‘ISADORA’ RELAUNCHED WITH REFRESHING TWIST

It’s a movie-lover’s dream--a great director given the chance to restore a hatcheted treasure--but tonight’s Z Channel showing of Karel Reisz’s superlative “Isadora,” something of a world event, comes with a refreshing twist.

Told in a style well ahead of its time, and just under three hours long when it was released in 1968 (2:57 actually), Reisz’s swirling memory-biography of Isadora Duncan was drastically edited by its releasing studio, Universal, and restructured in a strictly linear fashion after the film had played a one-week Academy Award qualifying run.

That resulting mess, called “The Loves of Isadora” (2 hours, 11 minutes), was responsible for the film’s generally bum rap wherever it played.

Faced with the chance to set his film right, Reisz has not simply added back the butchered footage. With an elegance and eclecticism that has marked every one of his films (including “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” “Morgan,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Sweet Dreams”), Reisz (who began as an editor), with the help of the film’s original editor, John Bloom, plunged back into his almost-three hour film, pruning, shaping, restructuring.

So what we have tonight (Z Channel, 8 p.m.) is a completely new version--2 hours, 33 minutes long, some 24 minutes shorter than the 1968 original, but restored exactly to its director’s wishes.

With Vanessa Redgrave as the rapturous embodiment of Isadora, the film is still a shifting, intricate memory piece. Much of it is set by the water’s edge in Nice in 1927 as the dancer, attempting to dictate her memoirs, ruminates on her life.

She was by this time blowzy and alcoholic but far from old--when she died in a grotesque car accident, strangled by her own chiffon scarf, she was only 49. With the film’s current structure, we understand how utterly her life broke apart when her two young children were drowned--the little daughter she had by scenic artist Edward Gordon Craig (James Fox), her even younger son whose father was the “monstrously rich “ sewing-machine heir, Paris Singer (Jason Robards).

These men--plus Russian poet Sergei Essenin (Ivan Tchenko)--each have their weight in the film, but it is Isadora/Vanessa in her Grecian draperies who dominates it, free, ecstatic, tragic, dancing unbounded across corseted continents.

Some of Reisz’s dance images are phenomenal: the moonlit love scene on the floor of Craig’s studio where Isadora seems to be floating through the air in one of film’s most delicately erotic moments; or the Russian theater sequence, as she holds aloft a lantern and the men of the audience sing for her.

“Isadora” (which contains brief scenes of nudity) captures perfectly the artistic climate in which the dancer put into practice astonishing “ideals of art, maternity and personal liberty” with honesty and dedicated flamboyance. It also minces no words in its portrait of her last years, when she had become redundant, erratic, impossible--and haunted.

If Redgrave isn’t really solid enough, fleshy enough for Isadora (Vivian Pickles playing the role in Ken Russell’s TV biography was almost ideal); if at times she prances when she should move with enormous authority, it doesn’t really matter--she is illuminated from within by the same incandescence that must have marked Isadora. And when, as she steps into that fatal red Bugati, she says, “ Je vois la gloire !” (“I see the glory”), we feel as if we have glimpsed it, too.

It seems appropriate to mention that this recovery, like other landmark ones at the Z Channel, was the brainchild of the channel’s indefatigable film programmer Jerry Harvey, with the full cooperation and assistance of Ned Nalle at Universal Studios. Now we can only wait and hope for “Isadora” on the large screen--and in cassettes of this definitive, intelligent version.