THE other day I obtained a remastered copy of Lawrence of Arabia, a film I have not watched properly for several years.

I will not need to wax lyrical here because of course every Echo reader is possessed of excellent taste and must have seen and marvelled at David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece.

Every moment of that near four-hour experience - the abrupt segue from burning match to fiery desert sun, the humming tension as Omar Sharif makes his entrance out of a seething mirage, the black-robed women ranged along the cliff top ululating as the column rides out through the wadi, Peter O’Toole’s somewhat over enthusiastically applied guy-liner - is seared into the mind of the viewer, never to be forgotten.

It is a complete experience for all the senses which, despite being made more than half a century ago, looks and almost sounds as if it could have been made this very year.

The film’s release date is actually now closer in time to the events of the First World War than it is to the present day.

Sadly though, this film could never be made now.

Lawrence is four hours long, opens with five minutes of orchestral music to a black screen, has no female characters, no love interest and only a handful of action sequences, however thrilling these may be.

The film poses a sequence of moral questions and invites the audience to supply its own answers, and we always see the consequences to any action.

Its hero was very likely gay, although both in the real Lawrence’s day and in 1962 such acts were illegal and as such the evidence is scant. Lean’s film makes subtle and elegant nods to its protagonist’s sexuality.

How many action films even now would have a gay male lead at all, and having done so, resist the temptation to make this, essentially, the plot.

Were Lawrence of Arabia made now it would barely look half as good. We couldn’t have Oscar-winning Freddie Young’s long slow widescreen pan through the wadi rum, since each scene would need to be edited into a series of high speed close-ups on our hero’s face, not to mention his gadgets and arsenal of guns.

Meanwhile, why hire thousands of Arab riders to charge through clouds of billowing dust when 10 will suffice, coupled with a green screen and further speedy editing, so no one can see how appallingly bad the computer imaging looks.

These old epics are complete epics. They are epic not just in their subject matter but in their conception and the process of their creation.

Lawrence of Arabia takes just the right amount of time in each scene to build its simple story and sparse script into a monumental edifice, with the music and the landscape making up the mortar.

It thrilled and inspired other directors who went on to create their own epics, such as Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott and Stephen Spielberg.

In the early 1980s Sir Richard Attenborough hired more than 300,000 extras for the funeral scene in Gandhi.

During the filming of the terrific 1970 historical epic Waterloo, Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk was in command of nearly 20,000 soldiers from the Red Army, who were put through authentic Napoleonic-era drills in a re-creation of Wellington’s famous battlefield somewhere suitably remote in the steppes.

In demented 1982 flick Fitzcarraldo, combining opera, the rainforest and Klaus Kinski’s pinball eyes in an unforgettable fable, director Werner Herzog decided to go one better than the film’s historical source, rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald, who dismantled a steam ship in one tributary of the Amazon, hauled it over an isthmus and reassembled it in a parallel tributary.

Herzog’s hero, aided by his cast, crew and hundreds of hired natives, pulled the entire ship intact over the mountain.

Film-makers these days seem to think their audience is as cynical as they are. We may have a long wait for another Lawrence.