I was watching the 1953 film
The Wages of Fear on a UHF station in Milwaukee many years ago when about 3 critical minutes disappeared from the end of the film.
If you are familiar with this film, the last 4 minutes are an interplay of sequences showing the driver, listening to a radio station while driving a truck on a dangerous mountain road, and a waitress in a seaside bar miles away, listening to the same song and dancing. The film inter-cuts from scenes of the driver (portrayed by Yves Montand) and the waitress he is going to visit, after completing the dangerous mission of driving nitroglycerine(!) over precarious mountain roads to a remote jungle site for use in stopping a raging oil well fire. Now that he is done he is playfully turning the steering wheel and, in effect, dancing with the truck to the music on the radio. Cut to the waitress who is dancing and happy, then suddenly a cut to the truck, a tie-rod fails and the truck goes off the road and falls into the canyon below. The waitress has a telepathic sense of shock and loss, then the credits roll.
Except in the version I was watching on Channel 18 that night. You see the truck driver tune in the radio station, then bam! - straight to the credits. Probably some production person at the last station that had shown the film had the film break, and rather than doing a precise ob of re-splicing it, he just tacked the credits on at the end and tossed the intervening footage.
This is where technology is really great. When film was literally on film stock, this kind of unintended editing could always occur. What does “director's cut“ really mean when you can have this kind of butchering? Now when distributed on DVD's at least the director can be sure that the version they intend to be seen is actually viewed.
***What does “director’s cut“ really mean when you can have this kind of butchering? ****
I hate cut movies! After 1968, with the killing of Bobby Kennedy everyone blamed movies, tv, comic books, the NRA.
Movies on tv began to be butchered to remove all scenes of violence or implied violence. It was terrible to see old 1940s and 50s movies butchered! Movies from the 1960 really got the treatment!
When NBC showed THE WAR LORD it was butchered beyond reality! Several years later I saw it on the late show and they conveniently “lost TWO REELS” of the battle scenes.
What galls me is even today AMC still butchers films. TCM does not. IFC does not censor movies. They now chop them up for commercials.
When ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE was shone on TV for the first time it was butchered so much it actually started in the middle of the film during the auto race. I thought, “Did I miss half of the movie? Then it reverted to the start.
And when A FIST FULL OF DOLLARS was shown it was really cut up. They even filmed a bogus first scene of “the man with no name” getting orders to go to a border town to see what was going on there. They even filmed it with a dialog to lips mismatch.
My favorite comedy horror movie is Peter Jackson’s DEAD ALIVE. The US version has been so butchered it is unwatchable. The uncut version is much better (if you have a cast iron stomach). The uncut version was shown on IFC many years ago with no commercials and I got it on tape.
Here is an interesting web site on censored movies.
http://www.movie-censorship.com/
Warning, there are some x rated movies on this site.