ABC Cut details
The Remastered DVD
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007 VISITS THE BUTCHERS

The ABC Cut of OHMSS deviates from the original narrative even before the gunbarrel has reached its natural end. Prior to the dissolve to the brass Universal Exports sign, the red dot of the gunbarrel fades to a close-up of Bond's booted feet clipping into a pair of ski's and then he's off into the cold night snow.

A disembodied voice - identifying itself as that of James Bond - appears in the soundtrack to explain what 007 is doing skiiing down a not so lonely mountain in the Swiss Alps, pursued by several heavily armed "orange-suited bully boys" in the employ of SPECTO (yes, you read that correctly), the deadly international crime cartel headed by one, Ernst Stavro Blofeld - who is also giving chase.

A severely truncated version of Bond's ski escape plays out with Bond making the relative safety of the village in extremely good time. Hunted by SPECTO goons, Bond finds himself cornered with little hope of survival until the appearance of a delivering angel in the form of Contessa Tracy di Vicenzo, "...or Tracy, as she prefers to be known", as the narration neatly puts it.

Bundling Bond into her little red sports car, Tracey escapes the village as Bond waxes lyrical, via narration, over the circumstances of their very first meeting some months before whilst Bond was motoring in the south of France (sic). The passage of narration is coincident with a visual transition to the described scene from the start of the theatrical version of the film.

Staying with the beach sequence all the way through to the last few frames of the main titles, the narrative wipes back to Bond and Tracey as they enter the town of Felkirsch. The film progresses as normal until Tracey swings off the road into the feed-road of the stock car race whereupon a narrated dissolve takes us back to Bond's arrival at the Hotel Palacio, his second encounter with Tracey and his abduction by Draco's men.

Then it's back, briefly, to the stock car race where Tracey's concern about how her big-end will stand up to the rigours of their predicament leads Bond to wonder how he was going to handle things now that he had arrived at the headquarters of Marc-Ange Draco.

Although staying 'in the past' for Draco's pitch and Moneypenny's solution to the clashing of male ego's in M's office, a reminder that this is the ABC cut of OHMSS appears by way of another brief extract from the stock car sequence, which is inserted prior to the scene of Tracey's arrival at her father's birthday celebrations.

The closing bars of Louis Armstrong's, "We Have All The Time In The World" which underscore the love montage have no sooner commenced when the mood is brutally crushed under the squealing tyres of yet another short snippet from the longest stock car race in history.

A few moments later, Louis Armstrong picks up from where he was so rudely interrupted and Bond breaks into Gumbold's office for a bit of safe-cracking and petty centrefold theft.

The flow of the original narrative takes us to Quarterdeck, the Royal College of Heralds and finally Switzerland, where the spinning of the wheels of agent Sean Campbell's VW Beetle as he follows the sleigh that's bearing-up quite well under the weight of Irma Bunt, Bond and Grunther signals an update on how the stock car race is progressing.

With Bond and Tracy safely extricated from the racetrack, it's back to Bond and Bunt for their journey high into the alps to the mountain-top eyrie of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The film continues as per the theatrical cut until the end of 'Part 1' (Ruby's lipstick-message is revealed on Bond's inner thigh) at which point an ABC station announcer begs the audience return in a week's time for 'Part 2', followed by a few teaser scenes.

Part 2 begins with a recap of Part 1, voiced by the bogus Bond. The recap segues to the OHMSS main titles, which end slightly prematurely to enable a transition to Bond attempting to unlock the door of his Piz Gloria quarters.

From here the film plays without any further flashbacks or naration. The Piz Gloria escape is re-shown in its entirety (censor cuts to fight scenes notwithstanding) and the stock car sequence is also shown uninterrupted.

MISSING SCENES
A few scenes are missing from the ABC version. Some were removed because they were at odds with the ABC edit while others were removed for timeslot considerations.

1. Opening scenes of the Universal Exports plaque and M's office
2. Bond at work in his Piz Gloria room
3. Interchange between Bond and Q at the wedding
4. Bond's first attempt at escape from the wheel-house*

*the edited wheelhouse escape segment in the ABC cut is exactly the same as the segment which appeared in some early home video versions so it is likely that the print which ABC received contained the edited scene.

CENSORED SCENES
In 1976, television stations modified content deemed to be either gratuitously violent or graphically sexual in nature. Cuts were confined to shots as opposed to entire scenes.

All fight sequences were censored to one degree or another. Some fights were trimmed by only a few frames while others had so much cut out that they may as well have been removed altogether.

The scene in which the fate of Bond's fellow agent, Campbell, is revealed is heavily trimmed of lingering shots of the body; lines of dialogue go with it.

Shots and lines of dialogue censored for sexual suggestiveness include:

Removal of a wide shot of Tracy as she comes out of the shadows, holding Bond's gun, affording a generous view of bra and cleavage

Cutting of Bond's description of besant's

Trimming of Ruby's lipstick writing and removal of Bond's 'stiffness' line.

Removal of 007 undressing in front of Ruby

The credits, too, have been tampered with and fadeout prior to the appearance of the "James Bond Will Return in Diamonds Are Forever" title. The music has been edited so that the natural end coincides with the early fadeout.