 The original version (the one restored to Criterion Collection DVD and  laserdisc) runs 163 minutes. When Winston Churchill expressed his vehement  dislike for the film, the British distributor, Rank Films, cut it to 140  minutes. The film was chopped to pieces when it was imported to the United  States in 1945, running around 120 minutes (in which the films vital  flashback structure is eliminated and the story is told from beginning to  end). The film was further cut to 90 minutes and ran on public television  often in the 1970s (in the Criterion commentary, Martin Scorsese comments  that this is the version he saw late night when working on New York, New York  (1977)). For years, it was thought that the only existing version was this  90