On Monday 10 December 1962, at the Odeon Leicester Square, filmgoers first watched Colonel T.E. Lawrence blow out a half-spent match and instantly transform the screen into a blazing red Arabian dawn. It was the royal premiere of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Present were director Lean and producer Sam Spiegel (the team behind the Oscar-winning The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957). Present too were Queen Elizabeth II and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh. Almost not present at all was the film itself.
Two nights earlier, the expensive 70mm print had got scratched. There were only two such prints in existence, and the other was under lock and key at London Airport (today’s Heathrow), standing by to fly off to New York. Lean’s editor, Anne V. Coates, found herself speeding down to the airport to retrieve the New York print in order to save the world premiere.
Coates had spent four months editing the film with Lean, leaving composer Maurice Jarre just six weeks to write and record the orchestral score for the three hour 42-minute film. This schedule left Jarre catching just two or three hours’ sleep a night. After three years in the writing, shooting and editing, the film remained something of an enigma; by the night of the premiere, even Lean himself had only seen the finished version in two halves the wrong way round.
A lucky few had seen it. The day before the premiere, two crew screenings were held. Twice that Sunday, dazed crew members emerged, spellbound and staggering, from the scorching deserts of Arabia into the cold West End air. Among them was Anne Coates. Lean soon telephoned her to check that the film looked and sounded as it should. It was, she assured him, ‘just fantastic’.
On the Monday of the premiere, the royal party travelled through the freezing fog then plaguing London, to be greeted at the Odeon by Spiegel, who escorted them along a line-up of cast and crew dressed in white tie. Spiegel was sorry to see Omar Sharif present; in his determination to maximise press attention on his proud new find Peter O’Toole, Spiegel had wanted the Egyptian star to stay away from the premiere, but Sharif proved unstoppable, and his presence only added to the rapture of the press coverage.
Lean was sporting the CBE which the Queen had given him nine years earlier (while he was filming Hobson’s Choice).
‘Good flick?’ the Duke of Edinburgh asked Lean. Lean politely replied that he hoped so, and, though he realised the Duke had meant no offence, inwardly he bridled at the jovial term ‘flick’. The British Establishment’s attitude toward cinema as rather mindless entertainment was a live issue for Lean. Indeed, his own father had decided not to attend the premiere, finding the journey in to London too much trouble for a film.
The audience took their places and so began the overture’s unsettling, bellicose percussion crashes. When the film began, the audience, accustomed to black and white television and grainy newspaper photographs, were soon ineffably transported by the succession of enthralling 70mm Technicolor images: a shimmering mirage charging through waves of heat to take the form of a rifle-bearing Arab rider; a boy being convincingly, horrifically, swallowed into quicksand; an ocean liner sailing, as plain as day, through desert dunes. Such splendour, in such rich detail, was new.
Also new was the film’s dark approach to biopic. Lawrence told of a young British soldier sent, in the First World War, to unite the Arab tribes in battle against their Turkish invaders. During his unlikely mission, Lawrence becomes something he doesn’t like, his self-image careening from mythical miracle worker to vulnerable, murderous fraud, while his humanity is played like a keyboard by his military and political superiors for their own (not Arabia’s) gain. Not all Spiegel’s publicity was as high-minded as the literate screenplay however; in one instance a real camel was photographed enjoying the film in a cinema in Sutton.
Lean was urged to shorten the film, and after the premiere he reluctantly agreed to cut out around 20 minutes (though the longer version continued to play in Leicester Square). Not until 1989 was the film restored to its original form, and its triumphant rerelease brought a new wave of interest in
Lean’s work.
Critic Dilys Powell thought the horse train ambush scene stood comparison with Homer. Noël Coward, at the premiere’s after-party at Grosvenor House, said that had O’Toole been any prettier, the film would have had to be renamed Florence of Arabia. Lean and Spiegel sensed that they had topped Kwai. By common consent, they appeared to have made a masterpiece. Lawrence went on to become the number two box office hit of its year (pipped by the gimmicky How the West Was Won). It won seven Academy Awards and became a regular fixture in critics’ lists of the world’s ‘greatest films’.
Good flick.
Patrick Fahy, bfi.org.uk
Lawrence of Arabia
Directed by: David Lean
©/Production Company: Horizon Pictures (G.B.)
Produced by: Sam Spiegel
Production Manager: John Palmer
Location Manager: Douglas Twiddy
2nd Unit Directors: Andre Smagghe, Noel Howard
Assistant Director: Roy Stevens
Continuity: Barbara Cole
Casting Director: Maude Spector
Screenplay by: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Director of Photography: F.A. Young
2nd Unit Photography: Skeets Kelly, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Newbrook
Camera Operator: Ernest Day
Chief Electrician: Archie Dansie
Special Effects: Cliff Richardson
Editor: Anne V. Coates
Production Designed by: John Box
Art Director: John Stoll
Assistant Art Directors: R. Rossotti, G. Richardson, T. Marsh, A. Rimmington
Set Dresser: Dario Simoni
Property Master: Eddie Fowlie
Construction Manager: Peter Dukelow
Construction Assistant: Fred Bennett
Costume Designer: Phyllis Dalton
Wardrobe: John Wilson-Apperson
Make-up: Charles Parker
Hairdresser: A.G. Scott
Music Composed by: Maurice Jarre
Played by: The London Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Sir Adrian Boult
Orchestrations: Gérard Schurmann
Sound Recording: Paddy Cunningham
Sound Dubbing: John Cox
Sound Editor: Winston Ryder
Studio: Shepperton Studios
1989 Restoration
Reconstructed and Restored by: Robert A. Harris
Restoration Produced by: Robert A. Harris, Jim Painten
Editorial Consultant: Anne V. Coates
Sound Consultant: Richard L. Anderson
Re-recording Mixer: Gregg Landaker
uncredited
Location Manager: Eva Monley
Production Consultant: André de Toth
Production Representative: Mildred McCargar
Research: Marie Budberg
1st Assistant Director: Ted Sturgis
2nd Assistant Directors: David Tringham, Bryan Coates, Michael Stevenson
Spanish Shoot Assistant Director: Otto Plaschkes
2nd Unit Continuity: Lee Turner
Assistant Editor: Howard Kent
Art Director: Ben Rogers
Assistant Art Directors: Wallis Smith, Charles Bishop
Production Buyers: John Higgs, Edward Rodrigo
Music Co-ordinator: Morris W. Stoloff
Foley Artist: Beryl Mortimer
Principal Military Adviser: L.E.M. Perowne
Military Adviser: Colonel R.C. Hutt
Liaison Officer: Wing Commander Jock Dalgleish
Aviation Stunts: John Crewdson
Stunt Double – Peter O’Toole: John Sullivan
Dialogue Coach: Hugh Miller
Unit Publicist: John Woolfenden
Moroccan Studios: Andromeda Studios (Ouarzazate, Morocco)
Cast
Alec Guinness (Prince Feisal)
Anthony Quinn (Auda Abu Tayi)
Jack Hawkins (General Allenby)
José Ferrer (Turkish Bey)
Anthony Quayle (Colonel Harry Brighton)
Claude Rains (Mr Dryden)
Arthur Kennedy (Jackson E. Bentley)
I.S. Johar (Gasim)
Gamil Ratib (Majid)
Zia Mohyeddin (Tafas)
Donald Wolfit (General Murray)
Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish)
Peter O’Toole (T.E. Lawrence)
Michel Ray (Farraj)
John Dimech (Daud)
Howard Marion Crawford (medical officer)
Jack Gwillim (club secretary)
Hugh Miller (R.A.M.C. colonel)
uncredited
Noel Howlett (vicar at St Paul’s)
Jack Hedley (reporter at St Paul’s)
Ian MacNaughton (Corporal Hartley, map room)
Harry Fowler (Corporal William Potter, map room)
John Barry (MP, map room)
Bruce Beeby (captain, officers’ club)
Patrick Kavanagh (staff-major, Murray’s aide)
Norman Rossington (Corporal Jenkins)
Henry Oscar (Selim, Koran reciter)
John Ruddock (elder Harith)
Kamal Rashid (Auda’s son)
David Lean (voice of motorcyclist, Suez Canal)
Roy Stevens (driver, Cairo)
Fred Bennett (sergeant, Cairo)
Peter Dukelow (driver, Cairo)
Cyril Shaps (bartender, officers’ club)
Daniel Moynihan (officer, officers’ club)
Fernando Sancho (Turkish sergeant)
Clive Morton (artillery general, field briefing)
John Robinson (infantry general, field briefing)
Basil Dignam (cavalry general, field briefing)
Mohammed Habachi (Talal)
Cher Kaoiu (Khitan of Aleppo)
Kenneth Fortescue (Tracey, Allenby’s ADC)
Peter Burton (sheik, Arab Council)
Bryan Pringle (driver, end sequence)
Stuart Saunders (regimental sergeant major)
Barry Warren (2 British officers/Arab sheik)
Robert Bolt (soldier with pipe, officer’s club)
John Bennett
UK 1962©
222 mins + play-in music and interval
Digital 4K
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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