Long, Long Spools Unwinding

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31023, 31 March 1966, Page 8

Long, Long Spools Unwinding

Films, it seems, are destined to get longer and longer writes the film critic of “The Times.”

Time was when a nice reasonable 90 minutes was about as long as even the most ambitions film-maker expected to hold an audience’s attention, and “Gone With the Wind,” at nearly four hours, was a marathon all on its own. Of course one or two of the

silent masters, with the model before them of the endless evenings theatre audiences hardier than ourselves were willing to sit through, had boldly pushed the length of film entertainments from the 10 to 20 minutes of the one-and-two-reelers to the two hours and over of Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance.”

But when Stroheim produced a first cut of “Greed” lasting seven hours his optimism received a rude blow, and even his final version running four hours was slashed to about 100 minutes for showing. Seinick’s decision to let “Gone With the Wind” run at full length was in keeping, of course, with the film’s status as a super-production and the vast amount of publicity it had received before and during shooting; in any case, it was argued, Margaret Mitchells' best-seller contained so much plot that any attempt to reduce it further would make nonsense of the film. EXCEPTIONS

But the point is, that in those happy days a very long film was the exception which proved the rule. All the conventional arguments were on the side of brevity, and even the most important first features were expected to fit comfortably into a bill with a second feature a newsreel, and possibly a cartoon or interest short when they went on release.

Make a film running two hours or over and you had to have a very powerful reason, or else front office would be likely to take over and make sure the result fitted willynilly into the slot destined for it. Not so nowadays, of course: for somehow the idea has got abi'oad that length and artistic importance or even, more telling still, commercial suc-

cess are somehow intimately linked. ATTITUDE CHANGE The virtual disappearance of the second feature has had something to do with this; it is assumed, in Britain and the United States at least, that audiences will feel cheated if they do not get their money’s worth in the shape of at least three and shape of at least three and preferably nearer four hours in the cinema each time they go, and if no second features are available it is up to the main feature to make up the time. Also, the spreading institution of “hard-ticket” film attractions, which run like stage plays in one theatre at a time, at special prices and with all seats bookable in advance, also tends to encourage longer films, since equally it is felt that audiences inveigled into regarding a film as a special sort of outing in this way instead of merely dropping in at their local once or twice a week, will expect something rather special; something not only higher, wider, and more handsome than the general run, but longer too.

Which would be all very well if most of the films thus dragged out to three hours or so could really stand such treatment, but on the whole they cannot. It is depressing to notice, for example, that whenever Hollywood takes it into its head to remake a classic comedy of the past—the most recent example was “Move Over, Darling,” based on “My Favourite Wife”— somehow in the process half the plot vanishes and half an hour at least is added on to the running time, as though we are all lame-brains plodding laboriously after the filmmaker’s most heavy-weight slow-motion sallies.

Very occasionally a film comes along with so much plot, character, and action that it uses all the time at its disposal instead of being glumly inflated to fill it; but how often today can one come out of a cinema, as after “All About Eve” (two hours 20 minutes) or “Hatari” (two hours 40 minutes), murmuring in astonishment “What, over already?” Not, certainly, after “Cleopatra” (made though you would never guess it, by the same writer-director as “All About Eve,” in an off couple of years), which was unveiled to New York running a merciless 243 minutes, but pared for London’s West End to 226 minutes and even further reduced on release.

Not. either, after any of the gargantuan comedies which have become a vogue of late (“It’s a Mad. Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines”), though “The Great Race,” by cunningly dropping a nearly full (normal) length parody of "The Prisoner of Zenda” into the middle of its New York to Paris motor race, does almost bring off the impossible.

EIGHT HOUR FILM But there it is: it is the length which dictates the material, not the material the length. All too rarely does one come across film-makers like those responsible for “Lawrence of Arabia” who actually removed 20 minutes from it after its opening because, wonder of wonders, they thought it was better that way.

However, at least the latest long film to be undertaken and, by all account the longest yet, promises to have more justification than most. Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part, eighthour version of “War and

Peace,” the first four hours of which are already complete and were shown at the Moscow Festival last year, at least should hava plot enough and to spare.

Who knows, if Margaret Mitchell's book might be taken, a trifle irreverently, as America’s answer to "War and Peace,” the film version of “War and Peace” may be able to stand, more seriously, as Russia’s answer to the film of “Gone With the Wind.”