Different Versions
I read in a movie guide that the film was cut down when it was shown in theatres in the U.S.A. Does anyone know which scenes were cut? I want to be sure that I'm not missing anything
shareYes, the comic relief segment 'Golfing Story' and the 'Christmas Ghost' story (the murdered child Francis Kent) were both cut for US release.
sharethe golf one was s hit anyway.
shareI thought the Golf Story was okay on its own merits, it just didn't seem to fit with the rest of the movie (and wasn't in the flashbacks, either).
I guess the filmmakers thought some comic relief was necessary. It wasn't.
I think that the golf story served the same purpose as Desdemona's singing, just before she's killed, in Shakespeare's "Othello". The tension in "Dead of Night" has been slowly escalating- there's a break to enable laughter to ease the assembly's nerves, and then the real horrors begin- I think it was a clever move. God knows why the Americans deleted the Christmas Party sequence- it dealt with a real-life murder case!
shareThe golf story, you'll remember if you were paying attention, was the one story invented by its narrator, while the other stories recounted what the narrator had experienced (except, of course, that 'everything' was in the architect's dream...).
This story, coming between two tense climaxes, mixes the mood in the tradition of Shakespeare; I think the film's enriched by the teasing, slightly cynical naughtiness it provides.
The two 'major' cuts mentioned in the US release are unpardonable. Let's hope its the complete, un-pathetically bowdlerized film now available in the US!
Possible spoiler.
Remember that the golf story is Eliot Foley's ploy to keep Walter Craig from leaving. Craig is afraid (rightly) that if he stays, something horrible will happen. The golf story reassures Craig both by lightening the mood and by apparently providing the omen Craig expects and turning it into a false alarm. Whether Foley is a conscious or unconscious agent of the evil force that eventually possesses Craig or merely acting out of self-interest (needing Craig's services as an architect) is of course up to the viewer to decide.