The Long and the Short of it
Oct 16th, 2007 by milo
In the innocent days of my youth, I had little time for intangibles such as artistic quality.
For me, the worth of a film was directly related to how long it was. Any film that tipped over the two hour mark gained merit simply by virtue of the attention span it demanded of me to sit through it.
After a while, things started to get a bit crazed - not content with Solaris (159 minutes), I upgraded to Lawrence of Arabia (227 minutes), and soon I was watching 2001 and 2010 back to back at the local IMAX (247 minutes total).
The apogee - or nadir, if you will - was Heimat, an epic so long they had to break it into two hour episodes to prevent viewers from developing schizoid embolisms due to the effects of sleep deprivation.
Back then, of course, I was alone in my obsession. The idea that summer blockbusters would one day routinely approach, or even tip over, the 3 hours mark, seemed like a mad dream.
I suspect the trend may have started with Titanic (189 minutes). Urologists now agree that 1997 was the year in which ruptured bladders became a common complaint, as filmgoers desperately tried to hang on to their nephrons long enough to find out whether the big boat would sink, or whether Jack and Rose would make it to New York and start a new life together.
But Titanic at least had an interval, a courtesy abandoned by Peter Jackson in his paean to continence, the aptly-named Lord of the Rings.
It is a sad state of affairs when a filmmaker has less regard for humanity than James Cameron, but Jackson’s trilogy of films, with their ever-expanding running time (178, 179 and 201 minutes), can only have been designed to boost sales of Pro-Plus, inflatable cushions, orthopaedic back-rests, and those funny eye-clamps used in Clockwork Orange.
To be fair, the Lord of the Rings films were based on very big and heavy books, and took far less time to watch than Tolkien’s humourless tomes would have taken to read.
But with two of this years blockbusters, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Carribbean 3: At World’s End, the sheer volume of celluloid consumed borders on sheer wantonness.
But can it really take a genetically mutated spider-boy 140 minutes to do anything? And in 169 minutes you could sail to the End of the World in real-time.
And I have no patience for the excuse that, as they were making the third films in their respective trilogies, Directors Verbinski and Raimi had to go the extra mile (of celluloid).
Kieslowski somehow managed to deliver his Three Colours Trilogy without ever cresting 100 minutes per film.
Maybe it’s a testament to how full and busy my life is, or how battered my synapses have become, that I am more impressed by films that can say what they have to say in as short a time as possible.
Compare the 1933 King Kong with its 2005 remake. In less than 100 minutes, our vintage Kong tangled with a tyrannosaur, a plesiosaur, a pterodactyl, a host of biplanes, and a shrieking blonde, and still had time to sniff his fingers.
In 2005, it took 187 long minutes for the monkey to hit the deck, and much like the critic who shouted “burn! burn!” at Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc, I was secretly wishing Kong would put the damn broad down and “jump! jump!”.
I think the trend towards longer films is running in the wrong direction. I agree with the sentiments of those poor Sony execs who predicted (back in the 1980s) that films wouldn’t get much longer than the 90 minute mark, and designed their newfangled Betamax cassettes accordingly.
The rest, as they say, is history (the fact that you couldn’t record a full movie off the telly using Betamax was the main reason the format flopped).
So now I am on the hunt for great films less than an hour and a half. Here’s a starter: Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) at a mere 80 minutes. Can anyone suggest any more?
I must say, a film in my house has got a much better chance of being watched if it’s under 2 hours. King Kong (2005) is, obviously, one exception and I take great offence at you encouraging monkey suicide!
Good short films that I saw recently - Good Night, and Good luck (93 mins), Night of the Demon (95 mins).
Picture the scene - There I am suffering through Pirates of the Caribbean III (a trip to see Casino Royale having fell through due to the strange notion of the better movie selling out that night). Now, as my friends will attest, I love all things Pirate-y - my adherance to International Talk Like A Pirate Day every Sept 19th is proof of this - but I was desperately waiting for the film to end. I have a strange desire never to walk out of any movie (in fact, I hold it as a badge of honour that the only film I could not bear too watch all the way through was Coyote Ugly) but then the words ‘INTERMISSION’ came up on screen and I realised that I was going to have to sit through another half of this soul-sucking nonsense. It almost killed me and only bribery with a large bucket of ice-cream kept me in place.
My entirely apposite recommendation for a good film in less than 90 minutes is Brief Encounter
Re. The Lord Of The Rings . . . there may have been no interval, but research shows that most people choose to use the elf-focussed sections of the film to relieve their bladders. Surely this must have been the plan - I can see no other reason for the elf-bits.
Re: the Elves - I concur. Though JRR Tolkien’s writing is not immune to criticism, the fact he had the foresight to work toilet breaks into his narrative speaks volumes.
Great short films? I agree with you on ROPE. My suggestion? Look at Val Lewton:
CAT PEOPLE 73 mins, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE 70 mins, THE BODYSNATHER 77 mins, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE 69 mins, THE LEOPARD MAN 66 mins (it’s barely a feature! runs out of steam part way, but it’s got a great first half), BEDLAM 79 mins.
Elsewhere, EYES WITHOUT A FACE clocks in bang on 90 mins, though if you’ve got a UK VHS, it might run a little shorter, what with the PAL conversion… in the ‘Guilty Pleasures’ box, you might try THE MONSTER SQUAD with clocks in at 79 mins. Or in classic noir PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET 77mins or DETOUR at just 67 mins… All of them absolutely brilliant, and the former titles tie in quite nicely with horror double bill theme of Julians blog…
Mind you, Epics with interval are a grand thing in my mind, and I seem to be at odds with you, since TITANIC when i saw it, didn’t have an interval, while, LORD OF THE RINGS did (at least at the cinema I was working in at the time, since you couldn’t fit that much celluloid on a single projector reel for the kind of projectors that we had). The self decided place was the arrival at Rivendel, tho we were later informed that if a cinema necesitated an interval that they were required to put it at the reel change that saw Aragorn and the Hobbits reaching Weather top and starting to cook bacon and stuff… which was a bit awkward since that meant when you switched back on, with people still settling down and running back from the lavvy etc, you were thrust right back into a moment of near peril without so much as a by your leave, nor any chance to settle and get back in to things. Oh well, I’m sure New Line knew what they were doing…
Intervals are definitely something worth cherishing. My local cinema has the same one-projector-problem, and it actually made some interesting cliffhangers in The Lord of the Rings. With only one projector you actually need two intervals for a film like that, and the second one occured in the Mines-of-Moria sequence, at the exact moment when something fiery shows up down the hall, and Legolas says: “What’s that?” Ta-daaaah: INTERMISSION (organs, etc.) And you have to wait for a full fifteeeeen minutes before you can hear Gandalfs answer: “A Balrog!!”
Quite nervy, and it took you right back to the days of Saturday matinée serials!
Perhaps filmmakers should start to think in cliffhangers again, and put in loooong intermissions, for the audience to drink, eat, go to the lavatory, and still stay excited!! (There’s something for Tarantino’s next stunt!)
Do documentaries count? If so, I would vote for Night and Fog, which manages to condense all the salient information about the holocaust into just over thirty minutes - I don’t think I’ve seen anything more perfectly concise!
Re. ‘The Long and the Short of it’
Some films that are very Great and very SHORT!
Zero de Conduite (Jean Vigo) 41 mins!
She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman) 66 mins
The Red Badge of Courage (John Huston) 69 mins
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir) 76 mins
The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale) 75 mins
I would like to include the stupendous ‘Dekalog’ by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Although, strictly speaking, it was a TV series, each of the ten stories is a mini masterpiece of cinema - two of the stories of course had been released theatrically in longer versions but even they were both still under 90 mins!
Thanks for all those suggestions! I am taking notes…. I’ll try to include a final list in a future blog. Also, can I add The Wild Blue Yonder? Werner Herzog’s slightly demented sci-fi monologue has a depth well beyond its 81-minute running time.
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