A Masterpiece Restored to the Screen

By RICHARD CORLISS

It seemed a mad gamble: a $12 million epic about an eccentric English adventurer on the fringe of World War I, set in the sere deserts of the Middle East. It was hell to shoot: 18 months in the singeing sun of Jordan, Morocco and Spain. It had an obscure actor in the title role and no speaking parts for women. When it opened in New York City during the 1962 newspaper strike, one of the film's few reviewers, Andrew Sarris, called it "dull, overlong and coldly impersonal . . . hatefully calculating and condescending."

How sweet the balm of history. Like its half-mad hero, Lawrence of Arabia defied the odds and won -- seven Oscars, to be exact. And like T.E. Lawrence, the Oxford-bred English lieutenant who led a Bedouin revolt against the colonial Turks, David Lean's film has grown in legend. Critics revere it as the cinema's greatest epic, and a young generation of filmmakers fondly cite its achievement and impact. "To me it is one of the most beautiful films ever made," says Martin Scorsese, whose Last Temptation of Christ was a Lawrence on the cheap. "The day before I saw it," says Steven Spielberg, who was 15 at the time, "I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. The day after, I knew I wanted to be a director. Whenever I want to see what great films used to be like, I watch Lawrence."

Now moviegoers can see Lawrence in its pristine splendor. One more movie hero, film archivist Robert A. Harris, spent years sifting through 3 1/2 tons of film to reconstruct Lean's film, which, like the stone monuments of the Sahara, had been eroded by time. On this gorgeous Lawrence, with its sparkling 65-mm prints and crisp Dolby sound, Harris was the producer and the chief surgeon. Next week the film has gala premieres before opening in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles.

Robert Bolt's eloquent, epigrammatic script traces Lawrence's career from mapmaking in the British army's Cairo headquarters to masterminding Arab nationalism. In Peter O'Toole's pensive, swashbuckling incarnation, Lawrence makes for a curious messiah. With his skin like a mandarin orange dipped in sand, his voice intimate and cryptic, his haunted eyes staring from inside his burnoose, O'Toole creates a towering, tragic, high-camp sheik of Araby.

In 1962 Lawrence was the ultimate epic -- cinema at the apex of its ambition and intelligence. Lavish in visual beauty, the film also boasts economy of style: it knows how much can be shown in a shot, how much can be said in a few words. But the picture was a harbinger too. If Lawrence was the last colonial God-man, he was also the movie epic's first moody hero, father to countless sacred screen madmen. And in the picture's political wrangling and massacre scenes, we see hints of American history in the late '60s and American movies today: a preview of Viet Nam and a prequel to Platoon.

This was the first of Lean's three elemental dramas -- Lawrence (sand), Doctor Zhivago (snow), Ryan's Daughter (sea) -- and the most spectacular, a feast for smart eyes. Two camels negotiate the swollen dunes like ants moving across a sleeping woman's legs. "The desert," says Lawrence, "is an ocean in which no oar is dipped." Lean and cinematographer Freddie Young translated that simile of the Saharan sea into screen poetry. They caught the wash of sand curling off the crest of a dune, the seaside effect of light shimmering over the parched expanse. When Lawrence finally treads in the surf of Aqaba, he can celebrate more than a military victory; he is primed to savor a mirage come true. The sand is now water, and this miracle man can walk on both.

But what miracle could save Lawrence from Hollywood's corrosive carelessness? Producer Sam Spiegel had shaved 20 minutes from the film's original 217, and 20 more were cut upon the film's 1970 rerelease. "It was as though some little rodent was nibbling at the healthy body of the film," O'Toole says. "And not even a tasteful rodent." Harris soon discovered that the negative was warped and scratched; splices were falling apart. The distributor, Columbia Pictures, had also junked more than 600,000 feet of dialogue and music tracks. Not only would the film have to be pieced together, but also ten minutes of the dialogue demanded redubbing.

"I like to take on things that I can't do easily," Harris says. Here was a worthy challenge. He imported prints from England, Germany and the Netherlands and married bits of them to snippets from Long Island City, N.Y., and Hollywood. Aided by Lean and film editor Anne V. Coates, he determined the sequence and duration of each shot. Parts of the dialogue track had been lost, so Harris lured some of the stars back into studios, using electronic tricks to lighten the aging voices. Arthur Kennedy, whom Harris located by calling every "Kennedy, A." in Savannah, recorded his lines there. Anthony Quinn did his dubbing in New York City. And Lean, 80, directed O'Toole and Alec Guinness (Prince Feisal) in London. "When I was sitting there," the director says, "there was hardly a line of dialogue that I couldn't finish." Finally, Lean and Harris supervised the mix in Hollywood. "They did a magical job there," he says. "It was a work of love."

So love conquers all, even the ravages of time. As Spielberg says, "Lawrence of Arabia 25 years later looks better and sounds better than any film that has been in theaters since Lawrence of Arabia." Now only three tasks remain. Lean should keep working with Bolt on their new film, Nostromo. Hollywood should get cracking on other overdue restoration work. And moviegoers should hie out to some triplex or googolplex and see how ravishing movies used to be.

With reporting by Kathleen Brady/New York and Anne Constable/London