Lawrence at 60 Years and Counting

Lawrence of Arabia changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. I’d seen pictures before that affected me deeply, and quite a few I’d gone back to see more than once. I knew vaguely about the auteur theory. I realized movies were made, they didn’t somehow spring from the brow of Zeus. But on the most basic level, I didn’t actually understand that a movie was intentional, that it was calculated and specific.

Lawrence changed that, and I can tell you exactly how: the moment when Peter O’Toole holds up the burning match, and blows it out, and they cut to the sunrise on the desert, the music swelling.

I’ve mentioned this before, and it’s subliminal, not literal, the light suddenly dawning, but I remember how jaw-dropping it was – the shot itself, for openers, and at the same time, that I’d been let in on this world-changing secret. I was struck with awe.

Lawrence is back, and not for the first time. It was released originally at three hours and forty-two minutes, a roadshow feature, in December, 1962. Then cut by twenty minutes for general release. Then re-cut in 1970, to 187 minutes. And then restored, in 1988, to 228 minutes – this is the Director’s Cut available on DVD. I just got to see it again, theatrically, in a 4K restoration. Granted, it’s digital, not film, but it’s spectacular.

A word about the cinematography. (Freddie Young won the Oscar for it, Anne Coates won for the editing.) The movie was shot in Super Panavision 70, which is a 65mm negative printed to 35mm, projected in anamorphic – meaning the compressed image on film is widened on the screen. One of the cool things about the newest release is the amount of visual detail. You can argue that there will always be more detail captured on film negative, but the image will degrade, as prints are reproduced from the master negative.

This new digital transfer is probably the best available capture of the original, even if the purist in me kicks against it. You can see the blowing sand, the texture of a man’s skin, in close-up, or the depth of distance. Lean and Freddie Young used a 500mm Panavision zoom lens to shoot Omar Sharif’s entrance, through the dust and the heat coming off the hardpan, the figure seeming to resolve out of a mirage, or a trick of the mind’s eye. Is there really a better entrance in all of the movies?

I went back to see Lawrence twice, the initial 222-minute roadshow release, and then I saw it another three times, in its 202-minute general theatrical release. I couldn’t get enough. My pal John Davis and I could retail entire scenes of dialogue to each other – “The best of them won’t come for money, they’ll come for me” – and ape Peter O’Toole’s mannerisms. I didn’t, at that point, even know David Lean was a big deal, that he and Olivier and the Kordas had brought British cinema back from the dead, after the war, or at least brought American audiences into theaters, which is what mattered to the box office. Later on, when I was living at the Y on Huntington Avenue, I discovered a revival house up the street, and saw Great Expectations for the first time. It was Lean’s two Dickens adaptions that put him on the postwar map, Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948, but this wasn’t on my radar. I was just knocked out by the picture itself, and it was icing on the cake to realize it was guy who’d made Lawrence.

Oh, and that Maurice Jarre score!

I think it was his big break. It was sweeping, and eerie, and thunderous, and sometimes all at the same time. Lots of tympani. I tried to recreate it the following summer, at a pump organ. Four of us, teenage boys. Driving a van filled with mattresses up to a summer cabin in Canada, and a shaving kit full of bathtub benzedrine, courtesy of a chemistry-adjacent friend of a friend. The four of us stoned out of our minds and flying, me pumping the foot pedals on that organ with physical fury, and picking out Maurice’s main theme on the keyboard, DOO-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-DOO-doo. It must have driven the other guys crazy, except that they were doing much the same, banging on a typewriter instead of an instrument. I think this is a story for another time. Too much left in already, when I should leave most of it out.

In any case, I think I’ve hit the highlights. Lawrence is the most important movie of my life, both as a movie that made me think organically about the movies, and as a totem, in terms of personal history. I’m enormously grateful it pointed the way.