I don't understand why there's such a mystery about the poor state of the print of The Big Sky shown on TCM these days.
The film was originally released at 141 minutes. Soon after, it was cut to 122 to get more theatrical showings when it went into wider release later in 1952. It was this shorter print that eventually went to TV and was the only version shown for over 40 years.
Unfortunately, during that time the deleted 19 minutes were neglected and from the available information all pristine 35mm prints including that footage have been lost. In the late 1990s, TCM began running the "restored" version with the missing 19 minutes back in. But that footage was spliced in from a 16mm print in degraded condition. The substandard footage includes not only the missing 19 minutes, but much of the lead-in material (to cover fade-ins, dissolves and so on) adjacent to those restored sections, even though this footage still exists in good condition. The result is this "hybrid" 141-minute print of very variable quality. (Even the sound and music tracks are marred in the early scene of Jim crossing the river, with some music from another part of the film snipped in to cover an apparently lost bit of the original soundtrack.)
The old VHS was of the 122-minute version (as are Region 2 discs from France and Britain), and its sound and picture were excellent. However, TCM insists on running the film "complete" even though that means having this lousy, spliced-together print.
To get a good DVD of the film, Warner Home Video (which owns the rights to this and most RKO pictures) could either: release a print of the high-quality, 35mm 122-minute version; release a DVD of both, with the degraded 141-minute print on the flip side of the disc; or try to clean-up and restore the 141-minute print as best as possible and release it singly (or with the 122-minute version). Fixing the small piece of the missing soundtrack should be possible (the complete soundtrack exists on an excellent CD), but unless a clean 35mm print including those restored 19 minutes is discovered somewhere, we'll have to make do with the poor stuff, hopefully cleaned up as much as possible. (They did this with the most recent restoration of Metropolis.)
Personally, I got along fine with the 122-minute version. Normally I prefer the complete film, but in fact that extra 19 minutes doesn't add all that much to the narrative, and drags a bit. At this point I'd settle for a good release of the clean 122-minute print.
As to TCM, they still show a print of Hawks's The Thing From Another World with the 7 minutes that were cut from the film in the 1970s restored, but in a very degraded condition from a 16mm print -- even though on the DVD this footage is pristine! TCM has occasionally used substandard prints of films (several Sherlock Holmes movies, for example) that are available in clean copies on DVD. None of this makes any sense, but they do do such things. As for the posters who experienced a problem recording TCM's broadcast a while back, sometimes the channel begins or ends a film at a different time from the one listed, or changes its schedule. I think that's what happened when they missed the film's first 15 minutes.
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