Explicit and implicit meanings

Alfred Hitchcock once said: “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” More recently, directors have been keener to display their overblown art than pay attention to audience comfort.

There is a lack of rigour in Hollywood as directors who consider themselves grand auteurs are allowed to produce shaggy-dog story films that meander to a halt. Ninety minutes is a great length for most film. Twice that is self-indulgence unless genius is involved.

Overlong films that had dominated releases in past seasons seemed to have exacerbated the nasty habit.

First and worst in the dock is Peter Jackson with his 166-minute The Hobbit. There is plenty of spectacle for fans but for those not obsessed by Middle Earth, it’s a bit of a task. The problem with The Hobbit is not the ending, which rolls into the next two films dragged out of a slim volume, but the start, which is half an hour of faffing over menus in the Hobbit hole.

Quentin Tarantino is also a well-known offender. His Kill Bill had to be split into two films, with enough content for one.

His latest slave-revenge spaghetti western Django Unchained, is superb and darkly funny but it could have ended half an hour earlier on a high note – which would have deprived us of a ridiculous cameo by Tarantino himself.

At 158 minutes, Les Miserables isa long haul compared with the stage musical, which at least had an interval. Perhaps an interval would solve the popcorn-purchasing problem for cinemas: the remastered re-release of Lawrence of Arabia is almost four hours and retains the traditional intermission.

Of course, some films are bladder-defying brilliant: Lincoln, which Samuel L. Jackson has criticised for being overlong, went by in a flash for me, so compelling was Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as the President. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, also justified its length with tension and attention to detail.

Sometimes, as with Skyfall, audiences really feel that they are getting their money’s worth with a long running time – if the content stays sufficiently compelling. And, while the short film was one of the joys of the golden age of Hollywood, it should be remembered that big was also beautiful. In 1939, Gone With the Wind clocked in at nearly four hours. – Taken from The Times, published in NST