LAWRENCE OF ARABIA -- Restored Edition
Film comment by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper
While it is an old film, and a well-known one, I probably should say something about the restored version of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA since its release is one of the big events of the year. ("What? More words?" as Jack Hawkins asks early in the film.) And it's true, there has has been a lot of media coverage. As a labor of love, Robert Harris has organized the restoration of a classic film, many people's favorite film of all time, and certainly one that deserves a +4 rating from me. The time spent on the restoration was longer than was spent on the original film (19 months on the restoration, 18 on the original film).
I think it is now film history what Harris and his people went through to restore the film. First Harris got Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to tell Columbia that if the restoration did not get funded there would be no more Columbia films by either director. Harris's team scoured the world for prints that might have some footage that may have been cut from more commonly available editions. They found footage for which they had no sound and in some cases no script. They hired lip-readers to tell them what the actors were saying. Then they re-hired Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, and several of the other actors to recreate their voices for 1962 and to redub the scenes, then they had to cut the new pieces in, artificially add hiss so the transition would not be so noticeable, and so forth. It was a remarkable piece of work. Further they had to remove the scratches for the pieces they had. Surprisingly, that is possible. The scratches are only on the surface and there is a process by which if you put the film in fluid, it fills up the cracks and you can transfer a scratchless image as long as you do so in the fluid.
So it was a giant piece of work, though I am told not incredibly expensive as new films go, and at the Ziegfeld in New York they did have lines wrapped around the block. I stood for 90 minutes in the cold to get in, and would probably do so again, though I have to say I was less than pleased with the Ziegfeld's presentation of the restoration, at least of the sound. The music was painfully loud and I would say it sounded distorted. It is rare that you see a 70mm print that is not a blown-up 35mm print. This was filmed on 70mm and you can see a difference, not a tremendous difference, but it is noticeable. The "mystical" experience of seeing the desert in all the glory of the original film eluded me. Yes, it is very good photography and seeing it in this really wide-screen version reminds you how good the photography is. It is a very good cinematic experience seeing the restoration, not much more.
Now here comes one of those pieces of heresy that I get my ears pinned back for occasionally. The people who cut down the film from 223 minutes to 187, they diminished the film. They did not butcher it. That 187-minute film that I got off of cable--that was a +4 film. The restored version seen on the wide screen is a better film, but not that much better. Given that the film was going to be cut, the "butchers" made pretty much the right cuts. There is one notable exception, the sequence of Lawrence massacring a group of Turks toward the end of the film. The cut version was incoherent; the full version was bloodier and made Lawrence less sympathetic, probably the reason for the bad cut. With the exception of that sequence and what it says about Lawrence, I find that what I like the film for was never cut out of it. (Speaking of what it says about Lawrence, I recommend an hour-long program they run on PBS that tells you more about the real Lawrence than the film does.) I do not approve of the cuts that were made, but the result was still a very good film.
Mark R. Leeper
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leeper@mtgzz.att.com
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