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chris kilby -> What Are Your Movie "Holy Grails"? (15/9/2012 10:38:59 AM)
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With the belated appearance on disc of restored “Director’s Cuts” of everything from Spartacus to Lawrence of Arabia, Blade Runner to Metropolis and even Superman II and Highlander II (not great by any means, but a surprisingly vast improvement – re-edited from top to bottom, they even shot new material and re-did all the effects. And actually apologised for the original release on the extensive DVD extras – they shoulda called it The Mea Culpa Cut!) what are the famous lost (or notoriously mutilated) movies you’d like to see re-discovered and finally released on disc?
Top of my list’s gotta be Orson Welles’ sophomore film, The Magnificent Ambersons – easily as good as if not better than Citizen Kane. Until the horribly truncated last real, that is, notoriously butchered by RKO in Welles’ absence. If you thought the original ending of Blade Runner was obviously tacked-on, just wait till you see this!
The Keep is long-overdue a proper release in Director’s Cut form. Or any form. Famously Michael Mann’s “lost” film, it only ever received a cursory cinematic release in massively truncated/incoherent form and to this day is notoriously hard (and expensive) to track down. On VHS – it’s never been released on disc. (I think there may be complicated rights and/or music clearance issues.) To the best of my knowledge, The Keep’s only ever been shown on British network television once (as part of BBC2’s “Lost” season years ago – I still have a knackered copy on tape somewhere).
Horribly dated now in a lot of respects – the lighting is very MTV, the Tangerine Dream synth score couldn’t be more 80s if it wore leg warmers and a spangly boob tube (not that that that did Drive any harm!) and it is impossible to watch the ending without thinking about The Snowman the same way it’s impossible to listen to The William Tell Overture without thinking about The Lone Ranger! But it’s still very atmospheric and uncharacteristically dreamlike for the usually gritty if stylised Mann, it has a superb cast of mostly Brit character actors (it was shot in Wales!) and being Mann’s sole horror movie (albeit a very arty and pretentious one) it’s a real curio. Once seen, never forgotten. It also anticipated the current wave of Nazi-themed horror by decades!
And there’s a couple of guilty, well, not pleasures exactly which will probably never see the light of day. Especially now. I’d really like to see Director’s Cuts of The Avengers (no, the Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman one) and Judge Dredd (yes, the Stallone one). Both massively flawed to say the least, fearing they had disasters on their hands, both films were slashed within an inch of their lives by panicking studios just prior to release in order to cut their losses (90 minute running times meant an extra performance at each screen showing them before the expected bad word-of-mouth killed them stone dead) thus guaranteeing they'd be disasters. Genius.
The Avengers, especially, was cut to the point of incoherence – virtually nothing in the really rather spiffing “How now brown cow?” trailer (including the pre-credits action set-piece which would have made more sense of the whole “Evil” Emma Peel subplot) made it into the theatrical release which has gotta be some kind of record as well as a great source of frustration for years.
I don’t know if Directors’ Cuts of Judge Dredd or The Avengers would be any better (both films are seriously flawed although I do have a soft spot for them – in the back of my skull!) but they couldn’t be any worse. Could they…? Even Alien 3’s restored “Assembly Cut” is a vast improvement on its hopelessly compromised theatrical cut. Plus the Director’s Cut of Judge Dredd would come with the added bonus if not selling point of Rob Schneider getting blown away – I’d buy that for a dollar! Hard to believe now, but he was saved by bad test screening results, thus proving what a blight they are on the cinema!
Longer versions aren’t necessarily better, BTW. Usually they’re not. While it was nice to finally see the “French Plantation Sequence,” Apocalypse Now Redux wasn’t as good as the tighter Apocalypse Now. But while the legendary five hour cut of Apocalypse Now is just that – a myth (or at the very least, a rough cut) I’d still like to see the longer original release print of 2001 which was cut by Kubrick himself before it was swiftly re-released as “The Ultimate Trip.”
By a similar token, it was great to finally see the 90 minute, studio-sanctioned “Love Conquers All” cut of Brazil finally emerge on Criterion just so we could see for ourselves the ignominious fate Terry Gilliam rescued his masterpiece from. It’s like a child clumsily drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa with a magic marker. Or a giant cock and balls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!
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