For lack of money I bought the Vintage Collection DVD instead of Criterion's version of this film.
It says on the back of the cover that it runs for 154 minutes but it didn't run much longer than 2 hours...
Any comments? What did I miss? The length given here on imdb is also 154 minutes so I became somewhat surprised and I guess, also, disappointed...
When I first saw this film back in 1972, it certainly ran 154 minutes or close to it. However, the striptease scene contained several blatant jump cuts that removed any glimpse of Carolyn Seymour's naughty bits. Obviously the distributor had demanded a PG rating, but the film didn't seem particularly damaged by the excisions, since the laughably blatant method that the filmmakers chose to "censor" themselves fit right into the whole satirical vaudeville quality of the piece.
I saw the movie many times over the next fifteen years, and it always seemed to be the same length with nothing missing....
Then, sometime in the late 1980s, the film was suddenly rereleased into theaters in "the Original Uncut Version." I raced to see it, eager to see what I'd been missing all these years...
...only to find that this "uncut" version was at least twenty minutes SHORTER than the version I'd always seen before!
So, by what pretzel logic did the ads dare to call this "uncut"? Carolyn Seymour's naughty bits were back in. Big wup.
And what was missing? I can't quite remember now. Some of Alestair Sim's dithering, some minor scenes of the affair between Lady Gurney and Dr. Herder... and, if I remember correctly, the scene where Jack courts Grace by billing and cooing like a bird. That can't add up to twenty minutes, so there must have been a lot of other snips. All I remember is how outraged I was at being lied to.
Maybe that late '80s version is the one that ended up on your DVD.
But I believe the Criterion version IS complete, including the naughty bits.
I was exposed of her breasts in the striptease-scene. That and the two murders seem to be enough for a "15-rating".
Haha.. I found your story of how the uncut version was shorter than the "original" very humouros- it seems pretty weird.
It said something about a urinating fox in another message board. Sadly, that I didn't see in my version of the film.
Lady Gurner and the doctors affair weren't given much attention either. The bird-scene was there though, and it was a very funny one in my opinion.
I'm pretty outraged myself, being lied to by the back-cover. If it had said 124 minutes I would've known in advance - pretty clumpsy to write a totally different running time.
Thanks for your answer - it actually did clear things up a bit - I really enjoyed the film - so maybe I'll end up buying the Criterion version - the problem is that they are pretty expensive here in Sweden - I'll just have to hope that the naughty bits add up.
Not actually very much naughty to the bits. The British Amazon site has quite a few comments about the bastardized version.
What I had in mind was boxing the compass.share
They also removed the fight between Jack and the doctor, which helps to explain why Dr. Herder goes off the deep end. It's a marvelous scene, too. The Criterion DVD is expensive, but very well worth it (you also get commentary from the three Peters: Medak, O'Toole, and Barnes). The first time I saw this movie was the bastardized version, which I liked, but the proper Criterion version is much better.
Yours is a capricious nature. Do you always blow hot and cold like this?
I rented it from NetFlix and it seems to have been the Criterion version because it has the commentary. I lucked out. Sometimes you get inferior versions from NetFlix.
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