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.

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Filed under: Film, The Toby

Diane writes about the film A Matter of Life and Death (1946), screening at the Toby this Friday at 7pm as part of the Winter Nights film series.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Eagle-Lion Films Inc./Photofest ©Eagle-Lion Films Inc. Photo by Fred Daniels.

There are some old movies that just grab you—heart and mind—and carry you away before you even realize it.  This is one of those films, a British film made during the final days of World War II, that is still on the favorites list of British filmgoers 60 years later.  It is wonderful, especially on a big screen. Oliver Sacks, Martin Scorsese and Steven Sondheim loved it as teenagers.  Teachers–bring your students. Anyone looking for a great night out will be captivated by the drama, the humor, and love despite great difficulties.  If you would like to know more about the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, you will enjoy visiting The Powell and Pressburger Pages.

And if you want to enjoy the film without any more preconceptions, you can stop reading now.

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Filed under: Film, Public Programs, The Toby

As soon as the first photographs were produced in the 1830s, there was a desire to make an accurate color photograph.  Images were painted, dyed, and colored with various inks for years until James Clerk Maxwell devised a way to make true color images that finally worked in 1861.

The first color photograph, a tartan ribbon, using Maxwell’s method.

Maxwell’s idea was to use standard black and white film and to take three images: the first with a red filter, the second with a green filter, and the third with a blue filter.  It was a clever idea that merged the idea of art’s color wheel with the scientific ideas of light frequency.  Almost all color imaging uses Maxwell’s principles to this day.

When motion pictures were invented in the 1890s, there was once again a desire for color images.  By 1900, the Pathé company in France had designed an elaborate system to hand-color film frames with the use of stencils.  Others developed ways of tinting film to make certain scenes have a different artistic feel.

Still photographers had no trouble using Maxwell’s method of making color images, but it was more difficult for motion picture cameramen.  While the still photographer could simply load a new plate, put up a new color filter, and reshoot, the motion picture cameraman had to take at least 16 images per second!

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Filed under: Film, Public Programs, The Toby

Since The Toby opened in 2009, we have held a Winter Nights film festival in January and February. This winter the theme for our Winter Nights 2012 series is Technicolor.

Design is generally a pretty subjective endeavor, so when starting a new project I like to do a little research into the subject in order to guide the generation of formal elements. Fortunately Technicolor offers a wealth of visual elements to play with, but the methods and appearance of color film varies a lot depending on the time. The earliest versions of color motion pictures involved three separate rolls of film—black, cyan, and magenta—that were layered together in order to produce the color projection. It’s a very distinctive look, and is wholly different from the colors you see in The Godfather: Part II, the last American film made using Technicolor’s dye transfer process. The early three-strip technique provided inspiration for the initial Winter Nights designs, involving a large and somewhat abstract W made from shaded cubes to reference a frigid, icy winter.

While working on this abstract and wintry version, we also pursued a more literal direction using film as the starting point. Keeping the W, this solution retains the grainy texture that characterizes many of those older movies. While each had its merits, ultimately we decided to go with the film-centric version for this year’s series, and a final version was created that made very clear the series’ relationship with film, as well as including the Technicolor theme in the graphic.

Using film stills in a campaign for Technicolor movies is a no-brainer, but this was not as straightforward as one might think. In the 1940s, Technicolor threw out a large volume of color negatives after the studios didn’t reclaim them, and unless they’ve been re-mastered those movies are now only available in black and white. Fortunately, we were able to find some great color images from Charade and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The beauty of these movies speak for themselves when you see them, and in order to try imparting some of that drama and motion in print pieces, I relied on careful crops.

One particularly seductive image of Marilyn Monroe offers plenty of details to highlight—Marilyn’s face, her eyes lightly closed, could be mistaken for being asleep when viewed alone. The diamond bracelet and thick gray fur are a glimpse of luxury, sensuality, and elegant excess. The full image, my favorite among Marilyn’s publicity shots for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, shows the actress dressed in red, wrapped in fur, and draped in diamonds. Her open mouth, even more red than her dress, completes a frozen moment of ecstasy, and was the perfect image to use for our Winter Nights banner.

Filed under: Design, Marketing, Public Programs, Uncategorized

Detour (1945), tonight’s Winter Nights film, comes from a little independent studio despised for its cheap pictures.  The studio, PRC, was said to be an acronym for “Putrid, Rotten Crud.”  (Well, it wasn’t actually “crud,” but you get the idea!) This moniker was so pervasive that today, when a PRC movie is recovered, we often find that this phrase has been marked on the film can by an unhappy projectionist.  Why then would the IMA choose to show a film from such a studio?

The answer is simple. Detour (1945) is an exception to the rule.  Director Edgar G. Ulmer never let a tiny budget hamper him.  Like many film noir directors, Ulmer had a background that stretched back into the German Expressionist era in the 1920s.  The Black Cat (1934) was his first major American film as director, and it was made at a time when Universal was strapped for cash.  Rather than shoot it as a traditional horror film in a drippy castle, with expensive sets, Ulmer rewrote the movie to take place in an ultra-modern fortress, with spartan interiors that cost little to make.  The film was a hit, and Ulmer seemed on his way as a top director.

Shortly afterward, Ulmer met his future wife Shirley, who was married to producer Max Alexander, nephew of studio boss Carl Laemmle.  Shirley and Max divorced, she married Ulmer, and the new couple were banned from the Universal lot.  Ulmer’s career was over before it had really begun.  He was banished to small studios for many years, where his talent for stretching a dollar was tested every day, especially at bottom-of-the-barrel PRC.

PRC specialized in westerns and cheap horror films.  At the time, theaters would pay a flat fee for a movie that could play in the bottom half of a double feature.  If PRC could make a movie for less than that fee, then it was profitable before it ever played in theaters.  Their profits went up as the film budgets went down.  Who cared if it was any good?

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Filed under: Film, Public Programs, The Toby