Find the original version of Cinema Paradiso and see that one

As predicted, as expected, "Cinema Paradiso," a great or nearly great 90-minute movie has no business posing as a three-hour epic - the charm and whimsy of the original is nearly drowned in the schmaltz of the great doomed love affair between Toto, the poor fatherless boy, and the wealthy banker's daughter. The director or producer or distributor or whoever it was who made him cut that material in the first instance was right. It makes the movie not only tedious but all too typical. Remove that entire plot element and you've got a charming picture about a boy from a small town, where they entire social and cultural life centered on the movie theater, who goes off to the big city and becomes famous but loses touch with his origins, and returns home for a funeral and finds that everything has changed - and then that amazing ending, amazing even in the 3-hour epic version of the picture. Stop reading here if you haven't seen it or have forgotten. Toto takes home, to Rome, an old cinema real and finds that his mentor, Alfredo, has made for him a reel of all the outtakes - the kisses and embraces that the priest required him to excise from the old films before screening. The montage is funny and touching - and meaningful, it's all the love that has in a sense been "cut" from Toto's life, and all the things once forbidden that are now sweet in their ordinariness, in other words, the entire past is there, and it moves him and us immensely. Find the original version and see that one.