Incomplete and Lost Films

Erich von Stroheim's "Greed" (1925), like the Venus de Milo, is acclaimed as a classic despite missing several parts deemed essential by its creator. - Roger Ebert (His reviews contain spoilers, and are best saved 'til after watching a film.)

When film preservationist Henri Langlois showed von Stroheim the surviving footage, he said, "This was like an exhumation for me. In a tiny coffin I found a lot of dust, a terrible smell, a little backbone and a shoulder bone."

Erich von Stroheim's greatest films were cut by studio executives, and hours of film were lost or destroyed. Greed was originally approximately 10 hours, and shortened to 2 hours despite von Stroheim's objections.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of the 4 hour reconstruction of Greed using film stills, and career retrospective of von Stroheim is worth reading after viewing the restored version.

RKO cut 45 minutes of the film and added a happy ending Welles called bullshit; the RKO cuts are lost.

The Vanity Fair article Magnificent Obsession describes the film and the search for the missing footage.

... the production designer, Rashit Safiullin, recalls that Tarkovsky spent a year shooting a version of the outdoor scenes of Stalker. However, when the crew got back to Moscow, they found that all of the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable...

By the time the film stock defect was discovered, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes and had to burn them. Safiullin contends that Tarkovsky was so despondent that he wanted to abandon further production of the film.

After the loss of the film stock, the Soviet film boards wanted to shut the film down, officially writing it off. But Tarkovsky came up with a solution: he asked to make a two-part film, which meant additional deadlines and more funds. Tarkovsky ended up reshooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer... According to Safiullin, the finished version of Stalker is completely different from the one Tarkovsky originally shot. - Wikipedia

The Wizard of Oz has a few deleted or extended scenes. The song, The Jitterbug, was edited together with stills on some releases.
A reprise of Somewhere over the Rainbow set in the witch's castle was deleted.

The Scarecrow's dance to 'If I Only had a Brain' was cut.

You can read more on IMDB.

There's a very interesting movie legend about Scorsese's decision to change the color of the blood.

The negatives of the scene are considered lost.

Stanley Kubrick decided to edit out scenes showing the aftermath of Jack's disappearance, and the scenes are now lost.

The Thief and the Cobbler was decades in the making, before the animator lost creative control. The film was never finished as the animator planned, and it was passed around a few studios who cheapened the film.

The Uncobbled Cut, an unnoficial fan edit, merges the inferior film versions, and makes edits to the films, like making Tack the cobbler a silent character, in an attempt to restore the vision of Richard Williams.

In the original ending, Letty goes mad from guilt after she killed, and wanders the desert to die.

The film was cut to two hours from four hours of footage.

... the studio insisted on a macabre ending and rejected Browning's more melancholy fadeout, which sympathized with the plight of these much-maligned social outcasts. But after the horrified response to the preview screening of Freaks, the studio drastically cut the film from a length of around ninety minutes to just over an hour. According to the authors of Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, "The truncated version jettisoned the horrifying details of the mud-dripping freaks swarming over the tree-pinned Olga Baclanova and pouring into a circus wagon to castrate her lover. Several comic scenes were eliminated, including one of the turtle-girl being amorously pursued by a seal. A rambling epilogue set in a second-story London dime museum called Tetrallini's Freaks and Music Hall...was completely discarded, save for the final shot of Cleopatra quacking; a new prologue was added, featuring a spieling barker....who introduces the "most amazing, the most astonishing human monstrosity of all time." And finally, a second epilogue, evidently intended as a happy....ending, depicted the reconciliation of the midget lovers in Hans' palatial estate, approvingly played by Phroso and Venus." - TCM

They are showing only the skeleton of my dead child - Erich von Stroheim

Martin Scorsese is helping the Leone family get the rights to the last 24 minutes of deleted scenes (source). They only bought the Italian rights; hopefully there's a complete English restoration (Variety).

The original 205 minute version is probably lost.

Lobster Films made the most complete version available now.

La Roue was originally around seven hours and the most complete restoration is around four and a half hours.

The definite version was over 9 hours, and the currently best version, Kevin Brownlow's restoration, is about 5 hours and 30 minutes.

A digitization is underway (New York Times). Unfortunately I do not have the money to see the film restored to its former glory, with triptych scenes showing across 3 screens.

Erich von Stroheim was forced to split the film into two parts. The last known copy of the last half, called The Honeymoon, was destroyed in a fire.

The sound version is lost.

Deaths of many of the actors prevented Lars Von Trier from finishing the trilogy and directing Riget III.

...this rather elaborate piece of slapstick and surrealist tomfoolery was written and directed by Bresson and released in 1934, a full nine years before shooting started on his first feature, Les Anges du péché, and I had been hearing about it for years as an irretrievably lost curiosity. When asked in some interview what the film was like, Bresson had reportedly replied, “Like Buster Keaton, only much, much worse.” But then, after the incomplete film was found, one heard that he was pleased rather than appalled about the recovery. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Kurosawa's 4 1/2 hour film was cut by about 2 hours.

Chaplin didn't finish or release this film; he would have played a different character than the Tramp.

Satoshi Kon was about halfway done with this film when he died. The studio plans on finishing it.

Shooting for the film canceled because of weather and shooting never resumed. The film wasn't edited together in its current release by Renoir. You can see the unedited material on this release.

Hitchcock wanted to film a very violent film with a gay weightlifting rapist and murderer as a protagonist, but was only able to film about an hour of footage.
This isn't Hitchock's film.

Bezhin Meadow was never completed and the last known surviving reels were destroyed from bombing during WWII. The film was reconstructed using film stills.

Soviet censors destroyed most of the film; one scene survives.

Only a few minutes of The Golem survives.

Nazis opposed the film's themes about tolerance and destroyed many copies. Only 50 minutes of the film survives.

Francois Truffaut's first film.

The last known copy of F.W. Murnau's film was lost by actress Mary Duncan (Silent Era)

Considered one of the first million dollar films.

The complete version was restored in 1990.

The director Carl Theodor Dreyer died thinking the film was lost forever, but an original copy was found in a Norwegian mental hospital (Criterion).

John Cassavtes preferred the second version of Shadows, and the first version was considered lost until a film professor tracked down the copy someone lost on a subway.

... there are more than 30 minutes of entirely different scenes that are not in the later version. The discovery gives us a large chunk of new work by Cassavetes - a little like discovering four or five lost Picasso paintings. - (Guardian)

A reconstruction restores around 40 minutes of lost footage.