The Vandals

Federico Fellini happily plunked down in front of his television set one night recently. Italy's government-run TV network was showing I Vitelloni, a vintage Fellini film that examined a quintet of Roman loafers. Basta! Gone was a scene -"a decisive scene" -where the hero is refused a job with a comedy troupe because he is not a homosexual like all the others. "Cutting an indispensable part of a film like this offends me deeply," wrote Fellini to the television network, "and so from now on I'm never letting one of my films be presented on television."

I Vitelloni was cut by only 61 seconds, and only because Italy's television censors find homosexuality a topic unfit for family viewing. In the U.S., though, films pass through the hands of many eager vandals: distributors cut them up for money's sake, television for time's sake, and censors for God's sake.

Customs men and censors make the crudest cuts: the girl's fingers move to the buttons of her blouse, and suddenly it's breakfast. Distributors make deeper cuts after films leave first-run houses, on the simple calculation that the shorter the film, the more times it can be run in any one day. When Rocco and His Brothers arrived here from Italy a year ago, it was a full, pasta-rich 180 minutes long. After a run in New York art theaters, it mysteriously shrank to 147, then pushed off for the rest of the nation as a beggar-thin 95 minutes. Such chopping may be why so many U.S. film goers wonder what New York critics found to rave about.

Television is the roughest surgeon. Trimming feature-length movies to fit into 90-minute afternoon slots (and spare plenty of time for commercials) leaves many films at about half-size -65 minutes. Cutters first remove all sex, violence (which TV saves for its own shows), mistreatment of children and animals, slighting mention of minority groups, profanity. Profanity uttered in the middle of a sentence is blotted over with tape, leaving an uncomfortable "bloop" in the sound track. Cuts in The Cruel Sea somehow made two ships one, left much of the dialogue senseless and many episodes pointless, reduced salty navy talk to tea-cozy delicacy.

Fresh from a triumphant trimming of John Ford's The Quiet Man to 63-minute television size, a cutter explained his craft: "The easiest thing is to take out a full character, but I try to keep the stars in and show what the plot is. I cut parts of the fight and cut the middle out of songs. Then the commercials help in cutting too. After two minutes, people forget what they were seeing."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.