Our guest blogger today is film historian Eric Grayson, who writes about the restoration of tonight's Winter Nights film.

The African Queen (1951). United Artists/Photofest ©United Artists.
The African Queen (1951) is an interesting anomaly in film history. An American director, with American stars, in a British film. Director John Huston was under suspicion from the House Un-American Activities committee in the early 1950s, and as a result he moved to Ireland. He set up a British film company and made several features before he returned to the US in the early 1960s.
This caused The African Queen to be in precarious position for many years. The original negatives, in the old Technicolor three-strip format, were in storage in England. It is quite expensive to reprint three-strip negatives on modern film, and that expense is compounded by the location of the materials. There are only a few labs in the world that can reprint three-strip negatives today, and they are all located in the U.S. The British owners usually would license the film to a particular distributor only for a limited time, which made it even less likely that new prints could be made. Studio executives are hesitant to spend $100,000 reprinting a film that they are only leasing.
The last film prints of The African Queen were made in the United States for a reissue in 1967. These prints were literally beaten to death through multiple screenings in drive-ins and grindhouses. Projectionists routinely broke the film and spliced it back together carelessly, sometimes losing many frames in the process. By the 1990s, there were only a few projectable prints left. By 2000, the rights shifted to another studio, and those old prints were abandoned.
At this point, I have to step out of character. Normally, I can report as an impartial observer, but as a film historian and collector, I personally became part of this story. Since I have a reputation for being able to find difficult-to-obtain prints, I would frequently receive calls from repertory theaters asking for a copy of The African Queen. I didn’t have one–no one did–but I kept looking.










