Why is it that "Little Big Man" is supposed to be 147 minutes in length, but the DVD version is only 139 or 140 minutes in length? Some VHS tape copies are supposedly 147 minutes, but my VHS copy is also only about 139 minutes?
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You're not wrong. The IMDb is. Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video guide lists the running time as 139 minutes.
shareI must be a lucky one. I ordered the VHS from Amazon (or somesuch) a few years ago. I just checked it. Running length: 147 minutes.
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I believe the DVD has been edited. I remember a scene from thirty (mumble mumble) years ago when I saw it in the theater, which doesn't appear to be on the DVD version I watched today. This particular scene was probably cut because it was too graphic (it involved a soldier with a knife, and an Indian woman). It was only a few seconds, though, not eight minutes. Can't say what other edits may have been done; they were probably of scenes which weren't seared into my memory like that one was.
Ehhh, never mind. After reading a few more threads here, I realized that the scene that was burned into my memory was from another film, "Soldier Blue", which I believe I saw many years ago as a double feature with LBM. So I really have nothing to add about the length of this movie; sorry.
The film was originally 150 minutes long. I saw it at that length on VHS in 1990. When the film was released to DVD, the home video distributor (Paramount/CBS Video) trimmed the movie by 11 minutes to what we have now-- for reasons that are beyond me. If you look at the latest Maltin book, he confirms what I'm saying about the movie's length.
It's possible that they managed to shorten the movie by 11 minutes not so much by excising entire scenes, but by trimming a bit here and a bit there. They did something similar with "The Third Man", since there's a different cut of that film that's shorter, but not markedly different.
"Little Big Man" was great at its original length. I don't know why they'd screw with it.
The footnote at this page mentions missing scenes:
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s799man.html