Lawrence, and the Stories About Lawrence

Near the start of Lawrence of Arabia, a man blows out a match and the desert sun rises in its place. The script called for a dissolve, one image melting into the next. But dissolves were laboratory work, done months later, so the editor had simply joined the two shots as a stand-in. Her name was Anne V. Coates. Lean watched the join, asked to see it again, and kept it, two frames shorter. The most imitated cut in cinema was the placeholder.

Somewhere in a Panavision vault in Los Angeles sits a lens that was built for one shot and, the story goes, never used again. Lean wanted a rider to appear out of a mirage: a wobble of heat on the horizon, then a dot, then slowly a man. The factory ground a special lens for it, nearly half a metre of glass, and cameramen still call it the David Lean lens. The story is told more often than it is proved. But the lens is real, and so is the shot: a quarter mile of empty desert, and Omar Sharif riding out of the shimmer.

The desert itself is not all desert. The company began in Jordan and shot until the money and the crew’s health ran out, then packed up and found new dunes in Spain and Morocco. The palaces of Seville played Cairo. When Lawrence walks in from the sand to report to his general, sunburnt and half mad, the British headquarters around him is the courtyard of a four-hundred-year-old Andalusian house.

Peter O’Toole kept a list of what the film cost him: third-degree burns, two sprained ankles, torn ligaments, a broken thumb, two concussions, one camel bite. The thumb made it into the picture. In the train attack, his left hand wears a small brace. The film cast its own casualty report.