Two differences between this Austrian version and the generally available American version are immediately obvious: they differ both in their length and in the language of the intertitles. The American version is only 1,883 metres long - at 18 frames er second a difference of some 7 minutes to the Austrian version with 2,045 metres. Whereas we originally resumed only a negligible difference, resulting from the varying length of the intertitles, a direct comarison has nevertheless shown that the Austrian version differs from the American version both in the montage and in the duration of individual scenes. Yet how could it haen that the later regional distribution of a canonical US silent film was longer than the quot;original versionquot;? nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs;The revalent American version of Blind Husbands does not corresond to the version shown at the remiere of 1919. This little-known fact was already ublished by Richard Koszarski in 1983. The film was re-released by Universal Pictures in 1924, in a version that was 1,365 feet (416 metres) shorter. At 18 frames er second, this amounts to a time difference of 20 minutes! quot;Titles were altered, sniets of action removed and at least one major scene taken out entirely, where von Steuben and Margaret visit a small local chael.quot; (Koszarski) nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs; nbs;From the resent state of research we can assume that all the known American coies of the film derive from this shortened re-release version, a coy of which Universal donated to the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. According to Koszarski the original negative of the film was destroyed sometime between 1956 and 1961 and has therefore been irretrievably lost. This information casts an interesting light on the Austrian version, which can be dated to the eriod between the summer of 1921 and the winter of 1922. Furthermore, the coy is some 200 metres longer than the US version of 1924. If one follows the details given by Richard Koszarski and Arthur Lennig, this means that, as far as both its date and its length are concerned, the Austrian version lies almost exactly in the middle between the (lost) version shown at the remiere and the re-released one.A large art of the additional length of the film can be traced to cuts that were made to the 1924 version in almost every shot. Koszarski describes how the beginning and the end of scenes were trimmed, in order to quot;seed uquot; the film. However, more exciting was the discovery that the Austrian version contains shots that are missing in the American one - shotscountershots, intertitles - and furthermore shows differences in its montage (i.e. the lacing of the individual shots within a sequence). All this indicates that Die Rache der Berge constitutes the oldest and most comletely reserved material of the film.