Hi Dr!
My wife painstakingly created a composite (I say painstakingly because the Spanish print was 16:9 enhanced while the Italian broadcast wasn't... It took a while but she perservered after I gave up after 5 minutes...I guess women really are the brighter species - or I'm just thick! - probably the latter)
I should add that it was you who sent me the uncut version so it wouldn't have been possible without you! Cheers mate, thoroughly appreciated
What's cut?
Hmmm.... just about every single scene of violence is missing.
From what I can remember, here are the cuts:
1) Riot at the football stadium > shot of the guy being punched in the face and the shot of him falling to the floor (oddly enough, later in the police station they show a photo of the dead guy... you wouldn't know this watching the Italian print so it's a very silly cut... What is perhaps bewildering is that it's just some bloke being punched - it's not graphic at all. We didn't even notice it at first when we were watching both prints side by side)
2) In the laboratory > shot of rats fighting each other (we didn't notice this till recently, a split second shot of the dead rat is missing and it's also missing from the composite, no big deal to be honest. I assume it's actually a fake dead rat, still not sure, eitherway if it was real then we did our bit for the RSPCA.
3) Long shot of the Joe Dallesandro's character leaving work and getting a lift from his friends.
4) Screwdriver attack > the Italian print cuts out a few seconds before the truck driver is stabbed, and then resumes after the attack is over.
5) Pimp attack > shot of the screwdriver in the nads' is missing.
6) The entire scene in the warehouse where they kill the two women (one with a forklift truck) is completely missing.
7) Aftermath with the bodies hanging from the statues (not sure if this is actually the pimp/prostitute? I could be wrong here... Anyway, there's a shot of the detective looking up at the corpses hanging on the statues - this is completely missing.
I'm missing one shot I think, but these are the main ones.
What gets me is why these scenes were cut in the first place? Italy isn't notorious for its censorship like dear old England - I can only guess that a) it was cut to be shown in the afternoon (unlikely) or b) it was cut at the time of release in the 1970s. I remember in an interview my wife and I conducted with Enzo Castellari that he described a certain period in the seventies when violence (of any kind) was somehow outlawed in films - this came about when he told me why there aren't any guns used in the Inglorious Bastards (is that true?) I can only guess this period really didn't last long (months? a year?) and so Fango Bollente was caught up in this mess - this might also explain why it has never been released on video/dvd in Italy. I dunno... it's just speculation.
Btw/ Let me know if you want a copy? It came out quite well to be honest - you can also hear it in Italian so you don't have to suffer the terrible English dubbing.
