Selective Memory

My recent reflections on Devil’s Daughter started a train of thought which inevitably led to the subject of ‘lost films’. This is a game that film buffs play quite often, with Orson Welles playing a starring role; the altered ending of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the tantalising fragments of Don Quixote and The Merchant of Venice, the endless will they-won’t they saga over the release of The Other Side of the Wind (1972 – for what it’s worth!). Meanwhile there is Erich Von Stroheim’s vision for Greed (1924), originally lasting ten hours, reduced to four and then coming in, at Irving Thalberg’s insistence, at two hours and twenty minutes. Honourable mentions should also be given to Jerry Lewis’s unreleased holocaust drama The Day the Clown Cried (1972) and to Sam Peckinpah, whose work continues to show up in different director’s cuts.

I also thought about the films we remember from childhood but then later can’t identify. For years I had flashbacks about an Abbott and Costello film in which the duo were bus drivers. I could see them driving the bus into the sea and then my selective memory cut to them being carried away in a storm and left marooned on a desert island. A search through the film guides brought nothing up, but the internet (of course!) revealed this to be Pardon My Sarong, in which after the bus crashes into the water the pair end up working for a playboy on his yacht and then get shipwrecked. I think I prefer the earlier version! Meanwhile I’m haunted by a film about a married woman who gets caught up with a mysterious stranger. Black and white, it feels like it came out of the 1950s. The story is told in flashbacks and voice over and with a hypnotic intensity. Was it an early TV film, a B Movie, a major release? Who knows? Any suggestions welcome!