First experienced this film on VHS some years ago and again on DVD very recently, seemed like there were some choice scenes that weren't on the DVD release. Have to obtain an old video and see...seemed like a few disturbing scenes had been edited out. Anyone else notice this?
share[deleted]
what scenes were those? I don't recall any. And the VHS tape was so awful that I don't want to see it like that again. So give me something to look for.
shareIt's documented (by American Film Institute) that both Jayne Mansfield and Ruth Gordon appeared in this film, but their scenes were eliminated. Does anyone have any information about the nature of their participation? Apparently, these scenes were not included in the DVD release either.
shareI would have loved to have seen Jayne Mansfield's and especially Ruth Gordon's scenes, but they're not in the DVD release -- just a short feature on the surviving cast members and crew recalling the film. I suspect that deleted scenes that are almost 45 years old have been destroyed -- but I'd love to be proved wrong. I don't think that in 1965, the studio saw any need to save them.
shareI don't know about the DVD but the version shown on TCM last night definitely cut my favorite 'bit' -- I watched faithfully for it -- John Gielgud's corpse sent to Aimee with a impossibly stiff smile by Joyboy. On the other hand I discovered 'bits' that I'd missed in the movie theater in 1965. Liberace in one of the caskets that disguised the entrance of hookers and party girls for the enjoyment of the Air Force space team recruited for Resurrection Now!
Has there ever been an American actor that could fake a British accent? Yes, Danny Kaye, but that was for brief rehearsed scenes. Robert Morse could not from beginning of the film to the end.
I miss Big Band music and talented singers. Leonard Cohen is my idol. Civility, harmony, unity!
I suspect TCM cut quite a few bits from this film when they aired it. I'm rather surprised they aired it at all, because this film breaks a lot of taboos -- and creates a few new ones in the process.
How lucky you were to see this on the big screen in 1965! I would suspect there might have been a few walkouts. I suspect many audiences were drawn to the big-name cast but didn't know what to make of the film.
Hmmm ... American actors faking British accents. Let's see: There was Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins," the "Spinal Tap" guys, Renee Zellweger in the Bridges Jones films, Gwyneth Paltrow in several roles. None of them as good as Robert Morse in this film, though.
In TCM's defense, they don't cut anything, and I've never heard of any alternate versions of this film (the scenes featuring Jayne Mansfield and Ruth Gordon simply didn't make it into the final cut). I'm pretty certain what one sees today on DVD and on Cable is the same film MGM released to theaters in 1965.
http://illusionstreetcar.blogspot.com
I caught this on VHS back in the 1990s and that was uncut. TCM shows the same version. Even though TCM DOES edit films (despite their pledge not to) "The Loved One" is not one of them.
shareRobert Morse's attempt at a British accent is abysmal. Two American actors/actresses with perfect British accents: Meryl Streep in the French Lieutenant's Woman and Richard Chamberlain in the Three Musketeers. Nice try but no cigar: Robert Duvall in The Seven Per Cent Solution. Excellent performance near perfect Robert Mitchum in the List of Adrian Messenger. On the radio Orson Welles's interpretation of Professor Moriarity along side Sir John Gielgud's Sherlock Holmes in "The final problem" (1955) is not only brilliant in its realization of cultured British speech but is a bravura performance of intellectual and physical menace conveyed simply by the voice.
I just watched a DVD copy today, made in Spain. Barbara Nichols is hardly seen. She is the widow of the Condor, I suppose, because she is briefly seen in the last sequece, when the rocked it launched into space. I did not see any Zomba Café either, so Reta Shaw was also missing.
shareI don't think those scenes still exist anymore. Among the footage cut:
-Ruth Gordon as a customer at the pet cemetery who is having her two dogs buried (separately, as they hated each other in life).
-The Blessed Reverend firing Joyboy after he decides to put all off the graves into orbit— no need for a mortician. (This is the scene that preceded that jarring jump cut where Joyboy is pleading with Barlow.)
-Extended footage of Aimee's suicide, in which the embalming fluid causes her breasts to balloon up.
-J. Theakston
http://centraltheater.blogspot.com
I just saw the film on dvd, and indeed, noticed some awkward edits/transitions...which are almost always signs of scenes missing or cut. And from what you've just detailed, they sounds like really good ones. I sure hope we get to see the missing footage in the near future.
"You're kind of a girl, right?"
"Well...if not, then I've been buying the wrong underwear."
There is an old Greek or Roman poem that I was sure Morse recited when I last saw the movie. He used the exact translation that I knew.
It's something like:
They told me, Heracletus
They told me you were dead
They brought me bitter words to hear
And bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered
How often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking
and sent him down the sky.
In the new version Morse recited a vulgarization of the poem during the pet ceremony. If you had heard the original poem, you would have remembered how he had turned something very beautiful into something ugly.