- Messages
- 503
- Reaction score
- 428
- Trophy Points
- 73
As released in most places, Max Ophüls' 1952 anthology of three Guy de Maupassant stories plays its three segments as follows, Le Masque, La Maison Tellier then Le Modèle, the long one (a whole hour, nearly 2/3 the runtime) bookened by two that are much shorter. The American release, in addition to replacing the French narration with an English one by Peter Ustinov (but leaving the rest of the dialogue alone), swapped the order of the second and third segments, ending the film on a less-melancholy note.
This version is unavailable, and the absence of the Ustinov audio (beyond a brief section on the 2008 Criterion DVD) means that it cannot be recreated with commercially available materials (let's hope that there are some prints in a vault somewhere). This little project is the next-best thing, changing the order but leaving all the dialogue in French, a single tiny section (under 4 seconds) of which has been removed as this would have clashed with the change.
The only slightly tricky aspect is the removal of the "Fin" ending card from the third (now second) segment. While the area can be masked off and replaced with clean background, the film movement is making alignment quite tricky, also need to match the fade to black.
This version is unavailable, and the absence of the Ustinov audio (beyond a brief section on the 2008 Criterion DVD) means that it cannot be recreated with commercially available materials (let's hope that there are some prints in a vault somewhere). This little project is the next-best thing, changing the order but leaving all the dialogue in French, a single tiny section (under 4 seconds) of which has been removed as this would have clashed with the change.
The only slightly tricky aspect is the removal of the "Fin" ending card from the third (now second) segment. While the area can be masked off and replaced with clean background, the film movement is making alignment quite tricky, also need to match the fade to black.
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