A wonderful 2 1/2 hour movie...

-- stretched into 6 hours.

Think of it as the DVD for the motion picture -- with 3 1/2 hours of deleted scenes put back in.

But that's the way things are now. Stories like this are rarely being made for the multiplex anymore. They are being made for television.

And, because of that, they are being made bloated. Attenuated. Waaaay too long.

I wish the great Sydney Pollack had gotten around to directing his feature version of the novel back in the mid 1990s. It probably would've been 140 or 150 minutes. Roughly 2 1/2 hours. Long for a thriller, but not necessarily too long.

It had a script by the wonderful Robert Towne.

Wouldn't that have been something!