John Cassavetes' Love Streams: the return of the amazing disappearing breasts!

My girlfriend must think I'm a bit crazy, rushing to get my new Blu Ray/ DVD of Love Streams into the player and searching to find "the scene with the breasts," to see if it has been censored, tampered with, sanitized... but I needed to know. The print of the film that played in Vancouver a few years ago, as previously mentioned on this blog, had a brief, startling moment of nudity excised from the film - nudity previously visible on the European DVD of Love Streams and even on the old (otherwise altered) VHS release of the film put out by Cannon. When Tom Charity informed me that Criterion were preparing this film - probably my favourite film in cinema history, certainly in my top five - for DVD-Blu Ray release, he also told me that he appraised Criterion of my blogpost on the subject. I had investigated at the time, or attempted to, phoning Sony and such, trying to determine if the missing breasts were simply a glitch - if, say, some horny, unethical projectionist had snipped the boobs from the film for his private collection, which was the theory I had come to favour - or if they were part of some prudish "sanitization" agenda such as the one that Ray Carney railed against re: the VHS release of Husbands (which finally came out on DVD with all the puking, shitting, bullying and bad behaviour back in its rightful place). Were the boobs missing by accident or by design? Surely it was an accident. Surely Criterion would release the film as it was first released, as it has been released on DVD in Europe; they wouldn't be so childish to snip out a bit of harmless nudity, would they? Carney can't possibly be RIGHT that there is an agenda to sanitize Cassavetes' films, can he?

Looks like he is, folks. Compare this screengrab - shot off the old VHS with a digital camera - to the scene in the film as released by Criterion. You won't see this image anywhere. Guess I gotta keep my French DVD...