News about two landmark films from the 1980s have arrived in recent days, with one returning to the big screen and another being pulled back for the immediate future.
First up, THR reveals that Stanley Kubrick's horror classic "The Shining" will hit U.K. cinemas this fall, but with one intriguing twist — audiences there will get, for the first time, the U.S. cut of the movie that runs 144 minutes instead of the 113 version they are currently used to. When the film was released in 1980, Kubrick made two signifcant cuts to the film. The first was a 2 minute coda, where Stuart Ullman's character visits Wendy and Danny in the hospital and reveals that Jack's body cannont be found. But more substantially, Kubrick reduced the running time down for all prints overseas to under two hours, making some big snips (detailed here) to the movie we know so well. While this was apparently his preferrred cut of the movie, the longer version is one most commonly viewed and celebrated, and this is what U.K. audiences will get to see around Halloween. Nice.
Meanwhile, Sergio Leone's restored "Once Upon A Time In America," which played the Cannes Film Festival this spring boasting an additional 40 minutes of footage has been pulled from circulation for the moment. The Guardian reports that planned screenings of the epic movie at the Melbourne International Film Festival were canceled, and the movie itself is apparently undergoing even more restoration work on the audio, particularly in the scenes and sequences that have been added back into the movie. How long this will keep 'America' behind closed doors is uncertain, but if it's all for the purpose of giving Leone's 269-minute film the treatment it deserves, then we can be patient (but let's hope it's sooner rather than later, okay guys?).
