Brazil, the brainchild of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, is a frustrating film at times. Its pace is wonky, sometimes racing from development to development without stopping to explain them, other times hammering basic points into the wall. The dream sequences, integral as they are, go on too long (especially the final one, which continues well past its narrative point is made). Its place in the pantheon of dystopic greats is a tribute to its many compensatory virtues, which range from a wealth of throwaway verbal gags to its persuasive nightmare vision of a society buried beneath the weight of runaway bureaucratic incompetence.

The film is also a visual feast. Take an early establishing shot of Lowry’s workplace: a vast, frenetic hive of identical drones and even more identical office boys, racing around in circles collecting and distributing paper to convince the suspicious boss played by Ian Holm that they’re actually accomplishing something. (They actually watch movies at their desks whenever he’s not looking.) It’s one of the most audaciously choreographed scenes in film history, and the movie throws it away in less than a minute. Or take another scene later in the film, when Lowry is assigned a dungeon of an office with only half a desk, the other half used by the worker in the next room; the insane tug of war the two have through the wall, over this one piece of furniture, is a gag Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton would have been proud to concoct.

An old love song called "Brazil" snakes in and out of all this, representing the longing for the happiness and transcendence that may or may not be accessible in a world gone so precipitously down the tubes. The film’s final position on this subject is complicated, to say the least. It’s a happy ending, of a sort ... and at the same time a heartbreakingly tragic one.

And therein lies the real rub. The history of film has been rife with masterpieces misunderstood by studios that did everything they possibly could to destroy them. That roll call of simultaneous honor and shame includes Erich Von Stroheim's silent classic Greed, cut from eight hours to just over 90 minutes, with the extra footage melted down for its silver content; Sergio Leone’s sprawling gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America, cut from four magnificent hours to an almost incoherent two; and, yes, Brazil, which became the subject of a major battle when the studio chief wanted to cut 40 minutes in a tasteless attempt to reduce this one-of-a-kind satiric nightmare to an action film with a more cliched form of happy ending. The director's cut played in theaters, and can be seen on home video.