Film critics on Sunday got their first peek at Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking, which will bow at the Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday under the threat of a lawsuit by the film’s main subject.

The lead-up to the premiere of the British/Canadian coproduction at Roy Thomson Hall has been overshadowed by claims from Martin McGartland, a former IRA infiltrator whose life story provides the basis for the movie, that his moral rights have been infringed by damage to his name and reputation.

Besides unveiling Skogland’s film to the media, Sunday’s screening also revealed key edits and alterations to Fifty Dead Men Walking that the producers, which include Vancouver-based Brightlight Pictures, hope will appease McGartland.

The latest cut, for example, has changed a scene where ‘Marty’, McGartland¹s character, drives an IRA bomb expert to a location where he plants a bomb.

Specifically, the producers amended the scene to ensure Marty does not see where the bomb is planted. In an earlier cut that McGartland viewed last May, the former IRA mole said Marty gets out of the car, looks over its roof to where the bomb expert has gone, and witnesses someone lying prone under a car.

In the latest cut, the image of the body under a car, presumably the bomb expert planting an explosive device, has been removed.

But McGartland contended Sunday that the film’s audience will still make the connection between his driving to a scene where hours later six men are killed by an explosion under their van.

McGartland contends that the bomb-planting scene, and another where he takes part in the torture and murder of an IRA informant, were fictionalized and not part of his 1999 book on which Skogland based her film script.

In another scene where Marty utters the line ‘I would never be a tout,’ meaning a snitch or turncoat, a complaint by McGartland prompted a line change to ‘What makes them think he would ever be a tout.’

Negotiations to reach an out-of-court settlement ahead of the picture’s world premiere on Wednesday were expected to resume on Monday.