1/19/23
Newsletter #224
The Crack of Dawn
For the first 35 years of the film business, when movies were silent, different languages didn’t matter – each country in the world inserted their own title cards in their own language. When sound arrived the language issue presented itself. An early example is Grand Hotel (1932) where the whole story takes place at a hotel in Berlin, and the characters are international. What language do they speak? The easy answer was: everybody speaks English, with whatever accent they happen to have. The only one who didn’t seem to get the memo was Wallace Berry, who plays the hotel manager with a very broad German accent, and sticks out like the ham he was. Even though Wallace Berry’s overacting seems ridiculous now, folks liked him so much that he won (co-won, with Fredric March) the Oscar for Best Actor that same year for The Champ (1932).
In any case, different languages continued presenting problems for filmmakers. Frequently, foreign characters simply speak English with an accent. Sometimes characters who were foreign would break into their own language, without subtitles, then the other characters and the audience couldn’t understand them. With subtitles, the audience knows what they’re saying, but not the other characters.
By the 1950s when foreign films became popular in the U.S. and people got used to reading subtitles, this approach was used more frequently. In The Longest Day (1962), a great deal of the film is with the German officers and it’s all in German with subtitles. In Judgement at Nuremburg (1961), director Stanley Kramer and writer Abby Mann made a bold decision. Since most of the dialogue should be in German, they cast a German actor in the lead, Maximillian Schell, had him play the first ten minutes in German, then did a fast zoom to his close-up while he was speaking and he just switched to English. This gag was used again in Hunt For Red October (1990).
This problem presented itself early in the writing process of Lawrence of Arabia. An important plot point is that Lawrence speaks and reads Arabic. Most of the dialogue in the film should be in Arabic, but some of it is in English. The parts of major Arabic characters were going to played by movie stars like Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn so they were certainly not going to be speaking Arabic, nor did it make sense for these actors to put on fake Arab accents.
Director David Lean, producer Sam Spiegel, and the writer, Michael Wilson, spent a great deal of 1959-1960 trying to work out a script for Lawrence and couldn’t do it. Spiegel, meanwhile, put together the financing and hired the cast. David Lean finally fired Michael Wilson (which is another whole story), hired Robert Bolt, whose play A Man For All Seasons was a big hit at that moment, and they didn’t try to fix the script, they started again.
In the first 30 minutes of Lawrence of Arabia many things are established, but specifically this language issue. When we first meet Lawrence in Cairo he’s a British lieutenant drawing maps. He immediately receives an Arabic newspaper and reads it aloud in English. OK, he both reads and understands Arabic. Now, here’s the conceit that Robert Bolt brought to the script: everybody speaks their own language fluently, therefore everybody is going to speak English fluently. Without explaining themselves, Bolt and Lean make this completely clear in the opening scenes, which is my favorite part of the movie.
Lawrence is being led through the desert by a Bedouin guide named Tafas, who is clearly just an average, uneducated guy in Arabia, who, if you bother to think about it, can’t possibly speak English, and certainly not fluently, but he does anyway. Robert Bolt eases us into this concept slowly, with a wonderful monosyllabic scene. Lawrence and Tafas are on camels in the desert and Tafas says in fluent English, “Here you may drink. One cup.” Lawrence pours himself a cup of water and asks, “You do not drink?” Tafas says, “No.” Lawrence says, “I’ll drink when you do.” Tafas shrugs, “I am Bedu.” Lawrence pours the water back into the canteen.
Then in the next simple – though exceptionally complicated – scene, Lawrence and Tafas peer over the top of a sand dune. Tafas points and says, “Bedu.” Lawrence looks, shades his eyes, but can’t see anything but endless desert. He uses his binoculars, and even still the band of Bedouins is so incredibly far away they’re the size of ants. Tafas says, “They are Harith. I am not Harith.” “No,” says Lawrence, “Hazimi, of the Beni Salem.” Tafas is thrilled that Lawrence knows that information and starts to laugh. And now we know that Lawrence not only speaks Arabic, but really does know his stuff.
The rest of the movie is in well-spoken English by everybody, including Jose Ferrer as a Turkish soldier, and we just go with it. No subtitles, no phony accents. I think it’s brilliant.
Occasionally, I imagine myself to be Steve McQueen in Papillion (1973) at the very end of the movie. After 25 years on Devil’s Island, he is sitting on top of a bag of coconuts in the middle of the ocean and hollers, “I’m still here, you bastards! I’m still here!”