I saw “The One” last night, and it clocked in at 80 minutes. Eliminating children’s films and documentaries, and only including major theatrical releases, does anyone know what film had the shortest running time? And the longest, while we’re at it?
And I don’t mean subjective time, because I’m pretty sure “Freddy Got Fingered” lasted a couple of days.
I don’t know about shortest films, but on the long side, I saw La Belle Noiseuse when it came out in theaters. The movie lasted 4 hours, and had a 20 minute intermission at the middle. Great movie, very slow developpement, but very strong emotions. I saw the shorter versions of video and on TV, and it wasn’t as good.
90 minutes to me seems to be the threshold of whehter a movie is “too short”. I know the movie Ladies Man had to have a cheesy (but funny) musical number added to push it over the 90 minute mark.
But in a film like The One, do you really need 90 minutes? 10 more minutes of weird, Computer aided martial arts. It was probably best to just end the film at 80.
Tangent:
Does the running time count from opening credits to beginning of closing credits or until the END of the closing credits?
** watsonwil ** I can’t speak for movies in general, but for “The One” I was keeping an eye on it because I was so surprised at the running length moviefone reported. The 80 minutes included the opening credits but did not include the closing credits.
I’m assuming you mean feature films here. The shortest theatrical release feature film I know of is The Great Train Robbery (1903) which clocked in at a grand total of 12 minutes. This is, of course, shorter than most “shorts”, but at the time of its release, it was the featured attraction. A Trip to the Moon (1902) is a grand total of 14 minutes. These two are the first theatrical feature films with a story, so subsequent films tended to be much longer.
Watsonwil: running time is indeed from the opening credits to the end of the closing credits.
Does Bambi vs. Godzilla count as a “major theatrical release”?
Andy Warhol once made a film called “****” (hoping, I suppose, people would think that was a good review) that ran 24 hours. After it was released and didn’t do very well (go figure), he edited to a 90 minute movie called “Loves of Ondine.”
I’m remembering all this from Guiness Book of World Records which I haven’t read in decades, so I might have some of this wrong.
The Marx Brothers’ early films are quite short: “Duck Soup” is listed at 70 minutes; “Monkey Business,” 74 minutes; “Horse Feathers” is 68 minutes.
W.C. Fields, likewise:
“The Bank Dick” – 74 minutes
“The Man on the Flying Trapeze” – 65
“It’s a Gift” – 73
“You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” – 76
“The Old Fashioned Way” – 66
There were also probably some B pictures that ran under an hour.
The shortest USA movie (kinetoscope, actually) is also the first to be copyrighted in the USA, in 1894:
“Fred Ott’s Sneeze” by Edison.
Runs a whopping two, you heard it, two seconds.
It’s one heck of a critically acclaimed sneeze.
Yay Fred! The first movie star!
8mm
Arthur Dibley’s versions of “Rear Window” and “Finian’s Rainbow” (starring the man from the off-licence) ran only a few seconds IIRC.
I think you have to set some boundaries here - major theatrical main feature in the modern era. I leave you to determine what “modern era” means.
“The Groove Tube”, released in 1974, ran 75 minutes.
(Some of those minutes were extremely funny, though, although some of them missed, too - it was a sketch comedy movie which satirized TV shows. Chevy Chase’s first appearance in a feature film.)
I think the longest feature film ever is Cleopatra, clocking in at 4 hours, 3 minutes.
Cisco, just at a guess I think Kenneth Branagh’s version of Hamlet was longer than Cleopatra.
cmburns, you really do need to define your terms, as yabob suggested. Feature length vs. short? Modern day vs. the early years?
I think to qualify as a feature under Academy rules (and thus qualify for a feature Oscar) a movie has to be at least 70 minutes. But I don’t know how long that rule has held.
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 was only about 75 minutes. I’ve seen independent features that were shorter.
1900, depending on the version, it ran from 4hrs 5 minutes to 5 hrs 18 minutes (the version I’ve seen was the 5 hrs one).
Guinness says the longest is Cure for Insomnia-literally over a day long.
Well, it depends on what you mean by “modern.”
“The Extraordinary Seaman” (1969) ran 80 minutes, but only after about ten minutes of padding.
Woody Allen’s “Zelig” (1983) ran 79 minutes. Quite a few of Allen’s other movies ran less than 90 minutes.
Disney’s “Dumbo” ran 63 minutes.
Branagh’s “Hamlet” was 4 hours, 2 minutes. “Cleopatra” had a special version of 4 hours, 3 minutes, but most prints ran 3 hours 12 minutes. Both were less than “Gettysburg” with the standard version of 4 hours, 21 minutes, with a director’s cut of 4 hours, 31.
They’re also less than the restored version of “Greed” (1999), which ran 4 hours 10 minutes. And, of course, the original director’s cut of “Greed” was eight hours long.
It doesn’t fit the parameters of the OP, but for the record the world’s shortest film is Bite. A car, water, an arm, a poem, titles, and credits. Shot in colour on 16mm, it is only 24 frames long and runs for one second.
Among modern English language films, the longest is “Little Dorrit”, at an even 6 hours.
