Cheap Lawrence of Arabia - The Battle for the Arab World (DVD) (James Hawes) Price

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Customer Reviews of Lawrence of Arabia - The Battle for the Arab World

Outstanding, insightful, balanced
This skillfully done documentary was a nice surprise. I expected either hero worship or irresponible debunking. Instead what I got was a very thoughtful examination of Lawrence's remarkable career. Interviews with historians, biographers, bedouins, military experts and others give it a real sense of authenticity. The reenactments are well produced, historically accurate and tasteful. The existing film footage of the real Arab Revolt is used very well. This complicated man is given the detailed examination his monumental achievements and tragic failures demand. It's good to see the shallow, poorly researched and politically motivated attemps at debunking Lawrence (i.e. David Fromkin and Desmond Stewart) have not sucessfully obscured the truly remarkable adventure that was his life.

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Excellent supplement to Hollywood Classic
I just watched (again) David Lean's 1962 classic followed by "Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World"... The new documentary is superb & a wonderful supplement to the theatrical movie, adding depth & context as well as presenting fascinating newsreel footage... It is interesting to compare the history of historians to the "history" of Hollywood... (In this case, it must be said that the commercial film makers acquited themselves very well indeed... Surely a rare, if not unique, event...)

The story told is essentially the same one in both the theatrical movie & the factual film, although the former is "larger than life" & the latter covers the entirety of Lawrence's life including the scholarly prequel & disturbingly bizarre & socially marginal sequel to the war years... The reenactments in the documentary are very carefully done & not intrusive or melodramatic... The "talking heads" offer a variety of perspectives: western & mid-eastern, academic & political, even a pair of "tribal historians" & a 106 year old Arab eye witness! Some of the comments of the former Jordanian Foreign Minister may grate on the viewer as biased, but I certainly didn't detect any anti-Semitism on the part of the film makers (anti-Zionism, yes!) & the "expose" of Lawrence's homosexuality is hardly that: The possibility is suggested along with the proviso that we will probably never know for sure...
I doubt that a documentary of this kind can be much better done than this one is.... All in all, I was so impressed that I've bought the DVD so I can watch both Peter O'Toole's immortal performance AND the real McCoy!!

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Some History, Many Lies of Omission, and Pro-Arab Propaganda
If you know something about the real history of the Middle East, this DVD will supplement it with some interesting old pics of Lawrence and scenes from the region. But the authentic old movies and pics of Lawrence are few, recycled too often, and the movie with Peter O'Toole gives a much better reproduction of the main events. Lawrence's homosexual affair with a young Arab man is exposed, and he comes off as a brilliant but dysfunctional human who got along better in a society where women were made invisible. It also misportrays the Arabs as having a major role in the military defeat of the Turks when in fact their roles were episodic at best, with the major credit due to Allenby, save for the capture of Al Aqabah, which was brilliant. The Arab army of Faisal never amounted to more than around 1,000 Bedouins with maybe 3,000 Ottoman former prisoners who joined them, and was plagued by chronic tribal feuding and desertions en-mass at critical times. They were held together into an alliance only by massive quantities of British gold, which Lawrence was regularly supplied with to buy their loyalty. If the Turks had offered the gold, they would have just as easily gone with them. The O'Toole movie about Lawrence more accurately shows this side of things. Not a word is mentioned about these facts in the PBS DVD "documentary" however, nor that one major complaint of the puritanical Arabian warriors against the Turks was their more secular nature -- even before Attaturk, they were "going West". Nor that much of the fight also was about having "my King" instead of "your King" as the Big Boss. The Arabs simply wanted to replace the Ottomans, but retain the same old gigantic territory and method of authoritarian rule. The British did promise a lot to many different parties in the Middle East, being exceedingly desperate to save Europe from the scheming Kaiser, whose plans for domination had killed millions on the Western Front. But the Arabs eventually got nearly everything they wanted, though (thank goodness) not the single giant Arab State flying the banner of Islam. The whole DVD seems to pivot upon what they did not get - Israel - and the Arab "historians" interviewed use the story of Lawrence as yet another weapon against Israel. No mention is made of the large populations of Jews in Palestine and Baghdad at the time, nor of Arab Christians, nor how they also fought against and suffered badly under the Turks and so were demanding some justice and autonomy in their regions, nor any of the other competing interests within the region which the authors of the Treaty of Versilles had to cope with. The only thing that mattered to the Arabs, and to Lawrence also it appears, and to the producer of this flick was, that the Arabs didn't get EVERYTHING. So small historical facts like the quick Arab rejection of the Peel Commission offer by the British -- which was to give nearly all of Palestine to Arabs, to be run by Arabs under presumably Muslim Law, restricting Jewish immigration totally, but allowing the existing Jews to remain living there -- are never mentioned. The fact is, the Arab leaders were tribal Kings with no interest in democracy or humanistic social freedoms or justice. The British and French in Europe knew this, but Lawrence, so captivated by sand dunes and his young male lover, was blind as a bat, and like the authors of this film, could not see that after the throwing out of the autocratic Turks, many people in Palestine - notably the Jews, Christian Arabs and those influenced by French culture, simply did not want to live under some new King or dictator, with a continuance of Mullahs lording over everyone, maintaining dhimminitude and grinding women down into the dirt. This PBS propaganda is not recommended for the historically naive, or for children, unless you want to glorify Lawrence's blindness and lifestyle, and once again to misportray Western democratic influences as "bad". My suggestion is to read "A Peace to End All Peace" by David Fromkin who covers this chapter of Middle East history and "Lawrence of Arabia" with great objectivity.