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1 20 EDITING
scene was to go where. As those who have seen this film will know, the film begins with scenes showing how the officers illtreat the sailors, and how the meat served out to the men is crawling with maggots. When the men respectfully protest, their spokesmen are seized and sentenced to death by drumhead court-martial. All hands are ordered on deck to witness the execution, the condemned men are brought out, a firing squad marches in — but at the last moment the firing squad turn their rifles against the officers. Mutiny. Fighting on the ship, fighting ashore. The rest of the fleet are ordered to quell the mutiny, but the crews of the other warships allow the mutineers to escape with their ship. Such is the sequence in the original film.
All the Scandinavian wanted was to take out the courtmartial and execution sequence, making it appear that the sailors had mutinied and shot their officers or flung them into the sea, not because their mates were to be put to death, but because there had been maggots in the food. After this the film was to proceed unimpaired until the end, when the rest of the fleet appears. And now the execution scene was to be cut in, so that instead of the mutineers steaming away undefeated to Rumania (as they actually did in reality) they would appear to have been shot. The connection between savage vindictive death-sentence and the mutiny, the refusal of the firing squad to fire on their mates — all this would have been lost — although not actually omitted — so that the conclusion would have been : there was an unmotivated mutiny in the ship, the officers quickly get the situation in hand, the mutineers get their well-deserved punishment and serve them jolly well right too ! And this by merely transposing a single scene ! Not a shot omitted, not a title changed — just one scene shifted. Such is the power of the scissors.
PICTURES HAVE NO TENSES
Such things could of course happen only to silent films. For pictures have no tenses. They show only the present — they cannot express either a past or a future tense. In a picture itself there is nothing that would compellingly and precisely