IMDB lists runtimes for Once Upon A Time in America (1984) as “229 min | 139 min (re-cut) | 251 min (extended cut).” I’ve seen the first two, and while I didn’t really care for either of them, the “studio butchered” re-cut which reordered the film’s sequences in straight chronological fashion made for a better film to me. Perhaps it just meant I didn’t have to spend as much time with characters I did not care for.
1776 as released by the studio is better than the director’s cut, which includes a couple of scenes from the stage version which drag on and on.
A while ago I saw the “Director’s Cut” of Aliens, and it was significantly less good than the original release.
It has scenes of the colony sending someone out to the ship, and them getting face-huggered. The problem is that while it’s a cool image to see the ship again, and see the person show up with a face-hugger, it undercuts the mystery at the beginning, and is a little to obvious a tell about something that is legitimately surprising later in the movie.
It also has some other scenes that are pretty forgettable, and weren’t necessary.
Amadeus as released in theaters is nearly perfect. The director’s cut adds several extraneous subplots, and a horribly uncomfortable scene with Salieri sexually harassing Mozart’s wife (which, arguably, pays off in that it helps explain how incredibly hostile she is towards him when Mozart is dying… but it just seems out of place).
Including that part where Private Hudson is bragging about all of the hardware that the Colonial Marines have just before they drop in on the planet. God bless Bill Paxton but it was a plodding monologue and the movie screeched to a halt right there.
There are many versions of Blade Runner, and that seems to be true of many movies (not to mention that projectionists routinely removed frames for one reason or another).
One of my friends saw a first-release copy in London, more violent and without any voice-over. Presumably shipped before the final American theatre release was cut.
But the main thing I noticed about the commercially re-released “Directors Cut” (which still did have intrusive stupid voice-over) was that there were scenes where the extra couple of seconds just slowed down the action, and didn’t add anything to the development.
There is no ambiguity, at least not in the original theatrical cuts (American and European, the latter lacking the voiceover and with some additional brutality); Deckard is clearly not a replicant; he is easily physically bested by every Nexus 6 replicant he comes across, and is saved by luck (or in the case of Pris, because she was too eager to toy with him, giving him time to grab his pistol and get off a lucky shot). Even if we assume he is an older model, it does not make sense that he has received memory implants as Rachael has, since it is revealed that this a new and experimental feature by Tyrell himself. (“Commerce…is our goal at Tyrell. ‘More human than human’ is our motto. Rachael is an experiment…nothing more.”)
The theme of Blade Runner is, of course, that despite being constructed and not having memories of the past, the replicants are sophisticated and fully sapient beings capable of the same human emotions including compassion, fear, and empathy even if they have not been socialized to understand or appreciate them or deal with the mortality of their all-too-short lives. Rachael’s story about the spider being eaten by her children is one of those formative memories through which children learn of mortality and the ‘unfairness’ of nature, and begin to realize that they world does not exist for their personal benefit. That Deckard is not a replicant does not matter to Batty in the end; he wants to save any life, even the life of a human sent to ‘retire’ him. The replicants are every bit as ‘human’ as humans, and maybe even superior. (It is interesting that the opening crawl refers to the replicants as the latest “evolution” in robotics, “superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them…”. The language is suggestive that the replicants are actually the next stage in self-directed human evolution.)
Anyway, getting back to the question of the o.p., The Big Sleep (the Bogart and Bacall film, not the later one starring a clearly getting-paid-for-this-shit Robert Mitchum) was originally cut in 1945, but then recut by the studio for a 1946 release that increased the screentime between Bogart and the ingenue Bacall. Although Bacall was not really mature in her acting at that point, their budding love affair was clear on screen and had already drawn appeal to Have And Have Not, released in 1944. Critics argue that the story—already somewhat muddled in the book—was made even less clear by the edits and particular the elimination of an exposition dump in the middle of the film, but a comparison of the two cuts (the 1945 cut was released to the public in a 1997 restoration) shows that the studio edit flows better and the dialogue is snappier.
Of course, the definitive adaptation of that novel is the little known Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. Fortunately this obscure film was rescued from destruction and restored through an arduous and complex process and can be found today at historical film festivals and the back catalogue of certain video purveyors.
Stranger
I disagree, but it’s clearly a matter of personal taste. I very much prefer the stage play of Amadeus, where Salieri continually breaks the fourth wall, talking to the theater audience (not the character of the Priest). I really felt I got inside his madness. With the film, I feel as I’m looking at it from the outside, and it’s not as sympathetic.
The scene where Salieri tries – clumsily and unsuccessfully-- to seduce Mozart’s wife is in the play, and, if you follow the logic of Salieri in the play, is absolutely necessary, and at that point. Salieri is waging war with God for His (God’s) breaking his bargain with Salieri. He’s been a good and faithful servant of God, devoting his life to Good Works and to Music, while the undeserving Mozart gets all the talent. So Salieri wages war with God with Mozart and his life as the battlefield, and one step in that is to break his vow of chastity with the most appropriate target – Mozart’s own wife. That he’s clumsy makes perfect sense – he hasn’t sinned before. When he fails with Mozart’s wife, he goes instead for Mozart’s mistress (who, Salieri has already deduced, went to bed with Mozart in exchange for that showy part in the opera), who readily agrees.
I saw the Final Cut prior to watching 2049. It’s definitely the superior version. The argument that Deckard was a replicant comes from the fact he’s been getting weird flashes of a running unicorn and at the end of the film, Gaff leaves Deckard a little paper unicorn which he finds on his way out the door.
It’s still ambiguous, just strongly implied that Gaff knows about that unicorn in Deckard’s head.
From an interview with Ridley Scott on the theatrical cut:
Scott doesn’t seem to feel a need to answer the question, just explore it as a theme.
From my POV, the meaning of the film doesn’t change whether he is one or not. I do prefer the ambiguity, though.
The Army didn’t want to show scenes of Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine) physically beating up Maggio (Frank Sinatra) in “From Here to Eternity”. They could say it happened. In the end, director Fred Zinneman said the Army way was better. What wasn’t better was the Army insisted the Captain Holmes be forced to resign for his actions. In the novel, Holmes is promoted to Major.
I think the studio insisting that two very likely suspects driving the same color car (different make though) and having a similar caliber pistol being arrested works better in “My Cousin Vinny”. Vinny and his expert witness Mona did cast enough doubt to get an acquittal but he was working under a deadline fearing Judge Herman Munster would find out the truth about his credentials.
The Big Sleep is a detective movie in which it doesn’t matter who the guilty party is, or even what crimes were committed. It’s brilliant.
I could have sworn I was keeping a list of these, but I can’t find a trace of it or remember any, right off the bat.*
For an honorable mention, though, I’d go for a television example—the story is that when he was developing “Firefly,” Joss Whedon only created Inara because Fox insisted he add a “space hooker” character to the cast for some sex appeal.
*Possibly with the exception of the 1987 “Masters of the Universe” film, which I’m oddly fond of. Mattel, the IP owner, had some strict demands over what their prized title character wasn’t allowed to do onscreen, including kill anyone—but when Cannon Films apparently reneged on a funding agreement, leaving the toy company to pay for the movie themselves, they told the director “Have him kill people. Blood, guts, gore, sex, do whatever you have to. Just make sure this movie’s a hit.”
I’m not sure if that’s respect for that desperate, mercenary instinct, or a sense of petty satisfaction born from witnessing years of Broadcast Standards and Practices’ content restrictions imposed on kids’ entertainment like He-Man itself. But I’ve got it, either way.
The Italian original of Cinema Paradiso included a sequence towards the end in which the male lead finds, years later, the long-missing woman with whom he’d fallen in love as a youth. They have a somewhat tawdry, sad middle-aged affair. The American distributors wisely cut that sequence when it was shown in the U.S. - made for a much better movie.
True Romance had been one of my favorite movies, I had watched it many times over on VHS, but at this point I haven’t watched it in many years. The VHS release was the last opportunity to see the theatrical cut. Only the Director’s Cut has been available since… and I hate it!
It’s amazing what a difference a less than two second change can make but in that two seconds the movie is completely ruined. The “ruined” version better matches not only director Tony Scott’s original intention but also matches Tarantino’s script but they were both wrong and the suits were right.
In the theatrical release, during the big shoot-out scene near the end of the movie, Clarence is shot and falls, possibly dead, to the floor. Alabama cries the cry of ultimate loss and suffering as she cradles her Great True Love dead in her arms. The shoot-out and chaos continue around them but none of it means anything. She holds her Love to her breast wanting only to will him back to life or follow him into the void for the Love that they forged together brought into existence a whole new world for her, her entire world could thereafter only be a world with Clarence. Nothing in this moment matters, nothing exists for her outside the bubble in which she is cradling her True Love dead in her arms.
The last man standing at the end of the bloody shoot-out, a battle devoid of meaning on both sides, is Officer Dimes. As Dimes taunts a goon crying for an ambulance, a random nameless henchman weakly raises his gun and shoots Dimes dead. The random henchman dies immediately after pulling the trigger. It is fitting that Dimes should be killed by a nameless random dying henchman because his death, as was his existence, is meaningless. All is meaningless except for True Love and True Love has throughout all these horrors been protected in an embrace.
Clarence wakes up. Had he only been unconscious all this time? Or had Alabama, focused only on him, completely detached from the chaos surrounding them, had she brought him back to life with the power of True Love? Cut to their happy ending, a long life together loving one another.
In the Director’s Cut…
All transpires as I laid it out above except…
The last man standing at the end of the bloody shoot-out, a battle devoid of meaning on both sides, is Officer Dimes. As Dimes taunts a goon crying for an ambulance, Alabama looks up from cradling Clarence, she picks up a gun, screams at Dimes, “Fuck You!!!” pulls the trigger and kills Dimes. Then Clarence wakes up, happy ending, blah blah blah.
COMPLETELY FUCKING RUINS THE MOVIE!
It is so much better to have Alabama completely focused on Clarence, insulated from the shoot-out, for the entire rest of the world to be devoid of meaning.
It’s less than two seconds but it has rendered what had been one of my favorite movies completely unwatchable.
A fine post. Sorry - your point makes sense as you tell it.
The original cut of the The Professional (now, more commonly known as Leon) was better, IMHO.
Leon added more material about Leon and Matilda’s relationship and more material about her training. The fact that she’s trying to seduce him and that he’s too stupid to really understand it or resist it, despite her age, is interesting/creepy and I presume that the studio cut it because of the pedophilic angle. And while I don’t know that I agree with that choice (it removes an interesting aspect of Matilda’s mindset…though it also makes it a lot more appealing to a wider audience), it had the secondary effect of removing a bunch of lighthearted and funny stuff that didn’t match the tone of the rest of the movie.
As a fan of the original cut, it’s fun to see more details about how he was training her and what their relationship looked like. But if you were seeing the movie for the first time, the fuller version is more aimless, going in too many directions, and jumping around in tone and topic.
Erich von Stroheim’s Greed was originally about 8 hours long. That probably exceeded the attention span of even the most hardcore movie fan.
The Director’s Cut is a mixed bag for me. I’m fine with the minor one or two line changes and Hudson’s nonsense. I like the sentry guns both for being pretty cool and because they answer the question of how a whole colony’s worth of aliens gets reduced to a relative handful. I can take or leave Ripley’s daughter and the extra Ripley/Newt stuff. But the longest part, Newt’s family and the middle-management bureaucrats on LV-426, deserved to get cut and doesn’t add anything to viewing the film. It really just bogs down and we don’t need to know the exact details on how the aliens infected the colony.
What I need is an edition where I can set up check boxes of what extra content I want included.
Can I nominate Kubrick’s “The Shining” for an honorary director’s meddling award?
Apparently due to bad opening reception he cut 25 minutes from the European print, still the only version you can buy in the UK.
The US version is significantly better despite the extra length, in particular lots of scenes of Halloran making his way to the hotel at the end.
I seriously disagree. The only scenes added are the number “Cool Considerate Men”, which was cut at Richard Nixon’s request (!) because it spoke ill of Conservatives, and an incredibly brief scene when a fire engine passes by. Neither can be said to “drag on and on” – one’s too short, and the other’s a musical number.
There’s one other change – as released, the opening credits ran over John Adams’ descent of the steps in Independence Hall. The restored version took that out and stuck them at the end.