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Old 13th January 2021, 09:58 PM
Michael Brooke Michael Brooke is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2011
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Someone at Warner Bros, as it's their film and their rules. I gather the BFI makes occasional enquiries as to whether they can upgrade their DVD to BD, but they've been rebuffed every time.

And you won't ever get an uncut version without a time machine that can go back half a century - the absolute best you can hope for is the 2004 semi-restoration, which is basically the UK theatrical cut (on the BFI DVD) with the "rape of Christ" and the thigh-bone scene reinserted.

All the other footage removed at the best of Warner Bros and the BBFC in 1971 is believed to have been junked at the time - the only reason those two scenes survive is because Russell was persuaded to remove them before official BBFC submission on the private advice of the BBFC's John Trevelyan. Wrongly, as it turned out, Trevelyan believed that he could get the rest of the film through the BBFC, but he reckoned without the examiners and, more surprisingly, Warner Bros, who also wanted to make substantial cuts, including stuff that the BBFC had no problem with. (There's a fascinating, and lengthy, essay in the booklet of the BFI edition describing in detail what was cut and at whose behest.)
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