Chaplin Defends His Gold Claim

The trades ran a startling headline in April 1959. Charlie Chaplin, turned seventy that month, was reviving the Little Tramp for a new feature, his birthday present to the world. Chaplin described it as a ballet slapstick in color, complete with all the works. Cuckoo as the idea seems today, there was pathos in Charlie’s circumstance not unlike those he’d mined decades before when America loved his Tramp best of all clowns. Guess Switzerland was a lonely place, as even splendid exile was exile nonetheless. Chaplin enjoyed a world’s adulation and became fretful without it. Picking up Euro awards was scant compensation for losing a profitable US market. 1972 has been credited as the year he returned in triumph, but there were earlier (if tentative) bids, with 1959’s being perhaps Chaplin’s first serious effort at re-garnering American hugs he’d gone too long without. It was a busy time for he and his lawyers in any event. Opening salvo followed close behind April’s comeback bulletin. The Inwood Theatre in Forest Hills, Queens was just then running Modern Times to an often-full house. They frequently booked silents in accordance with long-standing art and oldies policy. A Washington based mouthful called International Art Production Management Company supplied the 16mm print. Court-sanctioned marshals raided the Inwood on April 14 during a Modern Times unspool with 450 patrons seated. There was nearly a fight in the booth as reels were yanked off projectors. Admissions got refunded while officers hauled off the alleged contraband. Hasty substitution found Chaplin shorts and a W.C. Fields group as following day attraction while suits filed by the Roy Export Company (Chaplin’s copyright watchdogs) and Lopert Films, Inc., a United Artists sub, clamed the Inwood horned in on a legit Modern Times engagement set for New York’s Plaza Theatre.

Gauntlets having been tossed, the Inwood now applied gas to flames and scheduled The Gold Rush for a May 8 opening. Chaplin was hot at their ticket window and receipts warranted taking a chance. The International Art Company was again source for their print. Modern Times had meanwhile opened at the Plaza to sock business ($20,000 the first week and nearly as much for a second). It looked like public opinion was softening toward lightning rod Charlie, his political and State Department woes retreating back in collective memory. Modern Times was Lopert-booked into the East Side’s Victoria Theatre in addition to its Plaza stand. We want to insure the longest possible run for the film, said a company spokesman. Chaplin shorts done eons previous for Mutual, Essanay, and even Keystone were competing in revival closets all over Greenwich Village. Interest in the comedian’s latest, A King In New York, was stoked for his backlog ruling art house screens, but Charlie said nix to a US release. He’d not make the two year completed feature available stateside, even as plans kept apace toward reviving his Tramp persona. International Art meanwhile sought to widen The Gold Rush to nationwide patronage, their Boxoffice trade ad renaming the Washington firm Film Masterpieces for purpose of scoring dates. They called theirs The Original Full-Length Comedy Masterpiece, and indeed it was nearly that, for this was Chaplin’s 1925 version and one quite different from his official 1942 re-cut that had been in near-exclusive circulation over the past seventeen years. International/ Film Masterpieces’ trade ad broke the first week of June, just as Lopert was planning their own engagements of The Gold Rush to follow up on successful Modern Times. Here was further occasion to clear mats for another courtroom drag-out.

June 3 saw Lopert’s announcement of an original, uncut "The Gold Rush" to be blanketed in theatres across the country over following weeks, adding that this was the only production print of "The Gold Rush" which Chaplin has authorized for exhibition in the United States. There were also negotiations with Roy Export for a package of shorts to be called Chaplin’s Parade. They’d be newly scored and include Shoulder Arms, A Dog’s Life, and The Pilgrim, the trio having been out of theatrical circulation since the silent era. Charlie was said to be preparing music and narration to juice these for a new audience. But what about the black eye he was getting for a bootlegged Gold Rush smelling up US theatres? Prints out of International/Film Masterpieces were available in 35mm, but paled beside Chaplin’s 1942 version, despite International’s being actually more complete than his own. Lopert knew they’d have to vanquish these in order to click with a sanctioned Gold Rush (which they’d scheduled to begin July 22 at more than a score of metropolitan area theatres), and toward that end sought an injunction to halt further outlaw runs of the 1925 classic. This was in mid-June as International/ Film Masterpieces had a print running at the Grande Theatre in upper Manhattan. Lopert alleged unfair competition and trade practice against International /Film Masterpieces, its head of operations Robert B. Fischer, and the Grande. A major chink in Lopert’s armor was the fact of Chaplin’s having failed to renew his 1925 silent version of The Gold Rush after its initial twenty-eight year term of copyright protection expired in 1953. He was out of the country by that time, and US Chaplin offices were more or less dormant. The 1942 reissue, with score and narration added then by the comedian, remained clearly his (CC had properly registered that version), but courts wouldn’t be persuaded that The Gold Rush in all its incarnations should be exclusive to Chaplin. A final order enjoined Film Masterpieces and others from exhibiting Modern Times and fourteen other Chaplin films controlled by the Roy Export Company (with specific exclusion of The Gold Rush). Turned out International/ Film Masterpieces was infringing beyond Modern Times to encompass City Lights, The Great Dictator, The Kid, and others from Chaplin’s library. Runs and playdates in New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington were thus shut down and/or cancelled, giving Chaplin/Lopert at least the appearance of emerging from the fight victorious, despite their 1925 Gold Rush being adjudged in the public domain.

The Gold Rush of 1925 became the version a coming generation would know best. Any group or institution with a print could run it for free or profit. Paul Killiam found 35mm elements and made his scored rendition available. Collectors could acquire The Gold Rush from Blackhawk, Griggs-Moviedrome, or any dealer with a bathtub. Quality varied, but ones I saw looked OK. This was, after all, the only major Charlie Chaplin feature we could get on 8mm. My friend Brick Davis bought those nine little reels from Jack Hardy at the old Silent Cinema Service back in 1969 and we were thrilled to finally see the legendary film for which Chaplin most wanted to be remembered. Sellers used to compete by claiming their Gold Rush to be the most complete anywhere. One I recall touted the inclusion of a rare assayer’s office scene where Charlie redeems his gold. Collectors redeemed theirs for opportunity to possess a definitive Gold Rush (as I recall, Brick’s print cost about $40). Multiple vendors were panning for whatever dust lay visible as dupes were dredged from ones that had been duped before. When Chaplin reissued his backlog to theatres in 1972, we finally had opportunity to see The Gold Rush as he’d reassembled it in 1942. My disappointment over that was acute. It seemed he’d ruined a great show with intertitles shorn and narration spoiling the gags. I came out of Greensboro's Janus Theatre convinced that The Gold Rush was truest only in its 1925 incarnation.

Chaplin out of the public domain continued doing business. Theatres right through the sixties and some into the seventies booked various Cavalcades and Carnivals made up of shorts from the teens, while even Tillie’s Punctured Romance filled lower berths (as here) when showmen opted for old-time laffers. New 35mm prints of Tillie were tendered in 1959 by Continental Distributing as means of cashing in on Lopert’s profit-making runs, as certainly no one could claim exclusive rights in Mack Sennett’s 1914 antique. When home video later came to the fore, calls went out for a proper restoration of The Gold Rush. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill took on the project on behalf of Chaplin’s estate. Gill wrote a terrific article about complications of that for Griffithiana (#54 --- October 1995), a film journal near impossible to find in back issues (too bad … I’m missing some). One notable thing he mentioned was a 35mm print they’d found of The Gold Rush that originated with a man called Bob Fischer who operated from Texas, and was some kind of an associate of (Raymond) Rohauer’s. That last part intrigued me as I assume this is defendant Robert B. Fischer from the 1959 controversies. What I hadn’t realized before was Rohauer’s behind-the-scenes involvement with International/ Film Masterpieces. Turns out Rohauer acquired his source material for the 1925 Gold Rush when he, according to David Gill, bought up all the film Chaplin slated for destruction after he was prevented from returning to the states in 1952. Rohauer claimed to have assembled his Gold Rush from outtakes Chaplin discarded, adding that this was basis for prints he distributed into the sixties. As to present ownership status of The Gold Rush, there are clouds gathered as result of 1994’s passage of an expanded GATT treaty. Chaplin’s estate has used that to argue renewed exclusive rights in the film. Several proposed runs of the 1925 version have been blocked after letters from counsel representing the heirs. Trouble is it’s not worth anyone’s time and considerable expense to duke it out in court. Little has changed over these fifty years since Chaplin tried scuttling would-be exhibitors of The Gold Rush other than the fact of legal issues becoming, if anything, cloudier and more unresolved.

More on the 1942 reissue of The Gold Rush in Greenbriar's Archive here.

Gone With The Wind --- Part Two

Gone With The Wind seemed the ultimate collector’s dream in 16mm. To own it was something I dared not conceive. Dealers seldom listed GWTW. Bootlegs off 1967-68 prints were out there, but color and running time dictated a cost beyond what most could pay. You’d spend upward of $400 for any rainbow’ed dupe back then (I worked a sawmill not unlike Johnny Gallagher's the summer of 1973 to get up scratch for The Adventures Of Robin Hood). One startling occasion found Tom Osteen offering a black-and-white 8mm magnetic sound Gone With The Wind, difficult to imagine then as now (how and why would someone have generated such a hybrid?). Think of the hundreds he wanted for that (in the early seventies!) against today’s cost of a Blu-Ray with its quality to surpass any of the 35mm eastman prints in circulation then. My biggest collecting score was a Gone With The Wind in 16mm from a procurer of seemingly boundless resource who made no disclosure as to origin of his treasured find. Suffice to say he had it, and among collectors circa 1977, that was ‘nuff said. Possession of a classic movie in those days was a huge source of pride and accomplishment. I preened not unlike a peacock when opportunity arose to display my bounty. Never mind that Films, Inc. or Metro could have swooped down on unauthorized shows I was giving to slap cuffs upon me. Aggressive enough collecting took a lot of us far afield of copyright observance. Those were the only laws I broke then, but break them I did with impunity. Temptation to impress and be a center of attention guided many a reckless step. One occasion found me dragging Gone With The Wind and necessary equipment into a girl’s college where hundreds of quivering Scarletts gathered round my Bell and Howell to watch GWTW and hear my discourse as to history surrounding it. Robert Osborne never had it so good as this boy then twenty-three showing off his prize in that Garden Of Eden.

As stated previous, Gone With The Wind was always best viewed with a crowd. I’m less patient with it alone. It’s taken a week getting through GWTW in clumps. Different reactions came over me this time. Wind’s first hour is fun, the rest somewhat less so. What harrowing hours these are, and so many! There’s an awful lot of death and lice and men chopped up. I knew a girl in college who left the theatre at intermission thinking it was over. Salvation for Gone With The Wind lies in humor salted throughout. Screwball comedies of the era weren't nearly so funny. Who among the many contributing writers do we credit for infusing this show with such wit? As Selznick put a final polish on every page going before cameras, I’d suspect he was responsible too for easing intensity throughout GWTW via welcome levity. Clark Gable’s Rhett was the writer’s primary instrument for lightening the burden of heated dramatics between Scarlett and Ashley. The character plays modern still and exhibits likeable cocksuredness to relieve our march toward four sitting hours. Patrons I was with never failed to audibly gasp (or sigh) when he first appeared at the bottom of Twelve Oaks' stairs. Gable’s iconic status indeed maintained past his 1960 passing, but for how long? Would a full 2010 house react the same at his entrance?

Vivien Leigh was fortunate casting as Scarlett. She has sufficient appeal for contemporary eyes to justify Rhett’s tireless pursuit throughout GWTW. Imagine how some of those other candidates would play now. Such speculation could veer us toward considering what 30’s actresses still register on (male) audience desire meters. Not so many do on mine, even as I admire their performing. Once around the Wind might have been enough had Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn done Scarlett. The level of passion Gone With The Wind maintains must have stunned patrons five years into rigid enforcement of the Code. Kissing scenes are intense and dialogue is way more sexually coded than any other pic I can think of past mid-1934. Domestic/bedroom exchanges vis-à-vis Scarlett and Rhett achieve intimacy other movies got nowhere near. Do we credit Selznick here? --- or primary director Victor Fleming? There were other shocks I absorbed in 1968 that must have rocked earlier crowds. How often was someone shot full in the face close-up, as the Yankee deserter here? Melanie’s follow-up line, Scarlett, you shot him … I’m glad you shot him, used to get all but a standing ovation in shows I attended.

I’m now seven years older than Clark Gable when he played Rhett Butler, yet he still seems older than I guess I’ll ever be. Can we ever age to parity with film idol images, much less surpass them? Would anyone say they’ve been around the block more times than Humphrey Bogart? Gable and the rest represent ideals of maturity and worldliness seemingly unique to that generation. I can’t imagine our present one ever saying the same about Matt Damon or Leonardo De Caprio (aren’t they really the same person?). Rhett was surely Gable’s hardest act to follow. Even he knew there’d never again be a role so good, acknowledging on more than one occasion that reissues of Gone With The Wind was what really kept his name alive with a postwar public (you can be sure as hell it wasn’t "Betrayed," he said in 1954 upon release of this last for MGM). Vivien Leigh might have enjoyed Hollywood’s outstanding career as a leading woman had she regarded movies higher. As it was, the stage beckoned, and with it desire to live up to expectations of husband Laurence Olivier and legit figures who’d never afford screen efforts so much respect. Seems I read somewhere that Leigh’s problem onstage was a voice lacking punch beyond footlights and initial rows. Remarkable that greatest female part Scarlett O’Hara (maybe in all of American films?) was never followed up. Going back to routine work must have disheartened much of GWTW’s cast. Olivia De Havilland was soon humbled (deliberately so) by Warners via further girl roles opposite Errol Flynn. She alone survives among Gone With The Wind four principals (and beginning her forty-third year of doing so!).

The Blu-Ray Gone With The Wind comes in a big velvet covered box. I don’t really have a place to store such luggage. Who has? Extras and then some are proven necessities for selling product that’s been marketed to death, thus here are booklets, photo cards, and a touted eight hours of supplemental material. I got over intense curiosity as to how GWTW was made back in eighth grade, but acknowledge others only now discovering epic accounts of Selznick’s struggle (Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear is the latest thread in a ribbon extended back to souvenir books like mine from 1968). All I really sought out of this weighty trunk was the single disc housing the feature, and purpose there was mainly to see how much improved the picture would be since GWTW’s last DVD release. Those with a near-lifetime invested in classic shows have to take into account exhaustion setting into repeated purchase of ones we long since saw enough of. I’m alarmed to realize I no longer possess heightened senses to evaluate Gone With The Wind color values the result of millions Warners spent to render it most pristine ever. I remember watching several times a 1954 dye-transfer 35mm print at a friend’s house and pitting every frame against presentations myself and others had given over years of GWTW exposure. That archival print, said to represent the last run for which Selznick personally supervised lab work, had a look unique and not unlike seeing a painting as opposed to a reproduction. Is it unrealistic to think we’ll ever get imagery like that on a home disc? The gulf between film and digital remains vast, though I wonder how close modern technology will finally take us. It seems Blu-Ray compliments black-and-white more than color in any event, as Warner’s rendition of Casablanca remains for me the most impressive vintage title I’ve seen delivered on high-definition format.

The Wind That's Now A Breeze --- Part One

I can’t believe Greenbriar’s run over four years with so little mention of Gone With The Wind. Well, here’s where I make up for it. Warners is recently out with a Blu-Ray that hopefully represents the best this show will ever look. There’s also a book called Frankly My Dear in which Molly Haskell claims GWTW is still running strong. I agree it’s still running, though not nearly at strength once had. Those days are as past as cavaliers and cotton fields. Look for Gone With The Wind only on TCM, for no other outlet uses it to my knowledge. This was for years the one you never thought would play television. Now it’s just another TV movie. The fade began in 1976 when NBC scored a bicentennial run. Pretty soon GWTW limped out of theatres, even in the South where we figured it would never die. Turner headquarters in Atlanta used to play Wind on a loop in a dedicated on-site theatre. We peeked in once and saw pinkish 35mm that looked to have survived the 1967 reissue where blow-ups for 70mm first-runs gave new meaning to desecration of art (but not commerce, as that round was MGM’s most successful GWTW revival). February 3, 1968 was when I saw it first, and here’s the stub to prove same. My mother drove me to Greensboro’s Terrace Theatre (practically new at the time, torn down since). We had reserved seats. There was no bigger deal than going to see Gone With The Wind, even as it was closing on thirty years old. I brought my Tommy Traveler suitcase to sit on in event someone taller occupied seats in front of us (everyone towered over me then). Consider four hours astride a suitcase. That’s wanting to see GWTW bad. It hardly mattered our watching a 70mm aberration where tops and bottoms were clipped amidst grain the size of meteorites. Still, I was enraptured. Here was a 1939 movie in a big theatre. You could even buy a souvenir book with color stills for a dollar. Mom asked coming back how I’d enjoyed GWTW. The best, I replied, nothing ever so great. She’d seen it first run, probably late 1940 or early 1941, so I figured we were in agreement. Actually, I thought it was a little old-fashioned, came her devastating rejoinder. Miles after that found me in stunned silence. It seemed almost a betrayal to turn on a movie that (she always said) meant so much over the years. Shouldn’t I have been the one to call Gone With the Wind old-fashioned?

From there, I seized every opportunity to watch it. There were plenty. Gone With The Wind remained as sure fire in a late sixties South as ever. I tagged a ride at fourteen to Winston-Salem's Carolina Theatre, a downtown palace on wobbly legs. Entering their virtually empty auditorium for a matinee made me appreciate how pointless reserving a seat had been, though for at least the first few minutes, I dutifully sat in my assigned row. Later I campaigned our eighth grade teacher to arrange a Greensboro field trip based on GWTW’s historical value, and to my gratified amazement, she managed it. That day off school to watch Gone With The Wind was indeed one to savor. I was even put wise to the bottom line of a particular scene in the film by a wordly boy sitting next to me. Larry had been around and done things I’d only imagined from seeing movies like Goldfinger and The Sandpiper. So far as I understood from previous viewings, Scarlett waking up so cheerfully the morning after being carried upstairs by Rhett amounted to nothing other than having had a refreshing sleep, but my friend set me straight. Boy, he really gave it to her last night, was Larry’s whispered assurance. Here was a window toward maturity suddenly thrust open, even if I still had many miles to go. I’d write Larry now and thank him for said enlightenment but for fact that, last I heard, he was still imprisoned at an undisclosed location.

A quick break here for GWTW trivia you might not know. According to trades, Clark Gable accepted MGM’s invitation to attend the Atlanta 1961 premiere of Gone With The Wind’s centennial revival. This was announced but weeks before his death on November 16, 1960. How many thousand such GWTW factoids are out there? I’ve met people who memorized them all. One friend saw the film over 150 times theatrically. Drove to Charlotte every weekend through the whole of 1968 and ‘69. I toted up ten auditorium rounds, which for me was a record (guess it still stands). Why then, do I now have a tough time getting through a start-to-finish look, even on Blu-Ray? Maybe it’s diminished special-ness of GWTW. When I was at college, it was still Number One in everybody’s book, especially the girls. You could always break ice with that subject. A freshman crush spoke of how she’d gladly submit to a Rhett Butler, launching me upon a mercifully brief period of emulating Clark Gable around campus (I do still maintain that purposeful stride he used in the opening scene of Mutiny On The Bounty). GWTW’s leads were persuasive role models. Impressionable girls wanted to be Scarlett and cuter ones managed it. Boys like me who longed to be Rhett probably ended up more like Charles Hamilton. I always sympathized with Charles and was glad to tell Rand Brooks so when we met at an Asheville cowboy show back in the early nineties. Rand did a great impersonation of Gable as he recited both Charles and Rhett’s dialogue from their Twelve Oaks confrontation (Apologies aren’t enough, sir!). Surviving GWTW cast members developed callused fingers signing for fans. One who shunned them was/is the very holdout I’d like most to meet. Alicia Rhett played India Wilkes and still lives in Charleston. She made her living as a portrait painter and would slam the door on anyone mentioning Gone With The Wind. The imdb says Alicia’s ninety-four and the oldest cast member still alive. A guy I once met had a friend who was a friend of Alicia Rhett. He managed to wangle her autograph on several GWTW stills. Those must be rarities indeed.

The big moment at college came when Films Inc. finally made Gone With The Wind available for 16mm rental. I believe that was 1974. They wanted something like $400 for a non-theatrical booking. I’d been showing movies at Lenoir-Rhyne since arriving there in 1972, mostly stuff I’d collected. Offering GWTW at our P.E. Monroe Auditorium would crown my preeminence as resident classic movie geek, but where would the four hundred come from? A rival programmer was Dr. Ellis G. Boatman, history professor, lifetime film buff, and my nemesis. He and I never really hit it off, in part because of my childish determination to prove I knew more about old movies than he did (never mind his having seen the best of them growing up during the 30’s and 40’s). Dr. Boatman jumped on GWTW (with his own cash?) and sold it like the Atlanta premiere. I was pea green with envy. Everyone attended who could take a seat or stand beside one. Here was further opportunity to study audience reaction, something I’d taken up from the first time seeing GWTW in 1968. Clocking laughs has always been a major joy of sharing this film with an audience. There are so many throughout, more so than in most comedies. In fact, I think humor is primarily what makes GWTW wear so well as it has. The biggest reaction then? There were two in particular I remember. The most appreciative laugh came with Gable’s line when Scarlett donates her wedding band to the cause: And you, Mrs. Hamilton, I know just how much that means to you. The audience is in on his joke even as characters surrounding Rhett aren’t, and that always flatters as well as amuses a viewing crowd. The next, and probably most explosive guffaw, came with the cutaway to Aunt Pittypat fainting after Scarlett yells Oh Yes, I Will! at the Atlanta bazaar. It was fun sitting in wait for these moments. Too bad Gone With The Wind is gone out of theatres, for watcher's reaction really makes a difference in how it plays.