10 Movies Everyone Remembers For The Stupidest Reasons

Running at over 220 minutes (a length that makes the recent arse-punishing works of Peter Jackson look positively easy), Lawrence Of Arabia isn't lacking for iconic moments, ranging from small and character based - "the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts" - to the downright epic - the match cut and subsequent sand dune fade. They're moments even those who don't know about T. E. Lawrence will be familiar with.

The other thing everyone will be familiar with is the film's extreme aspect ratio: it was screened in panoramic widescreen, with a 2.20:1 image, at the time something pretty mind-boggling. It's what people always cite as the "true" way to watch the film, and while I'm certainly not discrediting watching the movie in the correct format, it's not as big a deal as some would say.

Nowadays, it's just not really all that crazy; the industry standard is 1.85:1, which isn't that far off (remember 4:3 used to be pretty common) and many big blockbusters come in 2.35:1. Lawrence Of Arabia's widescreen was certainly a big deal at the time, but that's not what makes David Lean's masterpiece stand-out in the pantheons of cinema. That's the deft balancing of the gradual breakdown of Lawrence to the carefully constructed desert battles to create something that genuinely feels life-changing.