An Angel for May

Initially, during the film production, director Harley Cokeliss and screen play writer Peter Milligan (who adapted the screenplay from the novel 'An Angel for May' by Melvin Burgess) had maintained the novel's original bleak conclusion. After an ad hoc workshop with his film family, actor Tom Wilkinson urged Cokeliss to come up with an ending in which the character Tom Collins succeeded so the audience could go out feeling positive. Cokeliss and Milligan thought that was an intriguing idea. As it happened, funding for the film was held up for three months giving Cokeliss and Milligan time to think about the idea and develop a rather powerful ending message. When author Burgess was shown the new ending, he said "I wish I'd thought of that ending" which they thought was very big of him and a great complement. The novel had focused not on changing the past but on returning to change the present.

Determining an original length of the British film 'An Angel for May' is complicated by its playing on the film festival circuit during the second half of 2002 and having an ITV TV release 23-Dec-2002 in England without having a theatrical release. The British Board of Film Classification approved the film, in the form of a PAL format DVD from Guerilla Films, for a PG rating on 14-May-2006 with no cuts to its 102 minutes and 47 seconds total PAL run-time for all video on the DVD including a PAL video of the movie with a PAL run-time of 96 minutes and 2 seconds. PAL video runs at 50 frames per second while film projectors run at 24 film frames per second (48 PAL frames per second). Thus a film version of the movie's PAL frames would have a run-time of (96 + 2/60) * 25/24 = 100 minutes and 2 seconds, which would also be the NTSC run-time were the film converted to NTSC DVD. In 2007 distributor Feature Films for Families released 'An Angel for May' on full-frame NTSC format DVD with a 97 minute 16 second run-time including a 30 second FFFF video clip at the beginning and a 13 second FFFF video clip at the end. Subtracting the 43 seconds of FFFF video leaves 96 minutes and 33 seconds of original film run-time compared with 99 minutes and 55 seconds of original film run-time in the Guerilla Films PAL format version after the 7 second Guerilla Films video clip is subtracted. This means at least 3 minutes and 22 seconds of original film run-time in the Guerilla version was deleted from the FFFF version. Feature Films for Families has a reputation for buying distribution rights to family movies and distributing an edited version with segments of any scene or dialogue cut that might cause young children to ask awkward questions of their parents. One example of FFFF cuts in 'An Angel for May' is an early scene in the police station where 12-year old Tom has been taken by officers who pick him up on the freeway trying to hitchhike to London. The first cut starts just before it would become clear that Tom is talking with someone, an 18-year-old (credited as Sniffer) who is telling him how to break into homes through open bathroom windows. This cut runs for 17 seconds until Rosie appears and stares at Tom -- she actually recognizes him as a boy she met in 1941, 50 years earlier, but first-time viewers won't know this. When Sniffer sees she is staring at Tom he says "Oi, Rossie! Piss off, alright?" A second cut starts just after Sniffer says "Rosie" and runs for 6 seconds (while Tom echoes the sentiment) stopping just before Sniffer says "People like that should be locked up." Sniffer's subsequent dialogue is cut from the soundtrack as Tom's mother approaches so FFFF viewers won't realize Sniffer is talking to Tom -- reformatting from widescreen to full frame also helps Sniffer to be cut out of the frame.