This is one of those movies I used to watch every now and then with my dad when I was a teenager (although it's way too long to watch in one sitting). It's one of my father's favorites, along with Rio Bravo, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Deliverance (I wholeheartedly recommend all of them, the last one is some heavy shit). Such a shame that most people get to experience it in the butchered version. And to think we were getting the real thing on Polish cable TV and didn't even appreciate it...
"Once Upon A Time In The West" would fit well in that list. Very long. Leone back to spaghetti western roots. Fonda as a pretty good bad guy. And Bronson. Been a few years, now I have to watch it again...
I think "Duck, you sucker!" is a very underestimated movie. Too bad it was seriously mistitled: Sergio Leone insisted on a literal translation when "A fistful of dynamite" might have made a difference.
Never looked @ SL IMDB page and never even heard of this before, thanks! Just put it on reseve @ my public library. Of course it`s 157 minutes runtime..
OUATITW is the best western ever made :)
The brilliance of the first 30ish minutes...I don't see anything like that being produced anymore in the near future.
I recall back in the day being very confused when I first saw the US release, but then several years later watching the original. I didn't know the back-story of the film. I recall thinking "I've seen this movie, but this scene wasn't in it, neither was this, what the hell?" This was obviously pre-Internet, so it wasn't easy to figure out what had happened to the movie if you weren't following the trades.
Richard Linklater (Slackers, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, etc) leads the Austin Film Society and screened the full European cut then led a discussion of the film (video of that here: https://youtu.be/irYXKADAKjI)
Attending that screening caused me to discover one of my favorite American films.
This is one of my favorite movies. I remember learning that he was working on another movie -- siege of leningrad -- but died before shooting started. A terrible loss!
I've been focusing my library on Google. For the most part they are great for both movies and books. But this is one example of a title they simply don't have. At least in us. I've been waiting for years, I don't care if it's the original cut or not. I just want to buy it digital from my provider of choice. It's infuriating this option is not granted as easily. I'll keep waiting.
This partial quote implies that a fully restored version exists (in some publicly-viewable form), but I don't see any details:
[At long last, materials for some of these missing sections have been found and re-inserted into the picture under the supervision of Leone’s family and surviving collaborators. The work has been completed by the magnificent team at Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata, and it has been wonderful to witness this enlargement of Leone’s vision, step by precious step.” —Martin Scorsese, Founder and Chair, The Film Foundation]
The 2 disk special edition is 229 minutes... I saw it many years ago on Netflix (before they had streaming) and I remember it being extremely long, like: had to stop in the middle to get the second disk delivered long, so I'm pretty sure I didn't see an 139 minute cut.
well, for whatever it is worth, the runtime of the non-extended cut which is available for streaming is equal to the runtime the article mentions as the full length version (229 minutes)
As I said, I saw it a long time ago (and I'm no movie expert), but me and the friend who watched it with me agreed the 229 minute version was pretty good but could have been better with some editing to cut the run time... though we didn't have the Cannes version to compare it to (or the knowledge that that version existed)
edit: oops, I guess the theatrical version, not the Cannes version.
My ranking is the reverse; I prefer this film to the Godfathers, but only by a hair. Goodfellas is third. This is definitely Leone's best, though, followed closely by Once Upon a Time in the West.
I can see where you're coming from (both involve crime, intrigue, cops and robbers), but I don't think it's really same genre.
Don't get me wrong, on its own terms The Killer is an amazing film, basically defining the heroic bloodshed action genre, and together with Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow among the three must-see John Woo movies.
They don't go about it the same way, but I think they explore a lot of the same themes -- loyalty, morality vs. the law, etc. I think people kind of undersell the Hong Kong triad movies as anything other than mindless action.
For those who enjoy commentary tracks, the 4h11m Bluray doesn't contain the commentary by Richard Schickel (film historian and critic), however the 3h49m version does [1].
This is the proper theatrical release with an optional commentary track.
For the 4h11m version, the commentary was dropped due to a lack of space and also because the commentary doesn't cover the additional scenes.
Here's a trick that I found works for such things: Watch what you can, then the next night, rewind about 5-10 minutes and continue from THAT point, not from exactly where you left off. It helps refresh the feeling of continuity, IMO.
The movie stands up to repeat viewings fairly close one after the other. The full cut plays with time and nostalgia in a way that deepens your appreciation of it in a second viewing. I think it can stand to be viewed in two halves - the cuts between eras make natural breaks.
It's my favourite movie, for the visual storytelling in particular.
Once Upon A Time in America should have been a trilogy, it's yet another movie that was undone by its length and the time it was released. Blade Runner is another one that should have probably been spread over two or three movies.
Sometimes I wonder what film history would look like, if only movie directors, producers and distributors had accepted the serial format earlier. It took the success of Return of the Jedi to make it acceptable to spread a story over multiple features, and even then it was considered just a geek thing until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings saga. Now Marvel keeps scoring hit after hit with the biggest shared-continuity universe in the business, auteurs have embraced serialization with high-quality TV series, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts purposefully making non-genre continuity-linked trilogies.
> Blade Runner is another one that should have probably been spread over two or three movies.
As a huge fan of Blade Runner, I strongly disagree. A masterpiece I've watched plenty of times already and love dearly, but there simply isn't enough plot to stretch into a series. I'm a bit upset at the general tendency to turn everything (books, movies) into trilogies, and then have prequels, sequels and whatnot. I'd rather have a single beautiful piece of art, and then have the director and scriptwriter move on to different works. I prefer focus to a never-ending milking of the proverbial cash cow. I don't enjoy "shared universes" or "world building" -- I'd rather have a single, focused good movie.
Or, to paraphrase Eldon Tyrell:
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Blade Runner."
No more sequels. No more trilogies. I beg you, Hollywood!
I'd say it's HBC and it's ilk that shifted things. Long story arc TV shows with the same artistic ambitions and standards as movies. It's debatable where it began. First I remember is Oz but I've read people claim it goes as far back as Hill St. Blues.
In the UK we had a series called GBH that blew me away as a young person. I keep meaning to rewatch it to see if it's as good as I remember.
I think the first artistically ambitious TV show I remember coming out of the US was 'Twin Peaks'.
I've watched GBH a few times since it aired and I think it still holds up. Certainly give it a go if you get the chance. The original UK TV version of 'Edge of Darkness' is also still very, very watchable. Some remarkable scenes and performances.
> In the UK we had a series called GBH that blew me away as a young person. I keep meaning to rewatch it to see if it's as good as I remember.
I've watched it recently, and it's super-fun, but not thoughtful or deep. It's just a LibDem/Tory slander against Militant starring a cartoon character sexually impotent lefty pol who pours campaign fund champagne over hookers while plotting petty revenge against his childhood enemies, slapping children and wetting the bed.
Watched it again a couple of years ago. It's not perfect (some episodes could be chopped without you noticing), but a Tory smear it ain't. Alan Bleasdale was "True Labour" (way to the left of The Third Way), he just had no time for the Derek Hattons of the world and believed Militant was an unwitting tool of the establishment (something he made explicit in the plot). Complicated by the fact he made Murray way more interesting than Hatton, ofc.
Nelson is Bleasdale's hero: long standing Labour member. Wants to teach kids, but would never cross a picket line. Doesn't use the personal stuff the establishment have dug up to discredit Murray. &c
Incidentally, I lived near Hatton back in the day. He had done extremely well financially out of his time at the council.
> It's just a LibDem/Tory slander against Militant
You can't reasonably accuse Alan Bleasdale of being anything close to a LibDem/Tory propagandist. Not without shifting the Overton window to a preposterous degree. There's a lot of space to place one's self in between Blair and Militant without because accused of betraying Labour's principles.
It's not at all boring or difficult to get through. It's simply a great film, both excellently plotted and filmed beautifully. You're never going to feel it's going on too long or you want to have a break.
(I've watched the European cut several times. I also hate the modern trend for over-long films or episodic TV with a thin plot stretched out.)
this film is usually shown in the UK in this format, essentially 2 x 2 hour movies, usually on a friday and saturday night. It loses nothing in the telling to do this. Watch and enjoy, the soundtrack is almost as good as the movie.
Hah, reading this almost makes me miss the days of watching evening films on channel 5, where they'd be broken into two parts separated by a 15 minutes news break.
From 8 to 12 pm is doable, but as other have replied, rewind some 5-10 minutes between your breaks and you should get a good experience.
It is worth it, it is one of the best films ever made IMO.
Been awhile since I watched it, but I distinctly recall an intermission card about 2.5hrs in (right after Noodles tries to see Deborah off at the station). Still a long time in.
The random synchronicity of life! I am halfway through this movie, having watched the first two hours last night, and planning to view the rest of it today. First time ever, and didn't really know much of it. When up pops this posting on HN.
I assume I shall have to watch the whole thing before it meshes into coherence, so at this point no ruminations on the actual quality of the thing.
No. There are lots of stories about various very long versions of Dune. The most common story that is Lynch had a 6-hour version and that the studio forced him down to 2. It's a myth. The theatrical cut is the only cut Lynch did.
IIRC Lynch did not have final cut on Dune, and was so bitter about it he never made a film he wasn't contractually allowed to edit himself again. If you look at the deleted scenes, they show Lynch was going for a very different tone to the finished product.
The "6-hour version of Dune" is probably confusing the Lynch treatment with Jodorowsky's attempt at a Dune film -- which was never filmed (the script wasn't even finished!), but whose production was documented in the 2013 Jodorowsky's Dune:
Possibly, but the rumours of a 6-hour and even longer cuts go back years. I remember discussing this way back in the late 1990s. It's a very persistent rumour.
There was never a four hour version. It doesn't exist - there's a version with a bunch of filmed material and storyboards of what might have been filmed, but that's it.
? I'm not sure how this fits together. There is a four or so hour extended version of the movie which I love. Is this saying that there is a new version as well?
