Brief Encounter

Similar to the other topic... do they still cut films now?

Of course the immediate one that springs to mind is the reduced cleavage in The Wicked Lady (1945)!

DB7

Night/Curse of the Demon is another that springs to mind.

I can't think of any off the top of my head, was the ending to 28 Days Later altered for the US?

orpheum

I have read an interesting book,cant remember the title,which gave a list of a whole host of British films imported into the USA showing how they were changed.I recall that Rank and other studios would send the scripts to the Hays Office as well as the BBFC to ensure that no scenes were filmed which would not be accepted.

Welcome To Highbury The Home Of Football

CaptainWaggett

The original US release of Dead of Night lost the Golfing Story and also the Christmas Party (which must have made the nightmare sequence rather confusing). Young and Innocent lost the children's party on its first release.

I think the US and UK releases of the recent Pride and Prejudice had slightly different endings - maybe an extra kiss in one of them?

Kevev

I agree entirely.

m35541

I have a book about the MPAA censorship of British films which lists a whole raft of stuff that had to be cut/altered for US release to meet the MPAA code diktats including films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, Oliver Twist and In Which We Serve.

This is separate from the issue of films that were cut for US release simply cos they were "foreign" films that the distributor wanted to play as a second feature and they were too long such as Dead of Night.

The overall alterations are in the hundreds if not thousands.

The most recent examples of distributor edits are Pride and Prejudice and The Descent (ending truncated to make it more "traditional").

On the censorship front Casino Royale went out in a slightly different edit in the USA to the UK - both were cut but cut differently and the MPAA cuts were harsher.

NappieB

UK films being cut for US distribution is one of my pet peeves. I won't get started on it (again) here.

Suffice it to say that even American films are cut in America for no good reason!! Two which stand out:

RETURN OF THE JEDI.. many minutes cut after the first release to make the movie shorter.

CHRISTMAS VACATION.... a few minutes cut rendering one of the later scenes nonsensical.

Philistines!

"The future is yet to come" - George W. Bush

Moor Larkin

The Spanish dvd release of The Best of Friends has Patrick McGoohan narrating George Bernard Shaws The Adventures of a Black Girl over sustained footage of an entirely naked maiden, acting-out the fable, on a stage-set arrangement.

Apparently, I have discovered, the American dvd release has no naked lady.

Presumably a different sort of Directors Cut.......

Admittedly the scene also has Jesus Christ nailed to a cross being whimsical, but he's only in it for a few seconds at the end.

CaptainWaggett

Didn't the US release of Edge of the World have a voice-over (maybe a letter?) carefully explaining that Belle Crystal managed to get spliced before having the baby?

Steve Crook

Hmm, I hadn't heard that. But it's just the sort of thing that the Catholic League of Decency would insist on.

They're the ones that got Sister Clodagh's flashbacks taken out of the initial American release of Black Narcissus. Even though Clodagh was in an Anglican order and even though the flashback didn't show any naughtiness. They didn't like the idea of a nun having any outside interests or any life before they joined the order.

It's hard to believe by modern standards but it's all documented in Sarah Street's book

Steve

oxfam1uk

"Silver Dream Racer" (1980) had its final few seconds cut for release in America, I believe.

That is why, when Americans got the recent DVD release, they were stunned to find a "different ending" !

billy bentley

I think "Witchfinder General" which was released in the States as "The Conqueror Worm" (with a voice over reading a poem of the same title at the beginning) was altered for U.s. consumption.

m35541

Apart from the title and the poem Witchinder General was identical. What you may be thinking of is the music alteration (ie the score was replaced) made for video/TV due to rights issues (the recent MGM DVD is the uncut UK version with the correct score). This affected a number of other AIP films such as Scream and Scream Again and the Phibes movies.

Harleybloke

'The Full Monty' had to have loads of scenes shot twice.

One for us Brits and another 'Translated' for the Yanks!

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!

CaptainWaggett

TV but the US version of the Christmas edition of Extras was similarly translated just in case there was a single reference to British showbiz that the Yanks might not have understood (the Jade Goody doll became a Kramer-from-Seinfeld doll, for example)