At the end of December 1962, roughly three weeks after Lawrence of Arabia had its premiere, the screenwriter, Robert Bolt, wrote the director, David Lean, that a Muslim psychoanalyst friend of his had called him up and said, "it was the first picture he has seen in which a Muslim people were accorded absolutely equal status with the whites, being neither sentimentalized nor belittled. On the other hand, you know, I don't think the Zionists could say we'd made a pro-Arab picture. ... It's when you start truckling to this or that expectation that you give offense."

How right Bolt was and is -- both about Lawrence of Arabia and the need for artists to explore the truth without bowing to cultural biases. And how fortuitous is the reopening this past Friday of Lawrence of Arabia, undiminished in its power, and a new version of the British colonial epic The Four Feathers, a prime example of filmmakers truckling to expectations and thus giving offense.

The 2002 edition of The Four Feathers bends over backward to be critical of imperialist Anglos and supportive of native cultures. In trying to balance their portrait of a messianic Islamic uprising in Sudan of the 1880s, the filmmakers inflate the character of a righteous African Muslim (played by Djimon Hounsou) until he takes over the movie from its nominal hero, Harry Feversham (Heath Ledger). And what do they get for their pains? Justified derision, even from mainstream media like the Associated Press, for creating "an angelic black man who exists solely to make things easier for the white man."

Hounsou, at least, is entertaining. What's fatal to this Four Feathers is the moviemakers' tendency to make the British Army characters banal or stupid; the picture never gives the audience a reason to root for their survival. The filmmakers introduce Harry Feversham not as a troubled, imaginative boy, but as a full-grown man carrying on like a present-day jock at a kegger and then spouting glib doubts about the need to trek through the Sudanese desert to protect the queen. He's a combination of a spring-break heartthrob and a reflex rebel afflicted with a backdated, trans-Atlantic strain of Vietnam Syndrome.

So his choice to resign his commission on the eve of his regiment's assignment to the Sudan and to stay with his fiancee carries no weight. When three pals and his betrothed each hand him a white feather as tokens of cowardice, there's no force to Harry's realization that he may have acted partly

out of fear. His later decision to ship out alone and earn back his good name, saving his buddies' hides again and again -- a surefire narrative hook -- becomes irreparably flimsy.

The filmmakers' scattershot critique of imperial aggression colors everything from their depiction of rugby scrums to battlefield hubris, yet does nothing to create an original perspective on the material. Ironically, this movie's whiff of radical chic from a bygone era won't help it with cognoscenti like that AP correspondent, who will still proclaim it a Victorian relic.

Heady conquest

As a movie critic, what irks me is that this movie's debacle has caused film critic-historians as accomplished and knowledgeable as Variety's Todd McCarthy to say that the 1939 version of The Four Feathers "was drenched in the sort of patriotic God, King and Country sentiments that seem quaint today at best." The 1939 Technicolor film, produced, directed and designed by brothers Alexander, Zoltan and Vincent Korda, respectively, is one of the most beautiful of all desert spectacles. One shot of a mauve haze circling some distant ruddy mountains ranks with the impassioned imagery of Lawrence.

How can you grasp the reasons men have for making imperial conquests if you can't understand the headiness of imperial conquest? Lean knew he had to make desert exploits intoxicating in Lawrence of Arabia. The Kordas knew that, too, in The Four Feathers. They comprehend the material so thoroughly they're able to satirize military tradition without defusing its power.

Graham Greene caught the two-edged quality of the Kordas' telling of this "ham-heroic" tale when he praised "the drive -- and in the Sudanese scenes, the conviction" of their version, saying "even the thickest of the ham -- the old veterans discussing the Crimea in the Feversham home, among the portraits of military ancestors -- goes smoothly down, savoured with humour and satire."

John Clements is a skillful enough actor to convey that Harry Faversham is not a simple coward, but a man afraid of being a coward. And the movie doesn't pigeonhole his quandary. With less fuss, this Feathers is far more piercingly self-critical, both personally and politically. Clements and the Kordas make you believe that Faversham hates "our disastrous Egyptian adventure." But, with a big boost from Clements, they clarify his realization that his motives for not joining the campaign are impure. You understand why the Kordas wanted to make Lawrence of Arabia with Clements back in the 1930s. Like O'Toole, he could pull off a Conradian combination of antihero and superhero.

In his adaptation of A.E.W. Mason's novel, R.C. Sheriff wisely excises Hounsou's character and puts Faversham through a self-inflicted torture -- including disguising himself as a mute Sangali outcast with a brand burned like a split sausage on his forehead -- that expresses, in vivid shorthand, the complexity and limits of a white Brit impersonating an Arab tribesman. For a while, Clements' Feversham is as happy in his Sangali rags as O'Toole's Lawrence is in his white robes. And the film's emphasis on Feversham as Arab focuses the casual indignities the British rein down on native populations better than any trumped-up noble savage.

As a buddy-buddy-buddy movie, the 1939-Four Feathers is again infinitely superior to the 2002 bollix. Ralph Richardson's dedicated soldier Durrance is equal to Clements' Faversham. When he wanders blind through a battlefield as scary carrion birds descend upon it, he's heartrending -- like Lear on the blasted heath -- partly because Richardson is as devoid of sentimentality as a brick, yet as light and subtle in gesture as his damnable feather.

Richardson's Durrance is a man that Harry would want to measure up to; he's a worthy yardstick. And June Duprez as Harry's fiancee conveys both her girlish petulance at his supposed cowardice and the mournful regret that envelops her in ensuing months.

Telling details

Of course, most of the non-Caucasians in the old Four Feathers are depicted as whimsical or unknowable primitives. But the Egyptian doctor who brands him first asks, gently, "Why not be a coward and be happy?" And the tribal warriors have a mysterious elegance. In their majestic purplish black, they never fade into the landscape. They have the alert bearing of masters.

Because the 1939-Four Feathers team knew what it was doing, they caught unexpected nuances. (It may be a boys'-book adventure, but Feversham's emotional scarring by his father is as powerful as his physical scarring by that doctor.) And as Graham Greene wrote, with the sort of poetic impressionism that later critics adopted for describing Lawrence, "what's important is: the close-up of mulberry bodies straining at the ropes along the Nile: the cracked umber waste round the dried-up wells: the vultures with their grimy serrated Lisle-street wings dropping like weighted parachutes."

To experience all the psychological and intellectual richness of big-screen "spectaculars," forgo the current Four Feathers for Lawrence of Arabia. And hope, a couple of months from now, that when the time comes for the Senator's annual celebration of 1939 films, the theater showcases the Kordas' Four Feathers.