Are some movies too long for audiences to sit through? Or do our expectations for movies often come up short?
Recently, the Music Box Theatre ran Marco Tulli Giordana’s six-hour Italian film, “The Best of Youth,” a robust and very intelligent family epic that spanned from the mid-’60s to the early 2000s–and despite rhapsodic reviews, the movie did decent but unspectacular business. Undeterred, the same theater will bring another longish movie, the restored, near 2 1/2-hour cut of Sam Peckinpah’s 1965 Western saga “Major Dundee,” later this month. A controversial film that stars Charlton Heston as an obsessive, Apache-hunting Army major, it was ruthlessly cut by its studio (against both Peckinpah’s and Heston’s wishes) back in 1965. Peckinpah aficionados have been waiting for this version ever since.
And many movie buffs are equally passionate about the complete cut of Michael Cimino’s notorious 1980 epic western “Heaven’s Gate,” which will be shown in its original 219-minute version (slashed to 149 minutes for its first run), starting April 29 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
But what about the rest of the audience? Is their patience being unreasonably taxed by directors’ cuts, expanded DVDs with deleted scenes and seemingly over-long movies of every kind? Isn’t it true that in cinema, as elsewhere, less is sometimes more?
Well, sometimes. But we have the recent example of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to argue the opposite. A massive commercial and critical hit and multiple Oscar-winner, the complete “Rings,” based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, was a three-movie series whose separate sections all ran about three hours or more (and ran even longer in the uncut DVD versions). Not only were audiences not turned off, they packed the houses.
Nor were average audiences intimidated by the longer-than-usual length of what became the biggest grossing movie of all time, 1997’s “Titanic” (3 hours, 14 minutes) or such box office champs of their days as 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” (3 hours, 6 minutes), 1939’s “Gone With the Wind” (3 hours, 42 minutes), 1946’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” (2 hours, 48 minutes), 1956’s “The Ten Commandments” (3 hours, 40 minutes), 1965’s “The Sound of Music” (2 hours, 54 minutes), or 1972’s “The Godfather” (2 hours, 55 minutes–with another six hours spread over its two sequels).
More Top Picks Best 4 Zone Mini Splits For Homes
Even at its original 3-hour, 42-minute length, David Lean’s 1962 “Lawrence of Arabia” is hardly guilty of boring its viewers. I know I’d rather sit through “Lawrence” again (for the seventh time) than suffer for the first time though 90 percent of the 90-minute wonders thoughtlessly and expensively churned out by the big studios today.
One thing you can say about the best long movies–perhaps “epics” or “movie-novels” are better terms–is that they often have ambitions as unbounded as their running times. When D.W. Griffith shot “Birth of a Nation” at more than three hours in 1915, he was more than tripling the average length of movies in that day. His “Birth” (still a classic, though damaged almost irretrievably by its racism) was a quantum leap forward in almost every cinematic aspect.
A decade later, when Erich Von Stroheim adapted Frank Norris’ novel “McTeague” in seven hours, as “Greed,” he was simply, stubbornly, filming a complex novel in the most uncompromising way he could. When MGM cut it to two hours and 20 minutes, they still had a masterpiece left, but they earned the ire of generations of film scholars since–especially after the imperious and foolish studio boss Louis B. Mayer burned the outtakes. (Today you can watch “Greed” in a partly restored four-hour version that makes use of production stills and the original script to recreate the lost sections; annoying as that process can be, it’s still better than the first release.)
In 1978, Francis Ford Coppola cut his great Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now” to 153 minutes for release–not because he wanted to, but because he feared for his continued fiscal and moviemaking life unless he delivered a sure-fire commercial picture. So he turned “Apocalypse” into a more action-oriented movie than was his original intent–which we can see more clearly in the more philosophical and intellectually ambitious 197-minute “Apocalypse Now Redux,” released in 2001.
Some American critics, perhaps weary of the onslaught of directors’ cuts brought on by the DVD age, tended to knock “Redux” and prefer the “original.” But I think they’re wrong. As much as the “Godfather” films and “The Conversation,” “Apocalypse Now Redux” is a crown jewel of Coppola’s career.
Some long movies, like the 8 1/2-hour Russian “War and Peace” (1966), or the intended versions of “Greed” and “Apocalypse Now,” were born for the theaters. But many in recent decades have, like “The Best of Youth,” started like as TV miniseries. That list includes Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1988 spiritual odyssey “The Decalogue,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s career masterpiece “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (his 15-hour film of the Alfred Doblin novel) and four movies by Ingmar Bergman–“Scenes from a Marriage,” “Face to Face,” “Fanny and Alexander” and “The Best Intentions”–the last of which he only wrote and all four of which were cut extensively for U. S. theatrical release.
The longest and most staggering of all these endeavors is Edgar Reitz’s 20th Century German historical provincial/urban epic, “Heimat” and “Heimat 2”–which clock in at 15 and 26 hours respectively and represent a use of cinema that is often awe-inspiring. Obviously, you can’t see most of these movies in a sitting. (Even the famously prodigal and over-achieving Stroheim suggested that “Greed” be released as a two-parter, and he was right.) But movies should be granted the same kind of potential length, detail and depth we allow great novels, something filmmakers since Griffith have fought for.
The DVD age has brought most of these films back, and, in some cases, also brought back the footage discarded to make them shorter. I sympathize with time-weary critics and audiences. But the fact is that, in the greatest movies, less is often much less; movies can play longer when crucial connective tissue and links are broken. And, as long as there is such a plentiful supply of relatively short movies, good and bad, why begrudge the few, sometimes great, long ones?
———-