Tuesday, July 9, 2013

London in the Raw - Theatrical Version vs Mystery Version

Originally, we had no plans to do a comparison of the theatrical and 'mystery' cuts of London in the Raw (1964), the middle entry in Arnold Louis Miller's Mondo London Trilogy (preceded by West End Jungle (1961) and succeeded by Primitive London (1965)), due to the fact that the booklet accompanying the British Film Institute's (BFI) 2009 DVD release thereof included a short essay by Vic Pratt, a fiction curator at the BFI National Archive, entitled "The Long and the short of it" allegedly detailing the differences betwixt the two versions of the film. Eventually, however, curiosity got the better of us and we did end up watching the two versions side-by-side. Our findings are that Pratt's analysis is woefully incomplete, completely ignoring several key differences between the two versions of the film.