Houston H. Haynes

I was channel surfing late one night and stumbled across the opening scene of Lawrence of Arabia, which had been restored and expanded in 1989 – and was being broadcast in high definition on HDNET. I decided that it was time to sit through this and watch it, beginning to end.  There are people that speak of seeing this in the theater like they were at Woodstock, and I’m sure watching at home is not the same experience that moviegoers would have had on the big screen. But alas, I thought I should do my best to soldier through it on a 52″ plasma display in 5.1 surround – Oh, the sacrifices one makes!

I was, in a word, gobsmacked. Aside from the fact that I was stunned at the incredible visuals, there’s so much more to this classic film than meets the eye. Even though there were some extraordinarily long sequences of dialog-free footage, the places where there was some form of discourse, there was hardly a word wasted. While not exactly Shakespearean blank verse, there was sometimes a poetic quality to it – simultaneously high-minded and yet seemingly realistic. Though I can’t imagine how they would have spoken to each other, the eloquence matched the way I hope they might have spoken to each other.

“With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me it is merely good manners. You may judge which is more reliable.”
– Prince Feisal (played by Sir Alec Guinness)

And I was somewhat surprised that it felt like a four-hour movie. In most cases films that stretch things out is seen as not such a good thing. When I’m working on a film there’s usually a concerted effort to do things that make a long segment seem shorter (I use the Schillinger phrase “compressing psychological time”). But in this case, it almost seems like they tried to make it seem longer than the actual run time – an epic that was not shying away from being, well – epic. I really, really liked the seemingly conscientious effort at patient story telling – not something we see in film that often today.

The thing that was a disappointment to me was the music mix – which seemed like it had not been updated along with the quality of the visuals. It’s a gorgeous score – excerpts of which I’ve performed live many times throughout my previous life as a concert musician. So I was a bit disheartened when the swell of music came up in parts that forced me to dive for the remote to turn the volume down. The tinniness of the music struck me as not unlike the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Yikes. If they re-mastered the music when they restored the film, they must have used a mis-calibrated dub stage or someone with burned-out ears,  or both.

One last thing – I was amazed at how many quoted scenes I saw in this film. I suppose that I shouldn’t be so surprised, since it’s such a classic. But there were several times where I was sucked out of the scene because I was saying to myself, “Hey, I’ve seen that shot in ‘The English Patient’” and what-have-you. It’s obvious that a lot of directors have “tipped their hat” to this film over the years, I just hadn’t realized the extent of it (and it’s worthiness for the accolades) until now.

After the credits started to roll, I told Julie that this was the first time I’ve ever been humbled by a movie. I’ve walked away from classic films happy, angry, dissapointed, amazed, saddened, and sometimes fully buzzed. But this was a singlar experience. It’s hard enough for me to truly enjoy any film, but now I think Julie’s going to be giving up on trying to get me to sit through the current tide of two-hour blab-fests, especially now that I’ve been fully spoiled by “Lawrence of Arabia”.