Jonathan Melville: Kubrik classic shines light on the long road to movie success

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 11:49

A LOOK at what's on at Edinburgh cinemas over the coming week.

THE news that the Filmhouse are planning to screen a rarely seen print of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic The Shining (Monday to Wednesday at various times), complete with around half an hour of footage cut by the director due to poor reviews, led me to think this week about some of the other films that have had a complicated journey on their way to our cinema screens.

Perhaps the Holy Grail of 'lost' movies, and now considered one of the greatest films ever made, is 1924's Greed.

A silent film directed by Erich von Stronheim and featuring forgotten British actor Gibson Gowland in his only starring role, Greed originally clocked in at a whopping ten hours, subsequently cut to 140 minutes at the request of MGM.

A 239-minute version was finally released in 1999, leading critics to hail the film as something of a classic.

As recently as 2008, 1927 science fiction epic Metropolis, already infamous in movie circles for the existence of various cuts of the film over the decades (the most recent sits at 87 minutes), became headline news when Berlin film experts announced that a 210-minute cut of the original negative had been discovered in Argentina and that a restoration project would lead to a DVD release in 2009.

Shot in various parts of Scotland, The Wicker Man (1973) had a tortuous history, its original 99 minute run time slashed by 20 minutes by the film studio while negatives were allegedly buried under the M4 motorway.

1982's Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's vision of a dystopian future, has gone through a number of edits, originally due to the studio's view that it needed simplification. Scott re-cut the film in 1992 and again 15 years later, all the versions finally seeing release on DVD in 2007.

One of the most recent examples of studio tinkering is 2007 Daniel Craig flick, The Invasion.

Original director Oliver Hirschbeigel saw the film he had made first of all change names (it was first called The Visiting) before Matrix creators the Wachowski brothers were brought in to rewrite and re-shoot much of the film, resulting in a different ending.

It just goes to show that the films we love and probably many of those we hate exist as the result of various forces: director, studios, audience reaction and more than just a dash of fate.

Two films that could perhaps have done with some cutting to prevent DVT in viewers – together they run to over four hours – are Steven Soderbergh's Che: Part One and Che: Part Two, showing this Sunday as a double bill at the Cameo.

The films are an epic telling of guerrilla leader Che Guevara's (Benicio Del Toro) rise and fall.

Finally, out on DVD on Monday is documentary Blindsight, following a group of blind Tibetan teenagers who set out to climb the 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri on Mount Everest.

Both terrifying and inspiring, Blindsight combines emotion and stunning scenery to tell a moving story of endurance over adversity.

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