| THE MOVIE |
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Filming started on 14 June 1982 and ended on 22 Apr 1983. At that time Leone had ten hours of useable footage. With help from editor Nino Baragli, this was pruned to six hours. Finally accepting that there was unlikely to be a two-part version, Leone delivered a fine cut of three hours and forty-nine minutes. His ideal running time would have been between four hours ten minutes and four hours twenty-five minutes but he relucatantly excised between forty-five and fifty minutes worth of significant material.
From April 1983 onwards there had been rumblings from the Ladd Company, the American distributor, that the film would require cuts to bring it close to the 165 minutes that Leone had been contracted to deliver. The Ladd Company was still reeling from the disaster on the American market of "The Right Stuff" which ran for a mere three hours and fourteen minutes and Robert De Niro had not appeared in a profit-making project since "The Deer Hunter" five years earlier.
On 17 February 1984 a sneak preview in Boston of a 227 minute version confirmed the distributor's worst fears. The audience's reaction was "confused", "angry", "too long". At Cannes on 20 May 1984 where the movie was shown in its three hour forty-nine minute version, it received acclaim from many critics.
Leone retained lawyers in an attempt to preserve his work but the Ladd Company instructed Zach Staenburg to re-edit the film. Staenburg's version lasted 144 minutes, jettisoned the flashblacks and some of the gang's childhood escapades, began with Deborah's dance in 1923, had characters cropping up without explanation and ended with the sound of a gunshot as Bailey unambiguously committed suicide. An executive of the Ladd Company claimed that a screening of this new version has played infinitely better than the Boston screening and the truncated version opened in America on 1 June 1984.
The film flopped and a 227 minute version was released in Europe with mixed success.
In
June 2003 a 220-229 minute version was released on DVD by Warner Bros. and this is
currently the only widely available version.
Chapter Listing
Running times (approx): Disc 1 - 1 hour 55 mins (115 mins)
Disc One
1. Credits
2. Looking for Noodles
3. Opium Visions
4. Shadow-Play Intruders
5. Ambush at Fat Moe's
6. Locker Contents
7. Side Show Beckons
8. Old Neighborhood
9. Return to Moe's
10. Deborah's Audience
11. Go Look at Yourself
12. Bad News
13. Sizing Up Targets
14. Opportunity Botched
15. Toilet Traffic
16. Passing the Time
17. Payment Devoured
18. Laying Down the Law
19. Through Open Doors
20. Never My Beloved
21. Some Partner I Got
22. Salting the Future
23. We Solemnly Swear
24. Bugsy Strikes
25. Noodles Takes the Fall
26. Visiting Old Friends
27. Advance Payment
28. Turnover in the Grave
29. Hottest Spot in Town
30. Deborah's Welcome
31. Insurance Talk
32. Jewel Robbery
33. Kid Stuff
34. Snowy White, Bloody Red
Disc Two
35. Going for a Swim
36. Guilt Lies Elsewhere
37. Plague to the Rescue
38. Chief's Bouncing Baby
39. Behind the Masks
40. Table by the Sea
41. Deborah on His Mind
42. The Drive Home
43. The Train Station
44. Intermission
45. Max's Way With Women
46. Two Hits
47. Stink of the Streets
48. Max's Dream
49. Better Off Than Dead
50. Prohibition Ends
51. Phone Tip
52. Memories of an Actress
53. Another David
54. Bailey's Party
55. Already a Dead Man
56. How Noodles Sees Things
57. Gone With the Garbage
58. World of Dreams
59. End Credits
Disc 2 - 1 hour 45 mins (105 mins)
Disc 1 ends awkwardly in the middle of
an action sequence but the distributors say it would be impossible to end Disc 1
at chapter 44 - The Intermission (an additional 39:20 mins) - and preserve the image quality.
Disc 1
could end after the gang go swimming in a car (an additional 2:50 mins) and this is how the movie was
screened in many cinemas. Disc 2 would then start with Noodles watching TV
in Fat Moe's in 1968 but the audience would not appreciate the match cut between
a car being submerged in water and a burnt out car being sprayed with foam.
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