More about this DVD  •  DVD Info  •  Movie Main Page  •  Message Board

To restore a film to its full cinematic glory, however, is a Herculean task, particularly when neglect has nearly destroyed the elements. Lawrence of Arabia was such a film; the gentleman responsible for its restoration is the eminent Robert A. Harris. We cannot credit the market clout of DVD for that effort. It was ten years before DVD was introduced that Mr. Harris teamed with restoration producer Jim Painten and director David Lean to restore the film elements and replace deleted footage. (Many have credited James Katz, Mr. Harris's longtime restoration partner, with participating in Lawrence, but the record indicates that this partnership was formed after Lawrence was restored.)

The film stands as a series of inspired cinematic visions that tend to draw the viewer into the desert. It's a visceral experience. The sandy vistas are as alien as one may find on Earth. I can recall my first impression of a Middle Eastern desert, very different from my experiences in the American Southwest; I was reminded of photographs from a Mars lander. And the sand isn't granular like beach sand; it's the consistency of compacted talcum powder. That's why hooves and wind create so much dust. By traveling to Jordan for most of his location shooting, Lean managed to capture that inhospitable beauty on film.

Consider the sequence in which Omar Sharif's character, Sherif Ali, chieftain of the Harith tribe, is introduced. Lawrence and his Bedouin guide are standing at a desert well. The horizon dances with shimmering heat as it rises off the hot sand. The heat reduces the critical angle, causing the sky to be reflected below the horizon, an effect well known as a mirage. Suspended in the hot turbulent air, a tiny dark distortion forms within the ripples of heat, slowly to become a distant man riding his camel toward us, seemingly in midair. As he draws closer, his mount's hooves return to the Earth; Ali has come to find who has violated his well. Much subtle detail had been lost in previous low-resolution video transfers, but this lovingly produced DVD with its admirable restoration captures the emotional impact Lean intended.

A plot summary does not do justice to this film, but is included here in the unlikely event that you aren't familiar with the story. (For most of you, you might want to skip ahead to the video section.) It is 1917. The First World War rages in the trenches of Europe. Germany's Turkish ally is waging a campaign in the Mideast. The Turks have occupied Arabia and are threatening the Suez. Lieutenant Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) is sent into the field at the insistence of British diplomat and head of the Arab Bureau, Mr. Dryden (Claude Rains). Under orders to assess the situation, Lawrence seeks out a powerful tribal leader, Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness). The Arab revolt against the Turks is not going well. Feisal and his men are withdrawing to escape Turkish aircraft sent to bomb and strafe.

A key port, Aqaba, must be taken to supply the Arabs. Lawrence devises a dangerous plan: cross the Nafud Desert and attack from the rear. The Turks' artillery pieces are intended to defend against a sea attack and cannot be turned inland. Ali believes Lawrence is quite mad, but Lawrence prevails; the impossible is always possible. Feisal lends his support, Ali is shamed into joining him, and a band of warriors sets off to make a trek no sane man would try. Whether through luck or willpower they survive crossing the scorching wasteland, only to find that one of their company had fallen from his mount and was left behind. Lawrence decides to return for the fallen man as Ali berates Lawrence for risking the mission for one man. When Lawrence returns safely with the missing warrior, he wins the respect of the tribe. This is a pivotal point. Lawrence is now convinced of his invulnerability and he's earned the acceptance and the loyalty of the people from whom he must ask such a great deal.

Lawrence meets Auda abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), chieftain of the Howeitat tribe, as he frolics alone in a gift of white robes. He wins over this cynical Bedouin as well. Applying his canny understanding of Bedouin values and customs, Lawrence manages to unite the Harith and the Howeitat, antagonistic rivals, in a common cause. They ride together to Aqaba and take the fortress from the Turks. Their success further emboldens Lawrence. With the support of his government, he guides the Bedouin tribes in guerilla warfare, disrupting Turkish lines of communication and rail. With each victory, his sense of indestructibility grows. After derailing a Turkish train, a surviving soldier repeatedly shoots at Lawrence with a pistol from perhaps a dozen yards away. Lawrence stands passively until a Bedouin ally slays the soldier with a sword. This confidence will be his undoing.

Accomplishing the impossible is one of Lawrence's most effective tools for ensuring the loyalty of the men who follow him (that and an ample supply of British gold). When a bold incursion into a Turkish held outpost leads to his capture and torture, he undergoes an unfortunate transformation. Lawrence started this campaign with an instinctive distaste for violence and killing, yet an incident in which he was forced to kill provoked an unexpected and unwelcome response: he enjoyed it. He found this very troubling, but his introspection was abandoned when the Turks brutalized him. He emerges from that brief captivity cursed with fear and hatred, feelings that do not dissipate until he takes a terrible revenge on the Turks. Lawrence becomes revered. His exploits are exploited by American reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), a Lowell Thomas surrogate. Lawrence will come out of this campaign as a colonel, and despite his love/hate relationship with the desert, returns to England and an ironic fate.

Lean's choice to portray Lawrence was at once canny and serendipitous. Lawrence is a cornucopia of contradictions, elements of sadomasochism, egocentricity, and sexual ambiguity. Peter O'Toole manages to capture Lawrence's eccentricities as he discovers his affinity for the desert and its people. He projects Lawrence's turmoil though his impossibly blue eyes. We readily accept his psychological arc as his ego grows to messianic proportions with tragic consequences. The intelligent script by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson is based on Lawrence's wartime writings. The desert provided an unworldly beauty. David Lean brought his vision.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film's theatrical aspect ratio of 2.20:1 is presented in anamorphic video that had been down-converted from a high definition transfer. When Columbia Tristar originally released Lawrence of Arabia to DVD - the fifth highest ranked film on the AFI top 100 and arguably director David Lean's best work - the studio inexplicably excluded Robert Harris from the transfer process. That oversight was corrected as the Superbit re-release was being prepared, and Mr. Harris has stated elsewhere that this new DVD is as close in appearance to the restored film as is possible. Thanks to his participation and the extended bit rate that forced this 227- minute film to be spread across two discs, the results are very impressive indeed. I found watching this new DVD a revelation; it's like someone had cleaned red-tinted Vaseline from my projector's lenses.

But there's good news and bad news. To demonstrate each, I captured the same frame (located at 18:48) from both the original and the Superbit release, cropped them, and magnified them to ensure visibility. As I was viewing the Superbit version, the first thing that struck me was the improved level of detail as compared to the previous release. Fine textures and small object detail suppressed in the first release are superb on the Superbit release.

In my first comparison, the two images are from the lower right corner of the frame. Notice that the ripples in the sand caused by blowing wind are clearly visible on the Superbit release and virtually invisible on the original. This is indicative to the improved level of detail. The differences in chrominance and luminance may be attributed to Mr. Harris and the fine-tuning of color and density.

The second comparison was pulled from that same frame, this time from the upper left at the transition between the desert sand and the bright blue sky. Notice that the excessive red on the original DVD imparts a slight purple hue to the blue sky, which is more properly shown on the Superbit release. This is indicative of the improved color balance throughout this new disc. But these two images also highlight the unfortunate reality that edge halos are a bit more prominent on the Superbit DVD. Mr. Harris mentioned that two layers of edge enhancement found on the original DVD were removed from the video for this Superbit release. I'm left to speculate what may have remained. One potential source may be the MPEG-2 encoder applied to the video for Columbia Tristar DVDs; it more often than not causes halos as a compression artifact. The other possibility is that the halos are a byproduct of telecine and the greater level of detail that Superbit's higher bit rates provide makes them more pronounced. Mr. Harris mentioned that the monitor used for quality assessment was 32- inches. In my humble opinion, that's not good enough. I continue to hope that soon the practice will be put in place to view progress on a large screen illuminated by a superior CRT-based projector as the video is processed for DVD.

Having pointed out a worst-case flaw, I will now seem to contradict myself by stating that the halos rarely intrude and that this Superbit release is so much more satisfying than the original that selecting one over the other is a no-brainer. The remaster is clearly superior. Highly saturated colors are vivid and noise-free. Skin tones are consistently more natural than the original. Contrast and brightness are excellent. The day for night scenes have much improved shadow detail. And digital artifacts are not in evidence. You may notice the occasional splice in the form a subtle, slight, single jerk of moving objects, but I think it's safe to assume that these were the unavoidable artifacts of trying to reassemble the film from available elements.

There is one other issue that I must address. Lawrence is a very long film, about 227 minutes. An intermission was built into the theatrical presentation at about nineteen minutes beyond the two-hour mark presumably for bladder breaks and to provide theater owners a second shot at selling some expensive popcorn. To maximize the quality of the presentation on this Superbit release, Columbia Tristar decided to split the film at 1:56:45, approximately twenty-three minutes before the theatrical intermission. So as disc one runs out of data, the viewer experiences a jump cut to a white on black placard with instructions to insert the second disc. The cut is abrupt and arbitrary. I'm more than enthusiastic about video quality - I do, after all, watch my DVDs on an eight-foot wide screen illuminated by a fine CRT projector - but I found this well-meaning decision esthetically troubling.

I can certainly understand that increasing the length of the content on the first disc by twenty-three minutes, about 20%, would have a proportional and significant impact on the bit rate, but I can't help but wonder how much the quality of the first disc's video would have suffered. An alternative and perhaps a more controversial solution might have been to edit the location of the intermission by placing it at 1:54:34. It's at that point that Sherif Ali and Auda abu Tayi watch Lawrence's receding back as he gallops off to Cairo to report the capture of Aqaba. It would not have reproduced the theatrical experience accurately, but in the context of having to switch discs, might have been more satisfying. (From my point of view, the arbitrary disc break is just as heretical as moving the location of the intermission.)

My reservations aside, this is a dramatic improvement. We may now have a transfer that truly does justice to the poetic visuals Lean brought to the screen. I can only imagine how much better it will look on HD-DVD.

Audio: How Does the Disc Sound?

Two 5.1 tracks are provided, one in DTS and the other in Dolby Digital. As I mentioned in my original review, the audio restoration wasn't quite as successful. Maurice Jarre's excellent score lacks breadth and resolution. Despite improved equalization, the intermodulation distortion inherent in recordings of the period simply cannot be processed away. There is an unavoidable harshness that runs through all of the audio, sound effects and dialog alike.

Surround effects are modestly applied and sound to be monaural. So those of you who have EX decoding should disable it to avoid a sonic collapse into the center surround. While the rumble of thousands of hooves is very effective, an exceptional subwoofer won't be required to reproduce them. Deepest bass and shimmering highs are both absent. But considering the reported condition of the film before the restoration was begun, this is actually a superb effort. Intelligibility is maintained throughout, and the visuals are so stunning that any audible disappointments are easily overlooked. As in the original release, the roadshow feature of an overture in complete darkness before each part of the film also has been restored.

The inevitable comparison between Dolby Digital and DTS yields a surprise. The modest distortion in the film's audio is such that it masks the subtle differences between the two lossy digital audio formats. But from what I heard, I have to speculate that the two tracks were equalized very differently. The Dolby Digital track emphasizes the upper bass, imparting a bloated sound to the score. The DTS track is more realistically contoured; without sacrificing the lowest registers, the orchestral spectral balance is more natural and more satisfying. To my ears, on this DVD, DTS is the preferred track.

The audio is supported by subtitles in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai. In addition, English Closed Captions are included.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

There are no supplements to consume bits on this Superbit DVD.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

Also dropped from the previous release are all the ROM features.

Parting Thoughts