I really do hate it when the TV people decide to cut out a scene from a film, especially one of my favourite films. On the other hand, it’s always interesting to see a director’s cut of a film when previously cut scenes have been added back. I think that explains the premise of this week’s post but stay with me and hopefully it should soon become clear.
I’m going to kick off with the film Young Winston. I’m a great fan of Winston Churchill and I’m not amused about current plans to remove him from UK banknotes, but getting back to the film, Young Winston is a wonderful dramatisation of Churchill’s own book, My Early Life. I read the book many years ago and first saw this film at the cinema where I greatly enjoyed it and I remember it coming to television some years later.
The film details Winston’s early life and we see him at school and later in the army and the rather cool relationship he had with his parents is gradually revealed. The film finishes with a poignant dream sequence which I remember reading somewhere was based on something Churchill either said or wrote. In the dream, a much older Winston meets his father, Randolph but Randolph is not the unwell man of his later years but restored to full health. He asks Winston about great events and Churchill answers telling of the two World Wars. ‘Did Joe Chamberlain ever become Prime Minister?’ asks Randolph. ‘No,’ answers Winston, ‘but one of his sons did, Neville’.
Winston mentions that he has resigned his commission in the army. Randolph looks about at the many paintings and asks Winston if this is what he does. Winston answers that painting occupies much of his time. Randolph thinks for a moment and then tells Winston to ‘do the best you can’ and we see the sleeping Churchill smile at the thought.
I’ve always liked this final sequence but when I bought my VHS copy back in the 1980s the scene was omitted. Likewise, every time in recent years, since I first watched the film on television, this scene has always been removed. I’d love to know why. Perhaps the producers thought the film too long or perhaps preferred the new ending in which Winston talks briefly about his marriage and living ‘happily ever after’. After a search on the internet, I came across a post which claimed that Carl Foreman, who wrote and produced the film, found that US audiences occasioned so little reaction to the scene that he promptly had it cut. What reaction was he expecting to see I wonder?
Another film I’ve always rather enjoyed is Notting Hill. It was written by Richard Curtis and stars Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Grant plays William Thacker who owns and runs a bookshop in Notting Hill. Enter film star Anna Scott played by Julia Roberts who picks up some books in the bookshop. Not long after this she collides with Thacker in the street and he spills coffee all over her. They return to Thacker’s home only a few doors away where she cleans up and later Anna invites William to her hotel and consequently a romance ensues.
Thacker shares his home with Spike, a slightly oddball Welshman. In fact, Thacker describes Spike to a hotel receptionist by asking him to envisage the stupidest man he has ever met and then double it.
Anyway, I was watching this film not long ago. It was late evening and the film began at 9pm I think which of course is watershed time and we are all aware of things like bad language which of course is something which can be broadcast after 9.
In a really funny sequence Spike asks William to choose which T-shirt he should wear on a date and models about three shirts. William vetos them all due to rude or sexist phrases. He chooses a last one which says ‘LOVE’ on the front. Happy, Spike turns away but as he leaves we see written on the back of the t-shirt the phrase ‘fancy a f#ck?’ Now I’ve always found that particular sequence rather funny but this time it was cut out. Why? It was after 9 (well, I think it was anyway) and although rude, it kills me every time. Do TV channels cut down films to fit their available time slots? If I was a director and that was my film I would be very upset indeed if some unknown TV editor had randomly chopped up my film just to fit it in a particular broadcast slot.
Let’s go the other way with this next example. I must have first seen Aliens on TV. I’ve always thought that it was as good, if not better than the Ridley Scott’s original Alien. In Aliens, astronaut Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver is adrift in a space lifeboat. I do love the opening of the film: The music gradually fades in as we come across a lifeboat drifting through space. Yes, the lifeboat holds astronaut Ripley, sleeping soundly in suspended animation after her adventures in the previous movie, Alien.
Later we see Ripley facing a committee where it is revealed that the spacecraft Nostromo, which Ripley self-destructed, caused a loss of over 64 million adjusted dollars. Another committee member advises that LV426, the planet where the Nostromo landed was ‘a rock’ with no indigenous life forms. I can feel Ripley’s frustration when she says, “Did IQ levels just drop while I was away?” She tries to tell the group about a derelict alien vessel containing alien eggs but the meeting ends and Ripley’s story is not believed.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Ripley joins a motley crew of space commandos on a mission to help the colonists of LV426 with whom all contact has been lost. On the planet the soldiers gain entry to the colonist’s base camp and we meet one of the survivors, a young girl nicknamed Newt, to which Ripley goes to extraordinary lengths to rescue from the aliens.
Why is she so keen to rescue Newt? Well, that is explained in a later director’s cut of the film in which it is revealed that Ripley’s daughter has died of old age. I know that sounds confusing but remember, Ripley has been in suspended animation for 75 years. She is still saddened by the news of her daughter which she has only just been told about and it is this loss that spurs her on to help Newt.
Now for me, this director’s cut is a much better version of the film and in fact, every time I have seen Aliens on TV recently, it is this new version which seems to be the accepted ‘cut’.
Here’s one final example. Spartacus was made in 1960. It was produced by and starred Kirk Douglas and was directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom Douglas brought in to direct after becoming disenchanted with the original director, Anthony Mann. The film is the story of a revolution, or at least a near revolution in ancient Rome. Spartacus, played by Kirk Douglas, is a slave who starts off a rebellion in a gladiator camp; the rebellion gets bigger and bigger until it threatens the entire fabric of ancient Rome. Laurence Olivier played the part of the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus who uses the rebellion to further his own dreams of dictatorship. Peter Ustinov plays the gladiator school owner and Charles Laughton plays Roman senator Gracchus. Ustinov, Olivier, and Laughton are a wonderful trio, their performances superb, so much so that other actors who share the screen with them seem to pale in comparison.
Tony Curtis plays another slave who calls out famously; ‘I am Spartacus’ towards the end of the film, heralding a chorus of similar calls.
The film was restored in 1991 and 37 minutes of cuts were restored to the film including a scene where Anthony Hopkins had to dub the sound for a sequence involving Laurence Olivier who had died two years previously.
Which film cuts do you love, or hate?
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As regular readers will know, I am a great fan of classic cinema and I do love making these posts in which I try to tell a story by linking together various films, actors and directors. My last connections post ran a lateral course linking the film 
Usually in these Film Connections posts, I tell a sort of circular story starting with an actor or director and then find a link to another film or personality and then another until I work back to whoever I started with. This week I decided to be a little more lateral and try and link Pygmalion, the 1938 film to the first Star Trek film from 1979. I like to be different now and again but not only that (confession alert) I struggled to find a link back to Pygmalion. (Actually I did find a very tenuous link and I’m not sure as I write this that I’m going to share it but we’ll see how things go).
Interesting fact #1: Wendy Hiller speaks a controversial line in the film – “not bloody likely” making her the first person to swear in a British film. It’s a controversy that’s almost laughable today considering the language used in modern films. Have you ever wondered who the first person to use the F word in a British film was? (Answer at the end of the post).
In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, 
I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, 
Back in the 1970s my Saturday ritual involved getting the bus into town and scouring book and record shops for, yes, you’ve guessed it, books and records. One day back then I was flipping through the posters in one particular shop. The posters were the music stars of the 70s; Elton John, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and so on but one was a picture of a really good looking guy with a fifties combed back hair style. In some pictures he was dressed like a cowboy and in others in a red jacket and denim jeans. The guy behind the counter must have seen me wondering who the guy was and he told me he was a film star called James Dean. He handed me a paperback book about the actor and I took it home and read it and very soon I was trying to find out everything I could about him.
The paperback book I bought that day in the record shop in the 1970’s was probably James Dean: A Short Life by Venable Herndon. It wasn’t a great book but an interesting introduction to Dean and who he was. It detailed his struggle for acting roles, TV work in New York, his apartment at 19 West Sixty-Eighth Street, his three films, his doomed affair with Pier Angeli and of course his death.
Another book I picked up only recently was another picture album James Dean: Portrait of Cool edited by Leith Adams and Keith Burns. It’s an album of photographs found in the Warner Bros archive and some have not been published before. Included are all sorts of documents such as casting sheets, production notes and messages. Dean’s address is listed as 3908 West Olive Avenue which I think might have been a place he shared with Dick Davalos who played his brother in East of Eden. During Rebel Without a Cause, Dean was listed as living at 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive.
I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.
Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.
Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.
As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.
Ida Lupino, like Roddy MacDowell, was born in England, in fact both lived in the Herne Hill area of London. She wanted to be a writer rather than an actress but went into acting as she was part of a theatrical family and it seems that becoming an actor was expected of her. She appeared in many British films before moving to the USA in 1933.
Myrna studied dance in Los Angeles. She had small parts in many silent pictures but some stills of her appeared in Motion Picture magazine and led to a contract with Warner Bros.
What attracted me to the persona of Marilyn Monroe? Well, apart from her obvious charms as a very attractive lady it’s her death that has always interested me. I’m a sucker for a modern mystery whether it’s the assassination of JFK, the disappearance of Amelia Aerhart or Marilyn’s own strange death. The obvious solution is that Marilyn committed suicide. She had tried suicide quite a few times before and various people along the years have saved her from death, including her acting coach Natasha Lytess and her third husband playwright Arthur Miller. Suicide is the obvious answer to her death but personally, I’m not so sure.
Norman Mailer’s book about Monroe finished with a photo of Joe DiMaggio, grief stricken on the day of her funeral and he reckons we can perhaps surmise Marilyn’s true worth just by the look on Joe’s face that day. I cannot disagree.
I thought I’d start with Gone with the Wind and see where it takes me. Gone with the Wind was a major film adaptation of the book by Margaret Mitchell. The book was a huge hit and producer David O Selznick bought the film rights. Production was delayed for a long while as Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable for the part of the roguish Rhett Butler. Another delay was a distribution deal with MGM which couldn’t be finalised until Selznick’s then current deal with United Artists had expired. Selznick used the delay to begin a huge search for an actress to play the part of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoilt daughter of a plantation owner in the deep south of America. Scarlet has a crush on Ashley Wilkes played by British actor Leslie Howard in possibly his most famous role. The film was one of the major hits of 1939 and was the highest earning film up to that time.
In 1938 Leslie Howard played the part of Professor Higgins in the film production of Pygmalion based on the play by George Bernard Shaw. A musical version was a big hit on the stage in the 1960s. Julie Andrews played the part of Eliza Doolittle to great acclaim on the stage but when the time came to make a film version in 1964, the producers wanted a major star and so the part went to Audrey Hepburn.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 