SOMETIMES less is more. That’s well known in the world of publishing, where many a successful novelist or award-winning journalist owes an often unacknowledged debt of thanks to an editor with an eye for making judicious cuts in what the author fondly imagines to be his or her deathless prose.

But this principle extends well beyond the world of print. Theatres have been doing abridged versions of Shakespeare’s lengthier offerings for many a long year, without too many stages being wrecked by fans infuriated by the excision of their favourite bit of the Bard.

However, it seems only right to acknowledge the critical role of editing in cinema, where the length of a feature can make all the difference between an audience being spellbound and bored rigid.

Ingmar Bergman may have won plaudits for producing films requiring the best part of a week to watch (or at least that’s how it felt, sitting through Fanny And Alexander in one bottom-numbing viewing in a Plymouth community centre), but it would have won him a one-way ticket back to Sweden if he’d tried it in the relentlessly commercial American film industry.

Does that mean films are brought in at bearable length at the expense of artistic merit? Many an “auteur” film-maker would have you believe that, when they rail at the way their masterpieces have been mangled by studio editing, and the “director’s cut” has become a must for serious cinema lovers.

But does editing always mean cutting corners and quality? In the late 1970s, a prima donna film director embarked on a prestige project which went way over schedule, had pretentious philosophising masquerading as dialogue, was blessed with “creators” who had opposing views of their material and ended with a mass of film “in the can”.

It should have been an absolute stinker, but instead Apocalypse Now is widely regarded as one of the great war films. Anyone who has seen the original “editor’s cut” may feel one of the reasons behind its success is that it was ruthlessly pared back before it reached cinemas, with whole scenes and characters discarded along the way.

In this case the director, Francis Ford Coppola, was involved in the editing process, but what about the times cuts are forced on an unwilling artist?

The most widely cited example of this is the sad fate of Orson Welles, a towering figure of cinema who found himself cold-shouldered by Hollywood and his best work butchered by the studios – or certainly, that’s what Welles and his fans believed.

But I must admit to having a few heretical thoughts on this one. I don’t doubt that The Magnificent Ambersons would have been much more magnificent had Orson’s vision been stuck to, but my favourite Welles work – an opinion I share with fellow columnist Maxine Gordon – is a later and less widely celebrated movie called Touch Of Evil.

Welles landed in the director’s chair for what was essentially a crime movie set in a hellish US-Mexican border town, and what did he do?

He created a film-noir masterpiece, in which the downfall of the truly monstrous villain (played by Orson himself) was as compelling as a Shakespearean tragedy. Despite that, he upset the studio yet again and it proved to be his last Hollywood movie. And again, the studio cut the film, against his wishes.

But the version I first saw and fell in love with was the studio one, which for me retained all the best Welles work, including the stunning opening shot. What the studio did was to get rid of some slow bits in the middle and make the opening and end sequences a tad more orthodox. Having seen an attempt to recapture what Welles originally wanted, I actually think the studio did Orson a favour with its cuts. Not that he would ever have believed it; these artistic types never do.