Diddlebach Again

The 1950 abridgment of a 1947 film

I’ve mentioned the 1947 cinematic flop The Sin of Harold Diddlebach on this blog twice before: once in short a post largely devoted to not being sure why I liked it and a year later noting that it fit into a pattern of behavior where I binge particular artistic works, not always knowing why I do so¹¹ Incidentally I’ve warmed cognitively to the movie since then: I still watch it more than I can explain, but I no longer agree with most of the negative things I wrote about it eleven years ago: it’s not a masterpiece and it has some issues, but it is a clever and enjoyable piece..

A few weeks ago I showed this film to a friend, mostly as a way of providing context to this particular peculiarity of mine, and afterward we looked up some details about it and learned that 3 years after its initial release an edited version called Mad Wednesday was released and also flopped. So I found a copy of Mad Wednesday and gave it a watch. After the untold times I’ve watched Diddlebach, I was able to notice changes made in Wednesday with some ease. And those changes (nothing larger, no take-home message) are the topic of this post.

Mad Wednesday is an abridged version of The Sin of Harold Diddlebach with about a quarter of the original runtime removed (1:16 instead of 1:29, including credits and so on). The only additions are (1) new title cards with a montage preview of some scenes from the movie, (2) Diddlebach briefly considering feeding a horse to lions, (3) Wormy suggesting getting dunk as a solution to their financial woes, and (4) a strange singing horse added after the movie ends with lyrics designed to re-pose the closing line of dialog (and the name of the 1950s version of the movie) in a cruder light.

The specific cuts primarily all dialogue, trimming most of the longer back-and-forth repartee to just the minimum needed to keep the plot going. There is one piece of action cut too, part of the tension building that precedes Harold’s falling off of a skyscraper while chasing a lion. In general, it feels like the editor wanted to remove the verbal humor and character building and leave only situational and physical humor.

In particular, I noticed the following cuts:

Most of the initial drunk scene, including the back-and-forth with the officer and the arrival of the tailor
Most of the interaction with his sister
Diddlebach asking the cat lady if she’d take some off his hands
Diddlebach noting he was in love with the same girl all his life and Wormy’s response
The entire planning process in the carriage
The visit to Lynn Sargent and need to re-plan when it fails
The reference back to the planning when the first bank visit fails
Some of the tripping stampede in the first successful bank visit
Some of the lion on a skyscraper action
Most of the dialog in jail
Diddlebach’s howl when passing out surrounded by bankers
Most of the final carriage dialog

One of the additions does help the movie: after Wormy suggests more drinking Diddlebach says That’s the trouble with ideas that come out of the bottle. When the bottle’s gone, so is the idea. It’s not a great line, but it does at least make it clear that the movie is about sober solutions to problems generated by drink, not the other way around, which is not entirely obvious from the 1947 edit. But otherwise, I much prefer the 1947 edit to the 1950 edit.

One other thing I noticed: in order to cut the longer-take dialogues without a jump cut, they often added a clip of the Thomas looking in the cab’s hatch. Having noticed that I saw a couple of similar clips in the 1947 edit which makes me wonder if more was removed there; perhaps the context for the concluding observation in the concluding scene of both edits that Sargent already had the idea of a free circus, which comes out of the blue and sits as an unexplained nonsequitor in both surviving edits.