This Week's Aisle Seat - MAJOR DUNDEE Rides Again

[AndyDursin]

MAJOR DUNDEE's new Arrow edition and a few new releases in this week's column:

https://andyfilm.com/2021/07/08/7-13-21 ... des-again/

[Eric Paddon]

Incredible as it is, there are still a lot of people in the business who just don't want to admit that TT's release of this title was less than satisfying. My old nemesis Kimmel chose to ambush me on HTF (again) because I'd answered someone's question about what was being added about the movie compared to before and he chose to quote an answer from several months back as opposed to the recent one to accuse me of piling on the TT thing.

After pointing out that he was quoting an answer from months back and not the one I had given recently, I then made the rather elementary point that the inadequacies of the TT release are the reason why Glenn Erickson went to the effort to get a new release done and it's impossible to avoid that fact in terms of the discussion if you want to explain coherently why this release is necessary. That also means confronting the fact that a lot of the TT spin that accompanied their release at the time was simply not accurate. I guess for some reason these people equate that with smearing Nick Redman's memory, but if people are going to be properly informed as to why the Arrow release is worth getting, they have to know these things and if it means pointing out how inadequate the TT release was by not including the original score with the original cut of the film (there was a lot of misinformation that suggested the long cut had never existed with the original score, but Erickson's research proves that's false), so be it. TT did a lot of great things but they weren't perfect.

[AndyDursin]

There are many reasons to invest in this Arrow release. Nick hated the original score so it was a very intentional choice on his part not to include it as an option on the longer cut -- in so doing, he took away the choice viewers should've had to make that decision for themselves. That was a real shortcoming no matter how someone may have felt about the original score. As awkward/bad as it is, I have come to prefer it over the Caliendo score, which is just this kind of bland modern orchestral score that doesn't do much of anything on its own.

The Arrow release also has the benefit of new commentaries, and from what I sampled, both of the Glenn Erickson talks are worthwhile.

[Eric Paddon]

Nick was too stubborn to acknowledge that his entire project was nothing more than a glorified fan-edit, and while I have no objections to fan-edits as alternate takes for us to enjoy, under no circumstances should they ever become the definitive studio release of a movie nor should they lead to the suppression of the original version. He tried to dishonestly brush this off by suggesting that the only duty to history was to restore the final butchered US edit, but that was roughly the equivalent of presenting a "Those Were The Happy Times" edit of "Star!". Once the original producer approved long cut re-emerged in 2005 and was presented on DVD with both scores, *no one* ever wanted to see the short cut of the film again.

The one thing Glenn couldn't do in his restoration unfortunately was restore Amiftheatrof's screen credit on the long version because the old DVD release had resorted to a "seamless branching" option in order to see the right credit for which score you chose that doesn't exist here. So even if you chose that score option you still have to see Caliendo's name.