The Mercenaries / Dark of the Sun (1968 Jack Cardiff)

Was always turning up on ITV in the seventies in a cut print under the name 'The Mercenaries', until one night - the sixth of November 1982 - it was actually screened in its quite nasty unedited 100 minute version. Despite the debate the Warners Archive 'remastered' DVD is also a cut version - has in fact a different ending. I should have realised from near the beginning where Taylor's 'son of a bitch' has the 'bitch' edited: that's how sanitised it is. So that's a major fucker.

For all the people that swear it isn't, consider the poster / DVD cover:

OK, if it isn't edited, where's the scene where Rod and Yvette are kissing (shown here twice)? And what about the scene showing a woman being taken by soldiers?

The BBFC lists its original run time of 100 minutes 25 seconds (uncut). I'll have to go and have a look in the BFI archive to see if they have the original British print.

I made a trip to the Congo, and met reporters who lived through all the troubles there [following independence in 1960], and they showed me photographs of the real thing - I wish they hadn't...The savagery was unbelievable. . When the film came out the critics all thought the violence was so terrible that they couldn't bear to watch it. They were really appalled by its excessive violence. I could only say to those that I met that my film was nothing like the real thing - it was a quarter, a fifth, a sixteenth of the violence that really happened.

'Conversations with Jack Cardiff' by Justin Bowyer.

Good cast: Rod Taylor, Kenneth More, Yvette Mimieux, Jim Brown, Peter Carsten, André Morell

Shot by Ted Scaife, music by Jacques Loussier, cut by Ernest Walter, from a Wilbur Smith novel. Actually filmed in Jamaica.