Word: enigma
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...LAWRENCE: THE SELECTED LETTERS edited by Malcolm Brown (Norton; $27.50). David Lean's recently rereleased Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest epic films ever made. But its subject remains an enigma. He tells his own story here in letters, nearly two-thirds of them previously unpublished, and illuminates the shadows of his personality...
Reading Lawrence's story, not as he polished it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom but as he parceled it out to friends, does not finally resolve the enigma of his character or explain his place in history. He would be easier to understand if he were simply larger than life or what his detractors claimed: a self-aggrandizing charlatan. But he took no pleasure in his notoriety; he ran from it. The Selected Letters adds another interpretation to an already overwrought tale. The age demanded a hero, Lawrence qualified, and the 20th century then got what it deserved: a loner...
Upon returning to Moscow in 1944 after a seven-year absence, the American diplomat George Kennan was struck by the enigma of an empire both yearning for its rightful place in the modern world and clinging to the enfeebling insularity of its past. "The Anglo-Saxon instinct is to attempt to smooth away contradictions," he wrote. "The Russian tends to deal only in extremes, and he is not particularly concerned to reconcile them. To him, contradiction is a familiar thing. It is the essence of Russia...
There are mysteries, and then again there are mysteries. Those that involve capital crimes oblige a movie to solve the puzzle clearly, neatly and, one hopes, surprisingly before the final fade-out. There is, however, a better class of enigma that involves less deadly, even comical, forms of human behavior. And there is a better class of film that is wisely content to set forth such shadowy dilemmas and leave them unresolved, resonating in our minds...
...Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene invariably gooses a cheer out of its audience -- almost a rebel yell. But its grizzly machismo represents an '80s-movie solution to a '60s for-real enigma: Dirty Harry beats dirty laundry...