Some of the most violent scenes of The Battle of San Pietro have been cut off the film before release. All these scenes, as an incredible amount of unedited materials from many other W.W.II documentaries, are preserved at the National Archives in Washington. The print we are showing finally gives the film its photographic quality and include a selection of those “cut-off” scenes, in order to show which kind of film The Battle of San Pietro could have been.

“Huston first unveiled The Battle of San Pietro to a screening room filled with his superiors and other army officers during October 1944. The reaction was nearly unanimous: Members of the audience began to walk out about three-quarters of the way through the documentary. […] The controversy surrounding The Battle of San Pietro actually heated to a level that the Army’s chief of staff and newly appointed five-star general, George C Marshall, asked to see the film. His reaction to the subsequent viewing was generally positive […]. General Marshall did, however, suggest a number of cuts, including the shot of the bloodied boot and more significantly the entire final sequence highlighting the dead faces of the GIs and their voice-overs. […] The released version of The Battle of San Pietro is somewhat watered down from the original, although this film still remains the most graphic and honest account of combat during W.W.I ever documented on celluloid”. (Gary Edgerton, Revisiting the Recordings of Wars Past, in Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol.15, No. I, Spring 1987)