THE KINDEST CUT

You say you found Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam too graphic in “Full Metal Jacket”? Well, you should have seen what never made the final cut.

In an early draft by Kubrick and Michael Herr, they had Joker (Matthew Modine) and Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) high in a chopper with an Arvin captain who is interrogating a V.C. prisoner; unhappy with his response, he pushes the captive out of the helicopter to his death. Rafterman starts to take photos and, when the officer objects, Joker shoots him with his pistol, blowing him out the door. That sequence does not appear in the movie.

But that’s not the really bloody excision. In the cut now in release, Joker performs a mercy killing of a female sniper. Also reportedly filmed, but later trimmed: Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin) decapitates the woman, takes her head and storms off while spouting “his” law of the jungle.

Sources tell us that Baldwin was “stunned” at an industry screening to find his scene gone. The actor’s representatives flatly refused to connect us with him for comment. Kubrick, through Warner Bros., said he was too busy monitoring the movie’s release to discuss in proper depth his editing decisions during the film’s development.