 <unk> spent more time <unk> the first 10 minutes than the rest of the film taken together . He <unk> several versions of the opening ; the first edit included <unk> scenes in which Jane and Ricky are convicted of Lester 's murder , but <unk> <unk> these in the last week of editing because he felt they made the film lose its mystery , and because they did not fit with the theme of redemption that had emerged during production . <unk> believed the trial drew focus away from the characters and turned the film " into an episode of <unk> Blue " . Instead , he wanted the ending to be " a poetic mixture of dream and memory and narrative resolution " . When Ball first saw a completed edit , it was a version with truncated versions of these scenes . He felt that they were so short that they " didn 't really register " . <unk> and he argued , but Ball was more accepting after <unk> cut the sequences completely ; Ball felt that without the scenes , the film was more optimistic and had evolved into something that " for all its darkness had a really romantic heart " . 
