Slarek on Cine Outsider wrote:
Super 8 Version (17:54)
This Super-8 version of the film released for home viewing cuts the film down to less than a fifth of its original length and thus plays more like a highlights reel, one cropped to 4:3 and almost completely age-drained of colour.... Particularly odd is the inclusion of a new line of dialogue in the opening raid on Benesch's apartment, which is delivered off screen by someone pretending to be either Madigan or Bonaro: "Sorry to break in on you and your wife, Barney." Hard to believe that even in the early 1970s, when I presume this version was released, somebody thought it morally questionable to show a man and woman in bed together unless they were married. Then again, any hint that any of the characters are having an affair has also been soundly excised.
I found a review of this Super 8 version in a 1979 issue (#21) of the UK
Super 8 Collector magazine, which usually covered these American cutdowns as soon as they were released in the UK. So it was probably a
late 1970s edition - not that it makes much difference in terms of changing sexual attitudes on that level! But it does mean that
Madigan would have been available to TV by then (in the UK it was first televised in 1973) and I wonder if that line of dialogue was added for one of those prim US TV versions we discussed in relation to
Diary of a Mad Housewife? The Super 8 abridgement would certainly have been transferred from a pan & scan edition that had already been prepared.
These 400 feet (20-minutes or so) Super 8 cutdowns didn't appear from the big Hollywood studios until 1975, at least in the UK. Columbia were the first here and
Super 8 Collector #2 carried previews of the Columbias already issued in America. Although Columbia did notoriously add a narrator to these editions, I'd be surprised if the big studios would have gone to the trouble of dubbing in dialogue, just for Super 8, unless perhaps it was necessary (as, allegedly, with the Columbia narrator) to clarify - or simplify - the plot. I haven't seen this edition but I suppose "wife" might have been added for simplification and could also be interpreted as an extra Madigan sarcasm in that scene! The Super 8 editors usually reduced this sort of film to action highlights.
The original reviewer of the Super 8
Madigan Keith Wilton (a professional editor who I recall was later hired to prepare similar editions of classic Warner titles) thought it was "quite a well abridged version... with good picture and sound quality - a great improvement on the last batch of Universal 8 releases which tended towards magenta and were from indifferent master material." Of course, most of these Super 8 colour abridgements have now turned magenta, judging from those on eBay, and it beggars belief that collectors paid £30 each in the 1970s for them, equal to about £120 now!
