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Summertime (1955), based on a play by Arthur Laurents, features Katharine Hepburn as Jane Hudson, a middle-aged American tourist on her first trip to Europe. Shot entirely on location in Venice, and using the dramatic rationale of the character's continual wielding of an 8mm movie camera, the film indulges in breathtaking, scenic views of the historic architecture and aquatic topography of this storied Italian city (indeed, Summertime is as good as any tourist video). Hudson's emotionally-conflicted romance with a married Italian shop owner (Rossano Brazzi) embodies the clash between contrasting American and Italian attitudes toward life and love. Although the characterization is more obvious today as a Fifties cinematic cliche, Hepburn's performance deftly blends poignancy with pride, and the pathos of her romantic yearnings and loneliness is only heightened by the city's sensual beauty and romantic atmosphere. Some of Hepburn's most affecting moments are accented by Lean's compositions and camera movements.
Lean's latter-day reputation as a director of widescreen spectacles was launched with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Although filmed in CinemaScope on exotic locales in Ceylon (doubling for the film's wartime Burma setting), the film is as much a character study dramatizing the battle of wills between its military protagonists as it is an adventure film. Pierre Boulle derived his inspiration for the novel from his own military experience in Indochina and the collaborationist conduct of Vichyites in France during the German occupation. The screenplay adaptation (see Kevin Brownlow's article in this issue) is significantly different and, in dramatic terms, a distinct improvement over Boulle's novel, although both carry their own load of colonialist ideology, most notably in their portrayal of the comically inept Japanese engineers as representatives of a technologically inferior race unable to build an effective bridge without British supervision.
Columbia TriStar's Deluxe Widescreen Presentation laserdisc of The Bridge on the River Kwai is heralded as a "restoration" and the color fidelity and letterboxed widescreen presentation are a welcome improvement over the faded colors and 'pan and scan' version previously available. Although the film was shot in CinemaScope, which boasts an aspect ratio of 2.55:1, the laserdisc utilizes a somewhat modified ratio of only 2.35:1, with some picture information missing on the right side of the frame. Likewise, the film's original soundtrack mix materials no longer existed, so the original dialog and music and effects tracks were remixed to create a new Dolby Stereo Surround soundtrack. In some scenes, however, the sound is so significantly different from the original release version that it raises serious questions about the extent to which 'restoration' crosses over into artistic revisionism.
Most critics agree that Lawrence of Arabia (1962) represents the artistic apogee of Lean's career, a film which consistently reveals Lean working at the peak of his creative powers. Those desolate but awesome desert locales seemed to inspire Lean just as they did T.E. Lawrence, the soldier/scholar on whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom the film is based. In recounting Lawrence's WWI role as a British liaison officer with the Arab guerrilla army fighting the Turks on the Mideastern front, the exciting spectacle of desert warfare is continuously intertwined with international political intrigue and the darker aspects of Lawrence's psychology. Since the film has been extensively-even repeatedly, some would say-covered in these pages, we will not take more space here to lavish praise on what, notwithstanding th e historical and biographical liberties it takes with its subject (see "The Cinematic (Re)Writing of History" n Cineaste, Vol. XVII, No. 2), is widely regarded, in purely cinematic terms, as one of the greatest motion pictures of all time.
Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten collaborated with Lean in 1989 on the restoration of the three-and-a-half hour epic film which, since its 1962 release, had been repeatedly shortened for exhibition purposes, and the theatrical re-release of a director's cut. That now definitive version of this classic film is available in a superb Criterion Collection letterboxed laserdisc, which includes a selection of behind-the-scenes production photos and a booklet detailing the twenty minutes of restored footage and other alterations in the director's cut.
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