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Rating:  - Timeless Classic
The movie is a masterpiece. I heard about it previously and decided to purchase it due to comments and reviews. It portrays the stuggle of the Arab tribes in Arabia with Lawrence uniting them to victory over the Ottoman Empire during WWI. It is a classic.
Rating: - You are one of those English who love the desert....
Cinematography makes this film great. I loved one of the first scenes in which Lawrence and his guide are dipping water from a well and see a shifting, ephemeral shape in the distance. The shape gets larger and seems to be someone walking on water...or...at leasts someone walking on the surface of a shimmering mirage. A rifle cracks and the guide drops dead. The 'shape' is Omar Sharif on his camel and has killed the guide for the unforgiveable sin of stealing water.
The movie is filled with similar images of the desert...beautiful, deadly and brutal. Lawrence, in the form of the overly-tall Peter O'Toole [the real T.E. Lawrence was only about 5' 4"]. Still, O'Toole captures some of the strangeness and irony of a very strange Englishman. Lawrence girds up the Bedoins to fight the Ottoman Turks. They blow up trains and murder people. They traverse an uncrossable desert to attack Al Aqaba on the Gulf with guns trained only on the sea. After incredible hardship they succeed and slaughter the garrison. Lawrence finds an interesting truth about himself...he enjoys killing people.
Confusion about his very nature moves Lawrence in his leadership of the Arab cause. Lawrence's leadership has, in its own way, become much our own problem in dealing with the Arabic and Islamic powers.
Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
Rating: - LAWRENCE
This is the greatest film ever made.Yes, better than "Gone With The Wind", better than "Citizen Kane," better than... you name it. It has the scope and vision of an epic, which for me is still Hollywood's grandest contribution to the art form. Small pictures can have a more personal impact, but the epic cannot really be made in a studio built off of one's garage. Spielberg and company have probably destroyed the genre with their digital monkey business; the true epic requires large casts and locations that can fill the camera. Lean found his canvas in the desert. It is certainly the greatest desert film ever made. Curiously, the film doesn't date. This says a lot about its superb script and a cast that has never been matched for talent. Even small roles are played by leading actors of the stage and screen, many now forgotten but they were legends in their time. Claude Rains comes to mind, of course, but virtually every role is filled by the best British stars of the war generation. The cinematography is breathtaking, even today when we have all been everywhere through television. Bolt's script works, balancing the sweep of the epic structure with numerous moving, personal scenes between two or three characters. Then there is the music. What can one say. Surely it is one of the greatest and most memorable of all soundtracks, a haunting, powerful evocation of the Arab peoples. In terms of politics, the film is provocative, anticipating political correctness by some thirty years in its depiction of the clash of cultures. Lawrence himself was devoted to the cultures he visited, so the theme is built into this sensitive portrayal of a most extraordinary of men.
Rating: - Lawrence of Arabia
Owned this as video. Wanted the clearer Def of DVD.This a pic that is a classic, I watch and re-watch from time to time. No devotee of really great films should be without...
Rating: - 5 stars for movie, 4 1/2 stars for DVD
The Columbia Classics Collector's Edition of "Lawrence of Arabia" is the best version on DVD.
I just discovered this film a few years ago, when the Superbit version was out of print and the Limited Edition was not only expensive, but was infamous for its inaccurate colors. I bought the single disc DVD, and was very pleased with it. However, it had no extra features.
Using various website reviews and side-by-side image comparisons, I have come to the conclusion that the Superbit version had the best picture quality (sound quality, I gather, is the same for all versions). The Columbia Classics version has very similar (if not equal) picture quality to the Superbit version. It also contains all of the same extras in the Limited Edition version, minus the replica booklet and DVD-Rom (the Superbit version had no extras, and neither does the single disc version). Therefore, the Columbia Classics version is best overall.
The only complaints that I have with this Columbia Classics version are that it uses false marketing to suggest that it is "Newly Restored and Remastered" (which it isn't, it's the same as the Superbit version) and one fault in the picture quality (the same for all versions, edge enhancement/ haloing around people.) These faults are minor, and this is still the best DVD version. However, I still detract 1/2 of a star for this.
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