Of the six previous movies I'd watched in this series, each was the same version of the movie I'd seen previously.
That streak was broken with Das Boot, my #124 on Flickchart. (Or The Boat, as it was called on Amazon, where I ended up renting it. Way to make a movie sound less interesting than it actually is.)
When I first saw Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film in April of 2019, I was worried about its notorious length. And then I found that the notorious length was only the director's cut of the movie. The regular cut was only a reasonable two hours and 30 minutes. And given its ranking, obviously I loved it.
The director's cut adds another hour to that, and the director's cut was the only version I could find today when I wanted to watch it again.
I don't mean literally today, I mean "today" in the general sense. I actually watched it across Friday and Saturday.
I thought I had started early enough to watch the whole thing on Friday. It was the last day of school before winter holidays, and considering that my job involves communicating with schools, there wasn't a huge amount to do after about 2. Everyone at the schools is just trying to get the hell out of there for two weeks.
So I threw on the movie about 3:30, figuring I could remain at my post for the last hour of my workday and watch the first hour of the movie, even with its subtitles, while keeping one eye on my emails. Then I'd have enough time before dinner to finish watching.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way. My older son had his first school formal on Friday night, and I needed to deliver him there by 6. That kind of threw me off the pace, and then it was dinner, and then I watched Stranger Things and Pizza Movie as I told you about in a blog post a few days ago.
I finally finished Das Boot on Saturday afternoon between 4 and 5 o'clock.
The piecemeal way I watched it didn't help, but the real thing that made me like Das Boot less this time -- not a huge amount less, but definitely less -- was the extra hour of material. Which I probably could have predicted, considering that I rarely prefer a director's cut of a movie I already love, and in most cases try not to watch them at all.
Das Boot's director's cut is particularly problematic, though, in terms of separating it from the original. And to illustrate this, I'll use the example of another director's cut that I actually haven't seen.
The thing I've heard about the director's cut of Apocalypse Now -- one of them, since I guess there are two -- is that there's this long sequence on a plantation. It's 20 minutes of footage that otherwise does not exist in the version we're most familiar with. As such, it's easy to note when you've come across that footage and assess whether it strengthens or weakens the rest of the movie. Perhaps more importantly, it's easier to pull that section out entirely and sort of ignore it in making an assessment about the film on the whole.
There was no way for me, me personally, to tell what made up the extra hour of footage in Das Boot. The whole movie takes place on a submarine, save three shorter sections, one each at the start, middle and end. And I feel quite certain those three sections are all in the version I saw in 2019. So that meant that the hour's worth of extra material just blended into a general indistinct stew of claustrophobic sub scenes.
Was it extra content in set pieces that were already in the shorter version? Was it new set pieces? Having seen the movie only once, I didn't know, but there being no obvious lines of demarcation, like the plantation scene in Apocalypse Now, made it impossible to tell.
The effect, though, was quite clear. The whole thing felt like reduced stakes to me. There were any number of scenes where the boat is getting shaken around by depth charges that break lightbulbs, such that the significance of any scene individually was totally lost. It made me wonder why they'd even bothered to shoot different scenes where essentially the same thing happens.
However, watching a director's cut does have a clear benefit: It makes you appreciate the original movie, and particularly that movie's editing, even more.
Now that I know that these superfluous scenes existed, and that someone deemed them unnecessary to the film most people saw at the time, I have a renewed respect for those decisions made. And sometimes, a renewed skepticism about the director, though that's a minor complaint.
Indeed, the idea of a director's cut suggests that the director felt hard done by the original cut, and wanted to show his "true vision." That makes sense in a situation like the Apocalypse Now plantation sequence, which is a truly different element in the film. It doesn't make sense with yet another scene of the sub emerging intact after taking another fusillade of depth charges. Rather, it kind of makes you wonder if those people delivering the depth charges on the surface were just really bad at their jobs.
I've spent most of this post throwing mild shade at Das Boot. It's not really deserved. These are still great underlying materials, and I will still look forward to my next viewing of the abbreviated, theatrical version. I just don't need to see this version again.
And the set pieces that do distinguish themselves -- the opening debauchery at the nightclub that leads to everyone getting sick, the initial tense testing of the submarine's dive capabilities, the middle sequence where they go ashore and are reluctantly feted by other German military, the bailing of the boat and desperate hope to get it surfaced after it gets grounded on the ocean floor, and finally, the gut punch ending -- are all just as good as they ever were.
Next up in July? Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet from 1955.
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