Brand new factory sealed 2-tape set of the director's cut in a letterboxed format so that newer TV owners can use their zoom mode and it looks almost as good as the dvd.

One of the most majestic true stories and epic that earned 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture. LAWRENCE of ARABIA is not a simple biography or an adventure movie--although it contains both elements--but a movie that uses the desert as a stage for the flamboyance of a driven, quirky man.

Although it is true that Lawrence was instrumental in enlisting the desert tribes on the British side in the 1914-17 campaign against the Turks, the movie suggests that he acted less out of patriotism than out of a need to reject conventional British society and identify with the wildness and theatricality of the Arabs.

Lawrence is able to unite various desert factions, the movie argues, because (1) he is so obviously an outsider that he cannot even understand, let alone take sides with, the various ancient rivalries; and (2) because he is able to show the Arabs that it is in their self-interest to join the war against the Turks. But he did it partially with mirrors, the movie suggests; one of the key characters is an American journalist (Arthur Kennedy) obviously inspired by Lowell Thomas, who single-handedly retailed the Lawrence myth to the English-language press. The journalist admits he is looking for a hero to write about. Lawrence is happy to play the role.

Along the way he makes allies of such desert leaders as Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), Prince Feisel (Alec Guinness), and Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) both by winning their respect and by appealing to their logic. Although it seems to be a traditional narrative film, it actually has more in common with visual epics like '2001: a Space Odyssey'.

It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it is not a complex story with a lot of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passage, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand.

There is a moment in the film when the hero, a British eccentric named T.E. Lawrence, has survived a suicidal trek across the desert and is within reach of shelter and water--and he turns around and goes back to find a friend who has fallen behind. This sequence builds up to the shot in which the shimmering heat of the desert reluctantaly yields the speck that becomes a man--a shot that is held for a long time before we can even see the tiny figure.

On full screen, this shot doesn't work at all--nothing can be seen. In the stark clarity of this 70mm print zoomed for widescreen televisions, we lean forward and strain to bring a detail out of the waves of heat, and for a moment we experience some of the actual vastness of the desert and its unforgiving harshness.

LAWRENCE of ARABIA would have soon been a lost memory if it had not been for two film restorers named Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten. They discovered the original negative in Columbia's vault, inside crushed and rusting film cans, and they also discovered about 35 minutes of footage that had been trimmed by distributor's from director David Lean's final cut.

To see it on a big screen TV is to appreciate the subtlety of F.A. Young's desert cinamatography--achieved despite blinding heat and the blowing sand, which worked its way into every camera.

Lawrence was one of the last films to be shot in 70mm, a format that provides four times as much film area as 35mm, and results in a brighter, crisper picture on screen. Most 70mm films are shot in 35 and then blown up. Lawrence was actually shot in 70mm, a format that was not to be used again for a while after 1970.