Some of you might be tempted to look at Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time in tribute to Christopher Reeve, who gave one of his better performances in it. I happen to be a sucker for this film, not for the “all” of it but because of a closing sequence that I saw at critics’ screening some 24 years ago….but which I haven’t seen since. I asked about this when I happened to run into Somewhere in Time√ɬ≠s cinematographer Isadore Mankofsky a few months ago at the Newport Beach Film Festival. I told him how much I admired this final sequence — a longish, ambitiously choreographed, deeply moving tracking shot that’s meant to show the viewer what Reeve’s character is experiencing on his passage from life into death. Mankofsky told me that as the film was about to be released some executive at Universal decided that the shot went on too long and trimmed it with a couple of fade-edits. This was vandalism, pure and simple. Mankofsky said as far as he knew the original cut of this closing sequence no longer exists…but he wasn’t entirely sure.