When he's riding In the raft inspecting the bridge work, Alec Guinness says "We can teach these ----- a lesson in western methods and effiency that will put them to shame." Does anyone know what was cut out? My guess is it included a racial slur that was common at the time but unacceptable now. One of the muted words sounded like "barbarians".
shareNot sure but I think he said "people".
shareYes, I noticed that too. He did say "barbarians." It was edited out by muting the spoken word, so you didn't really hear Alec Guinness say it, but I believe the Closed Captioning for the latest TCM broadcast did in fact include the word "barbarians." Even without the CC on, it wasn't too hard to lip-read what he really said.
I was looking on a subtitles site and noticed that most Closed Caption files for this film omit the word entirely, and even condense his line further. They have Guinness saying it like this:
"We'll teach them a lesson in Western efficiency that will put them to shame."
The full line as spoken by Guinness was, "We can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency that will put them to shame. We'll show them what the British soldier is capable of doing."
Don't mess with me, man! I know karate, judo, ju-jitsu..... and several other Japanese words.
I have a copy of the script. I can confirm that the line as written was: "We can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency that can put them to shame. We'll show them what the English soldier is capable of doing!"
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