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This morning Andrew found 1970s tv adaptations of Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Dain Curse (1978) on Tubi or someplace. The former was pretty good, although fairly substantial changes had been made from the Chandler novel, which disappointed me a little, as I’ve always liked the chaos of the original plot. Robert Mitchum’s always fun to watch, although slightly too old to be Marlowe in this story; Harry Dean Stanton by contrast is about sixty years younger than I’m used to seeing him; Charlotte Rampling does a good pseudo-Bacall and Jack O'Halloran (Zog’s cohort in Superman and Superman II) is quite affecting.
The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn, had good acting and production values, but about halfway through I began wondering if I was particularly stupid today or if the plot was particularly hard to follow. A few more scenes and it was clear that the dialogue was referencing major events we hadn’t seen happen, which is when Andrew checked IMDb and confirmed that this had originally been a six-hour mini-series, and the version we were watching was three hours, seven minutes.
It wasn’t just that half the footage had been dropped — I think the abridged version kept all the scenes in which a character spends several days detoxing from morphine, unless that sequence was even longer in the original; and while it was interesting to see the recovery process handled somewhat realistically instead of being skimmed over, that was a part of the plot that the re-editing could have afforded to shorten.
Instead, going by what I could infer from the courtroom scene at the end, they cut out the whole middle section of the story, including a marriage, a kidnapping and at least three or four murders — I’m still not sure whose blood was on the knife the heroine was found, and I think one of the victims was a character we never even met in this cut. Also the big villain reveal, and a subsequent further bombshell that might partly explain the motive, may have been foreshadowed in the original broadcast but they come out of absolutely nowhere here. We spent the courtroom scene yelling what?!
The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn, had good acting and production values, but about halfway through I began wondering if I was particularly stupid today or if the plot was particularly hard to follow. A few more scenes and it was clear that the dialogue was referencing major events we hadn’t seen happen, which is when Andrew checked IMDb and confirmed that this had originally been a six-hour mini-series, and the version we were watching was three hours, seven minutes.
It wasn’t just that half the footage had been dropped — I think the abridged version kept all the scenes in which a character spends several days detoxing from morphine, unless that sequence was even longer in the original; and while it was interesting to see the recovery process handled somewhat realistically instead of being skimmed over, that was a part of the plot that the re-editing could have afforded to shorten.
Instead, going by what I could infer from the courtroom scene at the end, they cut out the whole middle section of the story, including a marriage, a kidnapping and at least three or four murders — I’m still not sure whose blood was on the knife the heroine was found, and I think one of the victims was a character we never even met in this cut. Also the big villain reveal, and a subsequent further bombshell that might partly explain the motive, may have been foreshadowed in the original broadcast but they come out of absolutely nowhere here. We spent the courtroom scene yelling what?!
