Why wait for the exclusive director's cut of your favorite movie on video? Edit it yourself — at home, trimming overlong scenes, even deleting entire sequences or whole characters, just by pressing a few buttons on your VCR's remote control. Here are some movies on cassette that approach perfection, save for one nagging — now electronically fixable-flaw.
RIO BRAVO (1959)
*Offending Element: A sore-thumb
musical number. Howard Hawks' leisurely horse opera, featuring John
Wayne as Sheriff John T. Chance and Dean Martin as the drunken Dude,
can do without teen idol Ricky Nelson accompanying himself on guitar
to ''Cindy.'' *Solution: Excise the segment, which only serves to
stop this atmospheric Western dead in its tracks.
HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE
(1964) *Offending Element: Its insane length. Trashy treat though the movie is, 134
minutes is too much for this tale of the titular accused murderer-turned-recluse (Bette Davis) who's being pushed over the edge by
people close to her. *Solution: Cut out two sequences — a soft-focus
flashback as Charlotte is about to turn the last bend to complete
battiness and Charlotte's discovery of her lover's severed hand — which throw the suspense out of whack and scream to be chopped out.
NEVER CRY WOLF (1983)
*Offending Element: The terrible
ending. Carroll Ballard's languorous, blindingly beautiful narrative
of a biologist (Charles Martin Smith) sent to the Arctic to study
wolves deserves better. *Solution: Remove the avalanche of
heavy-handedness toward the finish when hunters arrive and destroy
most of the researcher's beloved lupine family. While you're at it,
try trimming most of an unbelievably lengthy sequence involving a
herd of caribou.
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)
*Offending Element: Nicolas Cage's performance as the husband. His acting in his uncle
Francis Coppola's comic fantasy, about a 43-year-old woman
(Kathleen Turner) who travels back in time to relive her teenage
years, is wildly overblown and self-indulgent. *Solution: Cut out the
scene in which he chats with Peggy Sue's father (Don Murray). As a
matter of fact, hack away at the rest of Cage's screen time.
HOPE AND GLORY (1987)
*Offending Element: A criminally boring grandfather character played by Ian Bannen.
Director John Boorman's marvelous memoir of a 7-year-old boy
(Sebastian Rice Edwards) growing up in England during World War II is
marred by too much action centered on his irascible granddad, with
whom the family goes to live. *Solution: Seven deadly minutes
eminently lend themselves to editing, including a protracted
breakfast sequence in which the mean old coot tries to shoot a rat,
most of a veddy dull cricket game, and some extremely nasty comments
about women.
MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)
*Offending Element: Dumb,
wrongheaded scenes scripted in rhyming couplets. Director Gus Van
Sant pushes the connection to Shakespeare's Henry IV past the max in
this oddball road movie about a pair of Portland street hustlers
(River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves). *Solution: Delete the scenes between
Reeves and his Falstaff-like surrogate father (William Richert).
