A NEW LOOK AT OLD FILMS – column from 1997

Girlfriend Velda (Maxine Cooper) and Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in a scene from the long lost original ending to Kiss Me Deadly.

It made the front page of the Los Angeles Times entertainment page: the discovery of long-missing footage from the finale of Robert Aldrich's 1955 cult classic Kiss Me Deadly, the story of private eye Mickey Spillane (Ralph Meeker) digging into something much bigger than he's ever encountered before. According to the story, it took a couple of Aldrich enthusiasts years to track down the missing footage—less than a minute in length, but crucial in their restating of the film's explosive finale. (To reveal more detail would be to spoil the sequence for those who haven't yet seen the film, just rereleased with that ending by MGM Video.)

In fact, a friend of mine who's a Spillane aficionado had found that ending several years ago, on a video copy of the British release of Kiss Me Deadly. (The only problem was the rest of the print, which was severely censored.) He didn't have the wherewithal, or the right, to make it available to anyone but a handful of friends.

It took the determination of professional film editor Glenn Erickson, now on staff at MGM, to find a copy of that sequence on film—in Robert Aldrich's personal print—and convince his superiors that it ought to be released on video. But even he, and fellow Aldrich buff/scholar Alain Silver, don't have a definitive answer as to why the footage was cut in the first place.

Similarly, there was great fanfare when UCLA Film and Television Archive restored the original version of Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep last year—and deservedly so. But a friend of mine has had an old 16mm copy of that “unseen” version for years, which originated on the U.S. Armed Forces circuit, where it was shown in 1945—before Warner Bros. decided to revise the picture. He is neither an archive nor a studio with rights, so there was little he could do except crow about his rare print and show it to friends.

There are dozens of other discoveries waiting to be made—or brought to the surface. The problem is getting somebody to do the work, or in some cases, finance it. Private collectors have made home-grown video copies of such rarities as the English-language version of THE Blue Angel, which Josef von Sternberg shot, with Marlene Dietrich, at the same time as the German original in 1930. Why hasn't this been more widely seen? What about the original German version of DuPont's silent German classic VARIETY, which was severely edited for U.S. release? That, too, has turned up on video in one of the collector magazines, but not in an archival copy one can see in a theater.

Just last week I was able to catch up with the new print of Fritz Lang's M at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles. What a treat to see this great, great film in a first-rate 35mm copy, newly subtitled, with the curious and provocative coda that was missing from American prints for so many years. M is one of those films that's always been around, but often in substandard copies that do the film a disservice. Since Kino International is distributing this print, I can only hope that they will then release it on video, as they have so many early film classics.

(If you've never seen M, there's no way to adequately describe its impact. The story of a child murderer whose crime is so heinous that eventually the criminal population of a city decides it's up to them to catch the man, it manages to blend suspense, humor, and even humanity into its story. It's no wonder Peter Lorre became an international sensation on the strength of this film; his performance is still as shattering as ever, and the kangaroo-court climax is a stunner. I can't think of any other film of that vintage which actually attempts to look inside the mind of a so-called villain. Hollywood still prefers not to do so today.)

But where, oh where, is Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of M? This version seems to have fallen through the cracks. Cineaste Pierre Rissient managed to pry loose a print for showing a few years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but other than that, it's been quite elusive. And, like so many films without obvious box-office value, it languishes in someone's vault and isn't available on video.

There are scores of films—good, even great, sometimes simply rare—that can't be seen except in bootleg copies.

When Walt Disney decided to make Swiss Family Robinson, he bought up the rights to the 1940 version produced by RKO and confiscated all known prints—so there wouldn't be comparisons to his remake. (This used to be standard operating procedure at all the major studios, and accounts for many missing films.) The nitrate negative of the original was destroyed in a fire some years ago. But a collector friend of mine had an original 16mm copy, and Disney archivist Scott MacQueen was able to use it, and a 35mm print he found in an archive's vault, to piece together a complete and fairly good-looking master copy. At this writing, however, the Disney company has no plans to actually do anything with the film—which is quite good, and deserves to be seen.

The inventory of American film is, in sum, a shambles. Imagine going to a really good library and not being able to find, say, the complete works of Shakespeare, or an early story of Mark Twain's, or a poem by Walt Whitman that you'd like to compare to some of his later work. That's what film buffs and students face every day. Instead of having local or national repositories where virtually everything is available, we have to be grateful for crumbs that come our way, like the theatrical reissue of M or the video release of Kiss Me Deadly. One can only hope that if those ventures prove successful, they were lead to more opportunities. It ain't much, but it's the best we can do.

(Since the publication of this article, the alternate Big Sleep has been released on a must-have DVD alongside the 1946 release version. Similarly, Kino Video has put both the English and German-language Blue Angel on a DVD set. But Losey's M remains a rarity, although it did get a showing at the Telluride Film Festival.)