Unico indizio un anello di fumo

Donald Sutherland had played supporting parts (mostly small) in Britain for nearly ten years before his roles in "The Dirty Dozen" and "Joanna" brought him to Hollywood's attention. When he began receiving American offers, he had a problem, which was that he simply didn't have the money to fly out to California and support himself and his family until deals were finalized. He turned to fellow-Canadian Christopher Plummer, with whom he had worked in both "Hamlet" for television and "Oedipus The King" for the cinema. Despite the fact that they knew each other only slightly at that time, Plummer advanced him $5000, and Sutherland's Hollywood career began.

There are three different versions of Unico indizio un anello di fumo (1977).

• Version 1: The original director's cut which runs at 101 minutes and is healthily non-linear, influenced by the temporal experiments of earlier films such as Hiroshima mon amour (1959), A Venezia... un dicembre rosso shocking (1973) and Senza un attimo di tregua (1967).
• Version 2: An unauthorized, shortened, re-edited version by Fima Noveck that runs at 81 minutes and attempts to put the narrative into a more coherent order by reducing the complexity of the narrative by coding the instances of non-linearity as flashbacks; and reducing their frequency and length.
• Version 3: A third version that runs at 91 minutes but maintains the jumbled time frame and comes across as a leaner and more abstract version of the original.

Edited into Give Me Your Answer True (1987)