MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Lawrence’ Restored: Nothing Can Touch It

From the suppressed excitement in its overture to the last moments as that prophetic motorcyclist overtakes Lawrence’s open car in the desert, David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (Cineplex Odeon, Century City), restored to its full clarity and magnificence, is one of the Seven Wonders of the cinematic world.

Nothing to come along since “Lawrence’s” release in 1962 has diminished the power of cameraman F.A. (Freddie) Young’s desert vistas. Stretched out in 70-millimeter Super Panavision vastness, the movie’s most pungent memory has lost nothing to time as a shimmering pin point in the center of the screen becomes clearer and clearer and can finally be read as a man, all in black, on camelback, riding straight toward the camera. It’s still the greatest actor’s entrance in movies, the one that launched Omar Sharif into American moviegoing consciousness.

But Lean never makes haunting pictures for their own sake; he uses scale to sculpt character, and as our themes shrink along with our screens, the joy of storytelling on this epic scale is thrilling. It couldn’t have been an easy story to shape. Thomas Edward Lawrence was a scholar, a soldier, a hero with notable flaws and a man whom Lowell Thomas said had “a genius for backing into the limelight.”

In his literate, subtle screenplay from Lawrence’s autobiography, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” Robert Bolt has kept all of Lawrence’s complexities: his reticences and his flair for bravura; his compassion and the blood lust that came on him after his capture by a Turkish Bey at Deraa. And in fleshing out the man, Peter O’Toole has fatally colored our vision of Lawrence; the 5-foot-4 “El Aurens” will forever live as a 6-foot 2 gold-blond demigod.

What has changed? We’re finally able to take O’Toole’s unwavering charisma for granted and look beyond him to the film’s uncommonly compassionate and shaded portrayal of these Arab leaders. They emerge as proud, brave, ancient, honorable: Alec Guinness’ elegantly ironic Prince Feisel or Sharif’s firebrand Sherif Ali, fascinating alternatives to the all-purpose villainy that has been the Arabs’ lot on screen for so long. The intensity of Lawrence’s exchanges with these sinuous, seductive men make us forget completely that it is a film without women.

Bolt has been only moderately successful in explaining what was taking place historically: a revolt by the Arabs against the occupying Turks during World War I. Bolt is better at laying out Lawrence’s passion to create an Arab nation.

Bolt and Lean are best at change-ups, at shifting down from scenic vastness to intimate, highly charged moments between two or three characters. Wonderful vignettes emerge: Claude Raines at his Cheshire-cat best as the foreign office politician Dryden; Jack Hawkins’ shrewdly manipulative Gen. Allenby, and Jose Ferrer’s indelible Turkish Bey, whose beating of Lawrence reveals to the Englishman two sides to himself that he finds unendurable: a human side and a streak of masochism.

That last trait, of pleasure in punishing his body, has been hinted at in a reinstated early, crucial scene between Lawrence and his fellow soldier-cartographers in Cairo. Sliding his fingers up a match to put it out, Lawrence says: “Of course it hurts. The trick is not minding that it hurts.”

There’s a slyness to the film makers’ presentation of Lawrence; twice, they set off his superhuman accomplishments with scenes in which a detached observer catches him when he believes himself utterly alone. As he runs to float his silken sheik’s robes, given by Sharif as a measure of homage, and to catch his reflection in his dagger, we move sideways to see his preening, mortifyingly, from the point of view of Anthony Quinn, as Auda Abu Tayi, sardonic leader of an opposing tribe.

The film, now 3 hours and 36 minutes long (rated PG, because its language is pure although its scenes are sometimes bloody), is in two unequal halves. The action before the intermission is the upward arc of Lawrence’s life, the second half is his tragic unraveling, documented by Arthur Kennedy’s Jackson Bentley, a correspondent and resident ugly American.

The first half ends after Lawrence has pulled off a seeming military impossibility, crossing the oven-like Nefud desert and capturing the Turkish stronghold of Aqaba. Lawrence’s return is a moment of unabashed theater--Gen. Allenby conferring with his filthy, burnoose-clad lieutenant, equal to equal. It’s a little embarrassing to discover how deeply satisfying the scene is.

The shorter second half, as Lawrence’s illusions are stripped from him, is almost unendurably painful and oddly unsatisfying. Here, the great visual moments are invariably connected with suffering, like the scene in Allenby’s quarters when Lawrence’s wounds at the hands of the Turks bleed through his jacket. This stigmata is an eerie, almost Shakespearean device, a bloody witness to his “weakness.”

In the year after its debut, “Lawrence’s” overwhelming authority collared seven Academy Awards--best picture, director, (color) cinematography, (color) art direction, sound, editing and music. Although it seems shocking that O’Toole and Sharif were omitted, now we can also be grateful for its artful and resourceful restorers, Robert Harris and Jim Painten, to Columbia Pictures and the quartet of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Jon Davison and Dawn Steel, who supported the complex restoration.

‘LAWRENCE OF ARABIA’

A Columbia Pictures presentation of the Sam Spiegel-David Lean production. Producer Spiegel. Director Lean. Screenplay Robert Bolt. Music composed by Maurice Jarre, orchestrations Gerard Schurmann. Camera F.A. Young, photographed in Super-Panavision 70. Production design John Box. Art direction John Stoll. Costumes Phyllis Dalton, Editor Anne V. Coates. Sound editor Winston Ryder. Second unit direction Andre Smagghe, Noel Howard. Second Unit photography Skeets Kelly, Nicolas Roeg. Restoration: Reconstruction, restoration Robert A. Harris. Restoration produced by Harris, Jim Painten. Editorial consultant Anne V. Coates. Sound consultant Richard L. Anderson. Rerecording mixer Gregg Landaker. With Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer. Omar Sharif, Anthony Quayle, Claude Raines, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit, Michel Ray, John Dimech, I.S. Johar, Zia Mohyeddin.

Running time: 3 hours, 36 minutes (plus overture, entr’acte, exit music).

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).