The newly reconstituted Libertas links to an exceptional essay by Anthony Lane on the great David Lean, whose troika of epics--The Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, and of course, the staggering Lawrence of Arabia made the phrase "the thinking man's blockbuster" not an oxymoron for a brief period in movie history.

Killer passage here:

Lean is talking about the crossing of the Nafud desert, the “sun’s anvil,” by Lawrence and Ali (Omar Sharif), a journey thought to be suicidal. Nonetheless, they and fifty warriors take the risk, on Lawrence’s insistence, because he knows it is the only way to reach the strategic town of Aqaba, then under Turkish control. As for the cut, Sam Spiegel, the bullish producer of “Lawrence,” wants to keep those three shots in, arguing that the audience needs to sense the slog of the night crossing, while Lean feels that any hint of tedium could be a killer. “The film has a certain something which we must be careful not to destroy,” he remarks, as if running his eye over a set of kitchen drawers that he had knocked up in the garden shed. As for a sequence near the start:

I find the map room a goodish scene in a goodish British film. I would, without a second thought, dispense with it but for the match incident. I am not absolutely convinced that the match incident is worth the footage involve

In retrospect, I think we can say it was worth it. One “match incident” leads to another: Lawrence, stuck in Cairo halfway through the First World War, and conscious of a place, not far away, where the fate of nations, not to mention his own private destiny, will be decided, holds a match up close and blows it out. We cut, without ado, to the desert at dawn, and so to the slow explosion of red gold on the horizon’s rim: God lighting the first match of the day. It was a moment that Steven Spielberg saw at the age of fifteen, and which, he says, ignited his determination to make films. If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if something inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spectacle that Lean has conjured, then you might as well give up the movies.

Just so! The cinema of the 1960s is bookended by a pair of fabulous edits: the above referenced "Match Cut" in Lawrence, and Stanley Kubrick's brilliant cut between a prehistoric hominid's tossed bone and an orbiting space weapon four million years later in 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a edit that simply had to have been inspired by Lean's earlier juxtaposition.

After that, it was all downhill in epic cinema, as Lane notes--it's a quite a chasm that separates Lean's Lawrence, Kwai and Zhivago and Kubrick's 2001 with Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. Even Alfred Hitchcock, Lean's fellow British master of the cinema wasn't immune--the man who once cast his films with the likes of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly began the decade with Frenzy, of which James Lileks wrote a few years ago:

One of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen is Hitchcock’s “Frenzy,” because you get the feeling that this is what he always wanted to do, and was finally able to do it because of the new post-60s frankness in cinema. It’s cheap and dank and smegmatic like no other Hitchcock film, and it’s depressing that he didn’t see how altogether smelly it was.

Fortunately, in 1977, George Lucas had this crazy idea to combine epic-style filmmaking with 1930s-era serials, and managed to get cinema, visually at least, off the street again, at least for a time.