out for Best Actor. It must have seemed like Peck was overdue, whereas O’Toole would have plenty more chances. In fact, O’Toole was nominated seven more times, but he never won, because none of his other performances could live up this one. (The exact same thing has happened with Ralph Fiennes and Schindler’s List: Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive was so good, and he had earned an Oscar, whereas Fiennes was just starting out his career, so he could get one later. But he never did, because he never got a part that great again. And then Fiennes would star as Lawrence in a sequel to this film!) In the end, O’Toole, not Peck, deserved it, because this may be the greatest film performance of all time, certainly the best debut performance.
   
2. Two minutes longer than Gone With the Wind, this is the longest Oscar winner and doesn’t waste a second of screentime (well, except the Overture, Intermission, and Exit Music.) Freddie Young’s sweeping Super Panavision 70 cinematography alone would be enough to guarantee this a spot on any list of the greatest films ever made (My only real knock on the film, however is the use of too much “Day for Night” shooting. The daytime, sunrise and sunset scenes look spectacular, but the movie just cheats on the after-dark scenes, which is disappointing.)
   
3. But the genius of the movie is marrying “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore” cinematography with “they’ve only just started to make them this way” editing from Anne V. Coates, who was inspired by the French New Wave to experiment with smash cuts (a match going out smash-cuts to a burning sunset) and sound pre-laps (hearing a new location before we actually cut to it) 
4. Lawrence was probably gay, and Lean, the screenwriters, and O’Toole agreed to hint at it without saying it. Viewers at the time were probably more aware of it than we are today because there’s lots of code that is no longer used. One of the first things he does is light another man’s cigarette. Everyone knew what that meant at the time, but modern-day viewers may not.  
   
5. But maybe the most daring thing about the movie at the time was its anti-colonialism. Wilson was a blacklisted ex-communist and Bolt (who wrote the final draft) was arrested and imprisoned for an anti-nuke protest in the middle of writing his draft. One could certainly accuse this movie of “white savior-ism” but it rises above such accusations by harshly examining and skewering those tropes.
6. Sharif gets the greatest character introduction of all time, appearing as a tiny dot in the middle of a distant mirage, then graaaaadually getting bigger, then BAM, just when he’s big enough to see, he whips out his rifle and kills Lawrence’s guide, before finishing his camel’s stroll into frame. This is a badass, and this is a movie star. (Steven Spielberg says, “The mirage sequence is still the greatest miracle I’ve ever seen on film.”)
   
7. The screenplay is a masterpiece of historical fictionalization, combining many characters into a few composites in a way that must be done. The most brilliant choice is the one to have the man he goes back to save be the same man he has to kill later. If they were different men (as they were in real life) the point would still be there, but would be far less powerful. We accept such fictionalizations for the purposes of a good story.

Ah, 1962: Try not to think about what you saw on “Mad Men” when you smoke our brand, please.