The gas chamber ending is lost. All that remains are a couple of stills (which are probably what triodelover saw on that doc).

Do you know this for a fact? James Naremore seems to suggest in 'More Than Night' that it is in fact somewhere locked away in Paramount's vaults.

Ed Sikov makes a similar comment in his Wilder biography, but who knows?

Went back and watched the doc on the 2006 SE. The scene is depicted in stills and there are actually three - one of Neff being walked to the gas chamber, one of Keyes as a witness shot through the chamber from the opposite side, and one that may have been intended as a publicity still shot from outside the chamber showing the witnesses including Keyes and Neff slumped over in the chamber's chair. The narration mentions the scene is lost.

Well this finalizes it. Time to get a multi-region blu ray player.

Naremore says, "Until someone rescues this scene from the Paramount vaults, we will never know if it is superior to the current version, and even then there may be room for debate." I think he was just assuming that they still had it. Noirchaelogist Eddie Muller says, "The gas chamber scene has never been found and probably won't be, unless it was smuggled out of the studio, which is not likely. It has been searched for, believe me."

The fact that Uni mentions in the doc that it is lost certainly seems to confirm that.

There were plenty of clips from the film in the doc. There was enough time spent on the alternative ending in a somewhat short documentary that one could conclude that if it was available they would have shown it rather than the stills. I think it was Eddie Muller himself who mentioned that Wilder didn't want this particular ending - didn't even want to film it and make it available- because he feared the studio would force it on him to satisfy the code.

Nick tweeted the menu he's working on for The Lost Weekend. Note that one of the extras is apparently Volker Schlöndorff's Billy, How Did You Do It?. I believe that the original German series included six 45-minute episodes. A very truncated (71 minute) version was shown on TCM in the U.S. as Billy Wilder Speaks. That cut was later released on DVD by Kino with an additional 70 minutes of the excised footage as a bonus feature. If MoC has the entire four and a half hours, it'd be quite a coup.

Also, this:

According to Twitter, it's the BBC Arena edit.

...which was shown in three 60-minute parts in 1992, so considerably longer than the TCM edit, if not quite the length of the German original. Though logic would suggest that the latter was closer to four hours than four-and-a-half, once you factor in things like repeated credits and rounding episode running times up to 45 mins.

Presumably the major advantage of the Arena version is that it's the longest cut available with subtitles already translated - if I remember rightly, large chunks of it are in German (no great surprise, since it's Schlöndorff and Wilder's native language).

So if they keep it in Standard Definition, it wouldn't be too much a problem, right?

Surely something like this would have been filmed in SD in the first place? Anyway, the use of the Arena cut strongly suggests an SD master.

Isn't it about time that we got the full details on these two titles?

And full specs are up. Pretty sweet!

The following item was inadvertently left off of the Double Indemnity special features, and has now been added:

• Audio commentary by film historian Nick Redman and screenwriter Lem Dobbs

That's some welcome news too! Your releases are always much more exciting to dive into when there's a nice amount of extras to look at after the film.

Great news - I was previously comparing the specs to the Universal dvd, and was thinking maybe I was too hasty in unloading mine (without ever having listened to either commentary) - and you all picked up the commentary that sounded more interesting to me (& that beaver raves about). Very exciting.

I'm not sad that the Richard Schickel commentary got snipped. The Dobbs and Redman one was infinitely better. Has anyone heard the Professor Geoff Mayer commentary on the Australian DVD?

dvdbeaver review of "Lost Weekend"
Yup, the BBC documentary is the 3 hour version

These are two lesser Wilders for me but man, with those extras (and having just sold my two-disc Double Indemnity for big bux), how can I resist?

This is the most thrilling 'supplement for a film I have not seen/heard of or had no intention of buying' since Moc's 'La gueule ouverte'.

Ordered!