It's weird how people think this movie is trash.
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — A Kiss Before Dying
JackForrester — 17 years ago(September 05, 2008 05:50 PM)
It's weird how people think this movie is trash.
I actually thought it was a great thriller.
But anyway, how come there's no deleted scenes on the DVD?
I saw a couple of scenes that weren't in the movie on the trailer, like a scene of Jonathan and Ellen visiting the family's copper factory. A scene where Jonathan throws a man of a very high place on the factory (not Dorrie's death, this was a guy).
The book in which this movie's based ends its story in the family copper factory, I was really curious to see these scenes in the movie.
Can't believe they're not in the extras. Universal really sucks. -
theapayne — 16 years ago(January 25, 2010 11:58 AM)
I, too, love this movie! I was wondering the same thing about the guy Jonathan throws off something tall at the factory. I remembered that scene from the trailer and wondered when I saw it in the theater back in 1991 why it wasn't in the movie.
Yes, extras such as deleted scenes would have been great! -
filmklassik — 13 years ago(July 13, 2012 04:18 PM)
Here's my two cents having read the book many times and just seen the movie again for the first time in 20 years.
SPOILERS
I think the current ending with Sean Young going back to Corliss's childhood home in Pennsylvania was a reshoot.
I think the movie was originally supposed to have ended at the copper factory the way the novel did (and there's still dialogue about their upcoming visit to the factory in the finished movie but the promised visit never transpires).
I think the ending at the factory was shot and tested badly, after which the studio panicked and had writer/director James Dearden draft a new (and unbelievably lame and unsatisfying) climax.
I too would enjoy seeing the original "director's cut" of the picture. Can't be any worse than the cut we have now. -
filmklassik — 13 years ago(July 13, 2012 04:26 PM)
Yeah, I think my theory about the badly conceived reshot ending of the movie is correct. Here's an article from a June 1990 edition of The New York Times which begins with a description of the filming of what was surely the original climax.
FILM; James Dearden's Latest Fatal Attraction
By SUZANNE CASSIDY
Published: June 24, 1990
A dusty amber light fills the air in Stage H at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex, where, high in the rafters, in what is supposed to be the windowed cab of a crane, the American actress Sean Young stands staring down into a massive steel cauldron below. She does not speak; she barely moves. She just looks down, watching.
Watching her, from the floor of the cavernous studio, is the English writer and director James Dearden, kneeling on the concrete floor, staring into a monitor. At the far end of the studio, huge tongues of flame lick upward from wall-mounted flame throwers. Bluish smoke mixes with the amber dust; the smoke, the dusty light and the flame combine to give the place a nether-worldly feeling. And still Ms. Young stares down into the cauldron.
Most of this scene, which takes place in a copper mill, has already been shot at a steel mill in Wales. But there are close-ups and other shots Mr. Dearden still wants. He said he knows exactly what he wants from each scene, and he'll persist on this one until he is satisfied.
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Call it an obsession. That's what this film, ''A Kiss Before Dying,'' based on the novel by Ira Levin - who also wrote ''The Stepford Wives,'' ''Rosemary's Baby'' and ''The Boys From Brazil'' - is all about.
In fact, obsession has been prominent in much of Mr. Dearden's work. He wrote the screenplay for ''Fatal Attraction,'' the now-famous morality tale of the 1980's that starred Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. After ''Fatal Attraction,'' he directed ''Pascali's Island,'' about a restless Turkish spy, played by Ben Kingsley, and his relationship with a pseudo-archeologist from England. He also wrote and directed ''The Cold Room,'' a psychological thriller starring George Segal, which was released in the United States in 1984 but went straight to video in Britain.
At first glance, this 40-year-old writer-director with longish, wavy hair and a dimpled chin does not look like someone who would immerse himself in obsession, perfidy and pain. The son of Basil Dearden, the director who made such British classics as ''The Blue Lamp'' (1950) and ''Khartoum'' (1966), Mr. Dearden read French literature at Oxford University.
But according to Sean Young, Mr. Dearden has ''a fascination with morbidity.''
''He seems to love to put contradictions within characters and then see how they react,'' she said. ''Like David Lynch, he is very interested in the weird line where things seem to be normal, but there's an underlying tragedy.''
''I like obsessive characters,'' admitted Mr. Dearden, in an interview in a closet-sized dressing room at Shepperton Studios, some 15 miles southwest of London. Tipping his chair back against a wall and bracing his legs against a dressing table, he continued, ''Pascali was an obsessive. So, obviously, was the character Glenn Close played. Jonathan is the ultimate obsessive.'' Along with Ellen and Dorothy Carlsson, sisters both played by Ms. Young, the character of Jonathan Corliss (also known as Jay Faraday), played by Matt Dillon, is central to ''A Kiss Before Dying.'' It is his obsessions around which the film twists and turns.
Like the New York lawyer portrayed by Michael Douglas in ''Fatal Attraction,'' Jonathan exhibits a will to have it all. ''He is the ultimate version of the kind of go-getter of the 1980's taken to the nth degree,'' said Mr. Dearden, ''where he literally stops at nothing to get what he wants.'' But unlike Mr. Douglas's character, Jonathan is villain, not victim. The product of a poor, working-class home, he becomes obsessed with the family and fortunes of Thor Carlsson, a copper magnate played by Max von Sydow. Ruthlessly, he pursues one of Thor Carlsson's twin daughters, Dorothy, who falls in love with him, but then dies in an apparent suicide. Convinced that her twin's death was no suicide, Ellen Carlsson sets out to find the truth, meeting and marrying, along the way, Jonathan Corliss, who is known to her as Jay Faraday.
''When I was re-creating the character of Ellen, I thought, she's just like a Kennedy would be,'' said Mr. Dearden, ''In fact, when I was writing the script, I just thought of those big American families who have so much money, so much power and so much tragedy.''
When he was writing the character of Jonathan, he said, he was driven by wondering ''how far the audiences would accept this character, would sympathize with him.'' To that end, he has also filmed the movie so that it oscillates from Jonatha