Yeah, the 20 missing minutes is a myth -- we've all got that -- BUT the black leader IS cut from the dream sequence in the VHS, as well as a brief shot, before a jump cut, of Seymour Cassel approaching alone, and the new print is shortened at the shower scene. Tom Charity is taking his time getting back to me, so if anyone can peek at the DVD, it would be useful to know:
a) are two girls clearly visible in the shower? The one on the left stands up, her head and hand briefly obscuring the one on the right; you can see two shampoo bottles in the background, on the rim of the tub. This is the VHS edition.
b) do you see their breasts, or are they "cropped," off the bottom of the screen?
Ray Carney just sent me the note below, and said I could quote it, so what the heck. Based on what he says below about the censorship of HUSBANDS, I'd say we have a good possible culprit to question in where the missing breasts went; but I'll be trying to contact Sony about this, if the Vancity people give me a contact...
Allan
(Professor Carney's note follows:)
Thanks VERY MUCH for the able reporting on the Love Streams print. You are doing to it what I did to Shadows. (Well, not quite, since my Shadows project took four or five years and about a hundred viewings, but you have the same
spirit.)
Thanks also for clarifying the "Ray Carney is right/wrong" statement. People take what I say out of context and then accuse me of the mistake. Just to clarify another thing about Husbands that has been misunderstood by misreading my writing:
UCLA created TWO master prints. Two. Not one. One print is almost complete. It lacks one or two minutes of footage. But that's pretty close to complete. The other lacks approximately 11 minutes of footage, including most of the Leola Harlow and some of the vomiting scene. Rowlands asked for the creation of the second print because she found the Harlow and vomiting stuff "in bad taste." That's what I wrote. I think it's disgraceful of course to tell someone to cut her husband's work because SHE finds it tacky. But that's a fact. The cut print was in fact the one shown at the UCLA premiere screening of the film where Rowlands was present. And it was the one used for later video releases. And used for later print creation. But there is a long print that exists and that was part of the UCLA project. I hope that clarifies my point. What I wrote was not wrong and should not be in dispute. I was writing about the way an instiution like UCLA honors Rowlands's wishes, and how wrong I think that is, and how much it tells us about the priorities of film preservation. I never said that the long print was not obtainable at all. It is. But it is darn rare and almost never seen. The short print, the Rowlands approved print, is the one generally screened, at UCLA and elsewhere.
You may add this to your blog or post it as you see appropriate.
All best wishes and thanks for your sleuthing.
Ray Carney
www.Cassavetes.com
Ray Carney, Prof. of Film and American Studies
Author: Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux/Faber and Faber); Shadows (British Film
Institute/University of California Press); John
Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity; The Films of
Mike Leigh (Cambridge University Press); The Films of
Frank Capra (Wesleyan University Press); Speaking the
Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer
(Cambridge University Press); The Films of John
Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies
(Cambridge University Press), and other works.
