In the late ’90s and early ’00s, Walter Murch became the most famous film-editor around. That’s partly because of some of the weighty films on his résumé—sound-work on The Conversation and The Godfather: Part II; editing (and re-editing two decades later) Apocalypse Now; a 1998 cut of Welles’ Touch of Evil—and the awards on his mantelpiece: Oscars for his sound-mix for Apocalypse Now and for his sound-mixing and film-editing for Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient in 1996. But it was also because of a 2002 book by Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. And yet much of the cutting-room detritus from Murch’s revision-project then, Minghella’s Civil War epic Cold Mountain (2003), adapting Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel, is a profound, regrettable loss.

The film opens in July 1864, in Petersburg, Virginia, where Union soldiers have laid explosives under the Confederate Army’s dugouts. That’s where battle-weary W. P. Inman (Jude Law) awaits orders. The blast rips clothes off men’s backs and shreds flesh; the maelstrom of blood, guts, and filth—as the Northern soldiers attack in a chaotic swell, only to find themselves below steep dirt embankments running up to their Southern foes’ trenches—is sickening, powerful cinema. Later, Inman, injured in a raid, deserts the Confederate side to return to Cold Mountain, North Carolina, and his sweetheart Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman). His Odyssey-like trek home through the Appalachians to his waiting Penelope brings: a Circe-like old woman who rescues and nurses him; the siren-call of seduction one night in a too-welcoming homestead; the Calypso-like temptation of war-widow and single mother Sara (Natalie Portman); the threat of roaming, raiding Union soldiers; a lecherous preacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman). In Cold Mountain, lower-class Ruby Thewes (Renée Zellweger) has shown up to tend Ada’s farm, saving it from ruin, but Teague (Ray Winstone) has taken over the town—he lusts after Ada and kills any returning deserters, deeming them traitors.

The final version, though, largely neglects the issue of slavery that rankled at the socio-economic heart of the Civil War and tends to evade concerns with race, apart from showing Ada and Inman, especially, as always kind to black people. But in the first deleted section, from early on in the film—“Scene 2: Cold Mountain Chapel”—a townsman questions one young man, to his face, about whether he’s going off to fight for “the South” or for “King Cotton”. Then, in the cut-out “Scene 12: Battlefield”, as Inman looks on silently, a fellow Confederate soldier keeps attempting, with one after another from a pile of discarded guns, to kill a black man (“Where you think you goin’, jigaboo?”) crawling away from a pile of bodies. The third one he tries is loaded and the helpless man’s shot dead. That scene exposes

Inman’s complicity in Southern racism while equating the guns and bodies—as if these men, especially Negroes, were being used simply as tools of war, so cheaply and easily dumped and forgotten afterwards. In another outtake, “Scene 53: Hospital By The Sea”, Inman, amid other white soldiers convalescing on the seashore with the help of black servants, watches as former slaves trudge along a road with all their possessions. Inman’s helped

out of the ebbing surf into which he’s hobbled by an attentive black man—so, some of these Negroes, their enslavement being what Inman and all his

fair-skinned comrades fought to maintain, are still tending to them in their rehabilitation, while other Negroes wander on, searching (as if their collective plight is more truly representative of a losing, and lost, South). These scenes, flecked with brutality and lyricism, mixing pathos and metaphor, dramatically expose the blind spots of a hypocritical white Confederacy . . . yet they were excised. (Two of the other scrapped bits develop the tender affection, and bridge the class gulf, between Ada and Ruby on the homefront—in one instance, they even sleep cheek-to-cheek out in the cold.) Some of the film’s disturbing power was leached here by the puzzling removal of scenes which dwell on the primary motive for the war; instead, the film increasingly foregrounds a heterosexual romance, with the conflict and its context pushed to the distance.

In Minghella and Murch’s audio-commentary, the editor seems to partially rationalize his cutting of the convalescence scene as a necessity of character and rhythm (a letter from Ada means he must, “Lazarus”-like, arise and come quickly). But there’s no mention of the social character or political rhythms of the time and place—that is, history. (Generally, the emphasis in the commentary is personal, not political—the stress is on production, character, and emotion, not on politics, even though this was the epoch of America’s greatest crisis!) In Murch’s conversations with Ondaatje, he implies that a finished film is often the result, ultimately, of an editor, who “works at both the macroscopic and the microscopic level[s] . . . ranging from deciding how long precisely each shot is held, to restructuring and repositioning scenes, and sometimes to eliminating entire subplots.” And so, in that supreme position, he “is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw.” In the case of Cold Mountain, though, it distinctly feels as though a few pieces are missing.

Works Cited

Cold Mountain. Directed by Anthony Minghella. Audio-commentary by Minghella and Walter Murch. Miramax, 2003. 2-disc collector’s edition DVD [including deleted scenes].

Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Knopf, 2002.

The author, a professor of film studies, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All film stills are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.