April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 37

By Paul Alkon

Churchill’s Advice for Alexander Kordas Stillborn Film, “Lawrence of Arabia”


Accounts of Churchill’s involvements with cinema have not gone much beyond anecdotes. Frequently mentioned is his fondness for movies as a means of late-night relaxation from wartime tensions during his first Premiership. Often the spotlight hovers on his unquenchable appetite for “Lady Hamilton” (“That Hamilton Woman” in the U.S.), Alexander Kordas 1941 patriotic epic starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Churchill is said to have seen it seventeen times.1

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We are invited to admire the old bulldog beaming in approval at this tale of Nelson’s defiance of Napoleon and glorious victory at Trafalgar. Equally admirable are the tears reportedly shed by Churchill at each reiteration on screen of Nelson’s heroic death and Emma Hamilton’s subsequent sad neglect by an ungrateful country. There are whispers that Churchill had some hand not only in urging Korda to make the film in Hollywood as pro-British propaganda to counter American isolationism, but even in writing its script of Nelson’s speech, insisting that “You cannot make peace with Dictators. You have to destroy them.”2 Alas, there is no evidence that Churchill wrote this.3

Rumored too in various pleasing degrees of lurid speculation is Churchill’s behind-the-scenes instigation of Kordas shadowy activities in the United States as a British agent ferreting out information for MI5, cooperating after Pearl Harbor with the OSS, and making dangerous wartime transatlantic trips “acting personally as a secret courier between British and American intelligence centres” while “allowing his New York office in the Empire State Building to be used as a clearing house for intelligence information.”4

Whatever the actual extent of Korda’s undercover exploits, and despite a disappointing estimate by the British Ministry of Information that his films “were of little propaganda importance,” Churchill certainly expedited the award of Korda’s knighthood in June 1942.5 But Churchill did not explain why he supported “the first knighthood ever to be awarded to a member of the movie industry.”6 For those fond of romantic tales with happy outcomes— and who does not love such stories?—it is better to leave shrouded in some mystery Korda’s dabbling in the world of James Bond, his rise from immigrant commoner to Sir Alexander, and Churchill’s role in this real-life romance. There is better documentation of Churchill’s less melodramatic though equally intriguing role during his 1930s wilderness years as a consultant for Korda’s studio.

In 1934 Alexander Korda secured film rights to Revolt in the Desert, with the stipulation by Lawrence’s trustees that there would be “no departure from historical accuracy” and “no female characters.”7 Korda had the project sufficiently in motion by May to announce that Leslie Howard would play the lead. But then Lawrence suffered another of his periodic attacks of modesty, and requested that no film be made during his lifetime.

After Lawrence’s fatal 1935 motorcycle accident, Korda received permission from the trustees to proceed. On 29 December 1936 they approved a script by John Monk Saunders. Lawrence was now to be played by Walter Hudd, who had acted the role of the Lawrence-figure, Private Meek, in George Bernard Shaw’s “Too True to be Good.”

In 1937 a new script by Miles Malleson was taken as a starting-point for what proved to be a long series of revisions and delays complicated by objections from the Turkish government, by requests from the British Foreign Office to tone down portrayal of Turkish cruelty so as not to alienate a potential ally, by threats from the British Board of Film Censors to withhold certification lest Turkey be offended, and by various legal maneuvers including sale of the project to New World Films, repurchase of it from them, sale of the rights to Paramount Pictures in 1938, and, finally, negotiations with Columbia that were broken off on 2 June 1939.

Outbreak of the Second World War that September ended Korda’s efforts to bring to the screen “Lawrence of Arabia” (as the final version of his London Film Productions script was titled). In addition to Leslie Howard, actors considered for the role of Lawrence during all these vicissitudes included John Clements, Clifford Evans, Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier, and (in a masterpiece of miscasting by Columbia) Cary Grant.8

Winston Churchill played two off-stage roles as adviser in this melodrama of Korda’s doomed movie: first as coach to one of the potential lead actors, and then as script consultant for Korda’s studio. In the 20 November 1937 issue of Film Weekly there appears an interview with Leslie Howard. To dispel widespread doubts that the movie would actually be made, Howard announced himself “hard at work on the preliminaries of the picture. Everything is signed and sealed. We hope to start the actual shooting in ten or twelve weeks’ time, and have the film edited and ready for presentation by the end of six or eight months.”9 Given the unforeseen obstacles that usually spring up to bedevil film production, Howard’s statement was not so delusional or disingenuous as it may appear in retrospect. Nor is there any reason to doubt Howard’s veracity when he goes on to remark:

I hope to bring in Winston Churchill to complete the scenario. He is one of the few statesmen of the period who saw beyond Lawrence’s military importance into the real complexities of his nature. Already, in a number of informal conversations, Churchill has helped me considerably to round off my impression of Lawrence.10

Hope of bringing Churchill in was not unrealistic because, as Leslie Howard must have known, Korda had secured Churchill’s agreement to serve as a consultant on the Lawrence project during the month in which Film Weekly published Howard’s interview. As far back as September 1934 Churchill had started what proved to be a long and, for him more than for Korda, quite profitable employment with Korda’s studio. The 1934 news release announcing this relationship stated:

Mr Winston Churchill has signed a contract with London Film Productions to edit a series of films dealing with subjects of topical interest….Mr Winston Churchill, in collaboration with Mr Korda, has selected the topics which will be comprised in this series….The following topics have provisionally been decided upon: ‘Will Monarchies Return?’, ‘The Rise of Japan,’ ‘Marriage Laws and Customs,’ ‘Unemployment’ and ‘Gold’….London Films have engaged a special staff of technical experts in order to ensure that Mr Churchill’s ideas will be presented in the most vivid, novel and entertaining fashion. Mr Randolph Churchill (Mr Winston Churchill’s son) has also been engaged by London Films to assist in the making of this series.11

Randolph soon faded out of this project, but Winston did much work sketching scenarios for elaboration by Korda’s “technical experts.” In September 1934 Churchill also agreed, in a separate contract, “to write and prepare for London Film Productions Limited a scenario of ‘the Reign of King George V for the forthcoming celebrations of the Twenty-Five Years’ Jubilee.” Churchill agreed moreover to “be ready as may be found desirable to introduce and explain the story myself by my own voice and to appear on the screen in this capacity if necessary.”12

Although Churchill put a great deal of well-compensated effort into writing and revising scenarios for the Jubilee project as well as conferring about it with Korda’s people, legal complications prevented completion of the film. Never one to waste his own considerable brainpower, Churchill then converted his scenarios into a series of essays that were published in The Evening Standard, May 2nd through May 9th, 1935, under the general title “The King’s Twenty-Five Years.”

Upon receiving Korda’s request to serve during November 1937 as a consultant for revisions of the Lawrence script, Churchill seems to have regarded London Film Productions as a money-tree ripe for the plucking. In a letter dated 22 October 1937 to Korda’s assistant, David B. Cunynghame, Churchill explained his financial and literary situation in pressing but not altogether heartbreaking terms by noting that he faced a December 21 deadline to finish the last volume of Marlborough, “for which I am to receive £3,500.1 am also writing another series of twelve articles for the News of the World for which I am to receive £4,500.” He continued:

If I am to make a strong personal contribution to this Lawrence film, I must derange all my existing plans, and let the subject play a large part in my thoughts during the month of November. I have some ideas upon the subject, but it will be necessary for me to re-read the Seven Pillars as well as the scenario. I have no doubt I shall get much interested in it and my other work will fall into the shade. In all these circumstances, of which I inform you confidentially, I think I should be paid £2,000 for giving my best services….If however my contributions should be found of sufficient importance to warrant my name being used with the editing or preparation of the scenario, which might perhaps be of advantage to the film, I should then ask for a percentage additional to the foregoing fee….13

Unmoved by this ambitious proposal, Cunynghame replied by return mail, in a letter dated that same day, 22 October 1937, that “Mr Korda hoped you would see your way to assist him by accepting a nominal fee of £250…”14 Churchill resisted the temptation to “derange all” his “existing plans” by setting everything else aside, nor did he otherwise protract his labors on the Lawrence scenario. Neither did Churchill sulk. On November 3rd, less than two weeks after their exchange concerning money, Churchill sent Cunynghame six double-spaced typewritten pages of comments on the script, which was returned therewith.

As he explained at the outset of this communication, Churchill had also—evidently in the same brief interval since the correspondence about his fee—”consulted Lord Winterton,” whose comments he enclosed, Churchill reminding Cunynghame “that he was with Lawrence during some of the most important phases in this story.”15 In Seven Pillars Lawrence characterizes Winterton as “an experienced officer from Buxton’s Camel Corps.”16 Lawrence had also met and corresponded with Winterton after the war. The crux of Winterton’s letter to Churchill, dated 27 October 1937, concerned the script’s treatment of Lawrence at the Arab Bureau:

There is one falsification of history to which I do take real exception, not because I was personally concerned (because I did not join the Arab Bureau until later), but because of the reflection upon friends of mine.

In the early part of the script the people under whom Lawrence was working are made to look absolute fools, and he (Lawrence) to be the sole originator of the idea of the Arab Campaign. Of course this is the most complete nonsense as every document of authority, official and unofficial, shows (e.g. See Ronald Storr’s book Orientations with its history of how the Arab Revolt started); the author has completely missed the real point. It was in the execution of the plan that Lawrence showed his genius, and where he was undoubtedly thwarted until Allenby arrived on the scene by the ordinary stupid type of “brass hat” but never by either his superiors or colleagues in the Arab Bureau; they recognized his genius from the first.

I think you ought to use your immense influence in the matter to get this portion of the script altered; the writer can have a “go” at the “stupid soldiers,” if he wishes, by showing the way in which Lawrence was undoubtedly thwarted at first when he had actually set to work.17

Churchill did urge revision of the Arab Bureau scenes, but to no avail if we may judge from the final version of the sctipt, dated “October 4 1938” and credited also to Brian Desmond Hurst and Duncan Guthrie.18 Nor, judging from other places where that version fails to adopt Churchill’s suggestions, was his influence over Korda’s people so “immense” as Winterton supposed.

On another matter, concerning verisimilitude not historical accuracy, Churchill disagreed with Winterton:

You will see that Lord Winterton likes your comic relief of the two sergeants riding in the desert. I can well see the necessity for this feature, but sergeants of the British Army do not talk in this common way. A sergeant is a fairly intelligent person who has risen to that position through a great deal of competition. The idea of a conventional British Tommy (odious expression!) being a person whose language is that of a half-boozed coster, is not in accordance with the facts. I am well aware that on the screen the idea is that a private soldier or sergeant begins every sentence with “Gor Blimey” etc., but I wonder whether in this film you could not afford to shake off this rubbish? (3-4)

(Churchill’s rich, antique vocabulary may have stumped the younger Cunynghame. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “coster” [monger] as “a man who sells fruit, fish, etc., from barrow in street.”)

Churchill’s comment on sergeants is most interesting for what it reveals about his notions of dramatic structure. He has no objection to comic relief per se, granting “the necessity for this feature.” He is bothered by what he takes to be lack of verisimilitude. Here it is not a question, as it is in the Arab Bureau scenes, of accurately representing history. Churchill accepts introduction of the sergeants as typical characters, and is willing to make these characters a vehicle for comic relief, provided it is achieved via dialogue that doesn’t sink to the level “of a half-boozed coster.” Churchill wants Korda to alter this image in the direction of greater fidelity to actual types as Churchill—and film viewers whose experience of British army life extends beyond the cinema—remember them.

Some questions of accuracy that attract Churchill’s attention are very minute. Of the word “crusade,” which seems to have been deleted from the final script in accordance with Churchill’s suggestion, he comments: “You can hardly talk of arousing the Arabs to a Crusade, which were things instituted to do them in. Jehad is the real word. Anyhow, they have no use for the Cross.” (2) Of an allusion locating Auda abuTayi’s residence somewhere north of Jerusalem, Churchill remarks: “I am quite sure Auda’s home did not lie in this place. Was not Auda a desert Arab who had nothing whatever to do with the wretched Palestinian Arabs?” (5)

Most of Churchill’s requests for greater accuracy deal with the key issue of geography. Churchill insists that the film cannot succeed unless it conveys a clear idea of the landscape that Lawrence had to master:

It would be a good thing to check this whole story up with the map. Page 24—What is the distance from Damascus to Wejd? It is 500 miles. Any ordinary film “fan” reading this would suppose that it was a steppingstone and quite close to Damascus. As a matter of fact it is hundreds of miles in the opposite direction. I do not think this tale can be told properly unless the geography is driven into the minds of the audience early in the day; otherwise they get a wrong impression, and keep on wondering why the hell people turn up here and there, and what it is all about. It is above all important to avoid confusion of mind in the audience. Unless you can carry them with you in thought at each stage, with pictures moving so quickly, they just get blurred, if not bored. Therefore I counsel forcing the audience to know where they are at each stage.

Another notable instance occurs on Page 16, where Feisal and his fellow-conspirators gallop out of the gates of Damascus, and in less than half of one second are in an Arab encampment outside the walls of Medina. Any ordinary ignorant person would suppose that Medina was a few hours’ gallop from the gates of Damascus. Actually, it is about 650 miles. (2-3)

In these remarks, as in Churchill’s own accounts of military campaigns from Marlborough’s day through the Second World War, careful attention to geography is a hallmark. As film critic no less than as historian, Churchill’s rather narrow military education yielded unanticipated benefits. In his autobiography he notes that “At Sandhurst…Tactics, Fortification, Topography (mapmaking), Military Law and Military Administration formed the whole curriculum.” He later adds that in India, extending his education by reading widely, he “began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what.”19 But if Churchill had gone to Oxford or Cambridge rather than Sandhurst he would have missed the intensive study of topography that left him with a lifelong habit of specifying geographical relationships with the utmost precision. This habit contributes to those descriptive passages that were singled out among other striking features of Churchill’s writing in the citation for his 1953 Nobel Prize for literature, given in part “for his mastery of historical and biographical description….”20

Other echoes of his military education and army career are apparent in Churchill’s response to Korda’s script. Among “the practical work” at Sandhurst that Churchill found “most exciting” was a series of field exercises in which he “cut railway lines with slabs of guncotton, and learned how to blow up masonry bridges.”21 Reading Seven Pillars must have evoked happy memories of student days spent messing about with explosives. Churchill always enjoyed loud explosions, even when, as during the Blitz, he deplored their consequences. Korda’s script afforded an opportunity to share such pleasures with movie fans, as Churchill makes clear in an enthusiastic afterthought at the end of his comments:

I forgot to say that the blowing-up of the trains should be more emphasized. It lends itself very well to your technique. Surely you should blow up half-a-dozen trains in different ways!—The approach in the distance; the scene in the railway carriage; the tense excitement of the ambush; the terrible explosion; the wreck of the locomotive, etc., and the fact of the sole communications of an army being cut off—all very pretty! (5-6)

Although urging Korda to repeat such scenes as a kind of leitmotif in the film, Churchill gets a grip on himself and winds up this passage in the more adult tones of a sober historian concerned above all with accuracy. He stresses the strategic importance of Lawrence’s raids in drawing the Turkish army away from Medina and explains what is equally relevant to an accurate depiction of history in the movie: that the raids were crucial to establishing Lawrence’s reputation among Arabs, thereby effecting his metamorphosis from alien Englishman to their hero “Lurens.”

In addition to making him a connoisseur of explosions, Churchill’s army career enhanced his appreciation of the harsh climate and distances against which Lawrence had to struggle. Thus after urging proper attention to conveying a sense of the many miles separating Medina, Wejd, and Damascus, Churchill continues:

These points bring me to what I think should be a feature in the film, viz: the great distances, and the enormous weight of the sun. This was the strongest impression left on my mind after reading the Seven Pillars. One felt the unending toil of these immense marches by camel; with the most severe privations; barely enough food and water to keep body and soul together; on and on each day under brazen skies, through hot, crisp sand, and over black jagged rocks. The script fails to give the impression of the rigours of the desert in which these strange Arabs live, and to which they are habituated. The words at the top of Page 52 show that the author has this idea, but I suggest it should be emphasized more elaborately. (3)

In Churchill’s memory, which is to say in his imagination, his mental visions of Lawrence’s experiences merge with his own 1898 campaign as a cavalry officer with Kitchener’s army in the Soudan. Looking back on the Battle of Omdurman in his autobiography, Churchill recalls how “Batteries of artillery or long columns of cavalry emerged from a filmy world of uneven crystal on to the hard yellow-ochre sand, and took up their positions amid jagged red-black rocks with violet shadow. Over all the immense dome of the sky…pierced by the flaming sun, weighed hard and heavy on marching necks and shoulders.”22 In The River War, published in 1899 barely a year after the battle, Churchill places similar emphasis on heat, sand, rocks, and sun:

This is the Soudan of the soldier….Level plains of smooth sand—a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon—are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock—black, stark, and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot, crisp surface of the ground. The fine sand, driven by the wind, gathers into deep drifts, and silts among the dark rocks of the hills, exactly as snow hangs about an Alpine summit; only it is a fiery snow, such as might fall in hell…. scarcely a cloud obstructs the unrelenting triumph of the sun…. he who had not seen the desert, nor felt the sun heavy on his shoulders, would hardly admire the fertility of the riparian scrub [by the Nile].23

In Churchill’s memo to London Film Productions, three phrases describing his memories of what Lawrence says in Seven Pillars match almost exactly the words Churchill used previously concerning Omdurman. The “enormous weight of the sun” corresponds to “the flaming sun weighed hard and heavy on marching necks and shoulders” (My Early Life) and to “the sun heavy on his shoulders” (The River War). The memo’s “hot crisp sand” corresponds to the autobiography’s “hard yellowochre sand” and The River Wars “hot, crisp surface of the ground.” Reading or even recollecting Seven Pillars was for Churchill thus an almost Proustian experience triggering remembrance of his own time past serving as a mounted warrior in a harsh desert.

The rest of Churchill’s comments to Korda center on aesthetic issues. He remarks, “I think you should make more of Lawrence’s execution of the murderer. It is a terrible story, and a high spot in the story. It is very well done as it is.” (3) Here, of course, “terrible” means terrifying, awe inspiring, not of inferior quality or poorly done. Churchill rightly regards the episode as one of the most arresting moments in Seven Pillars and, potentially, in the film. His final two suggestions take up the knotty problem of achieving a memorable ending that would provide appropriate closure to the story’s action while also capping off the glorification of its hero.

Churchill first explains the military significance of a “tense scene” that Lawrence omitted when narrating his encounter with the retreating Turkish army:

…Lawrence was far out in the desert, and in a position to ride across the communications of the retreating Turks. The remarkable episode which should be chronicled was that in defiance of all military advice, he took his little Arab force of perhaps twelve hundred men, and planted them in the path of this vast retreating Turkish mass, perhaps two hundred thousand strong….He paid no attention whatever to them, and stood straight in the path of the avalanche. It was a miracle that he or any of them survived. No doubt they killed a lot of Turks and some Germans, but it was like throwing pebbles at a wave. I suggest that this episode requires further study and recasting. It certainly reveals Lawrence in his most heroic and Napoleonic aspect. Again, however, the point cannot be made without the audience having the geographical lay-out in their minds. (4-5)

OfTalal’s death ride, of the Turkish atrocities that occasioned it, and of Lawrence’s “no prisoners” order that figure largely in Seven Pillars and in Korda’s script (as later in David Lean’s 1962 film), Churchill says nothing. His concern is only to add the “tense scene” of Lawrence ignoring “all military advice” from more conventional and less suicidally inclined regular officers.

Here, as in his published essays on Lawrence, Churchill presents material in a way that contributes to the Lawrence myth of selfless heroism. Arguably, a maneuver that ran the risk of needlessly and pointlessly sacrificing a “small valuable force” might easily have been characterized as foolish, futile, and selfish bravado. Instead, Churchill in a conspicuous non sequitur calls it “heroic and Napoleonic,” even though it accomplished no more than “throwing pebbles at a wave” while the Arab force’s survival (as Churchill describes it here) was a lucky chance not ascribed to Lawrence’s leadership but to “a miracle.” Perhaps Churchill sees Lawrence as Napoleonic in this reckless episode because Napoleon himself considered luck a legitimate military virtue that some commanders were blessed with and others lacked. Elsewhere Churchill does not suggest that Napoleon was so recklessly quixotic.

Churchill’s last idea, to reverse the sequence of presentation by starting at the story’s end, was not acted upon until David Lean arrived at it independently and put it to effective use in his 1962 movie:

Finally, this film falls away, as they nearly all do, towards the end. We have vague galloperaverings of horsemen doing impossible charges, in the style of some of the absurdities of “Bengal Lancer.” Nearly always the audience fails to keep up with the reel under these conditions. With horses galloping five time faster than animals’ feet ever touched the ground, a sense of flurry is about all that results in the spectators’ minds. “On ne regne sur les ames que par le calme.” Indeed I feel films ought to be begun from the end, because that is what strikes home, and what the audience take home. I cannot suggest alternatives at the present time, but this ending is the weak part of what is in many ways an excellent piece of work. (5)

If all Churchill’s advice had been taken, Korda’s Lawrence film, had it been made, would have been much better than the surviving script leads us to suppose. But it was not to be. This unrealized outcome illustrates in miniature the contingency of human affairs that, apropos more serious matters, Churchill’s military experiences had impressed upon him while still a young man.

When the twenty-five year old Churchill published The River Warm 1899 he observed: “We live in a world of’ifs.’ ‘What happened,’ is singular; ‘what might have happened,’ legion.”24 Korda’s “Lawrence of Arabia” remains forever in the crowded world of cinematic “ifs.”


Notes

1. Norman Rose, Churchill: An Unruly Life (London: Simon & Schuster Ltd., 1994), 201.

2. Michael Korda, Charmed Lives: A Family Romance (New York: Random House, 1979), 154.

3. Karol Kulik, Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles (New Rochelle: Arlington House Publishers, 1975), 251.

4. Kulik, Alexander Korda, 257.

5. Charles Drazin, Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002), 242.

6. Korda, Charmed Lives, 155.

7. Andrew Kelly, James Pepper, and Jeffrey Richards, eds., Filming T F. Lawrence: Korda’s Lost Epics (London & New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1997), 3.

8. Kelly, Pepper, and Richards, Filming, 1-21.

9. Kelly, Pepper, and Richards, Filming, 22.

10. Kelly, Pepper, and Richards, Filming, 24.

11. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume V, Companion Part 2: Documents. The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (London: Heinemann, 1981), 869.

12. Gilbert, Volume V, Companion Part 2, 876.

13. Churchill Archives: Char 8/557.

14. Ibid.

15. Churchill Archives: Char 8/557. Subsequent references to Churchill’s letter dated “3rd November, 1937” are cited in the text by page numbers on the letter. The full letter is in Volume V, Companion Part 2, 823-26.

16. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Privately printed 1926; London: Cape, 1935; reprinted Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1962), 601.

17. Churchill Archives: Char 8/557, items 7, 8, 9.

18. Kelly, Pepper, and Richards, Filming, 29-129.

19. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (1930; reprinted New York: Macmillan/Scribner’s, 1987), 43, 111, 113.

20. Nobel Prize Library: Albert Camus. Winston Churchill (New York: Alexis Gregory; Del Mar, California, CRM Publishing, n.d.), 175.

21. Churchill, My Early Life, 43.

22. Churchill, My Early Life, 171.

23. Winston Spencer Churchill, The River War, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), I, 3-4.

24. Churchill, The River War, I, 235.

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