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But after 40 or more years, with a studio having undergone corporate changes, budget costs having spiraled so spectacularly that original figures could have no possible value to competitors, and with most of the participants dead, there is no justification for not, at least, turning such historically valuable material over to a body such as The American Film Institute.

Some incredibly useful information has come out of the salvaged Fox documentation. It may never be really known for example, how key a role Herman Bing (better known as a German dialect comedian of the 30’s) played in Fox’s “German” period. An assistant to Murnau, Bing wrote screen treatments both for him and for Ford. They were poetic, stream-of-consciousness writings, possibly influenced a great deal by the writing of Carl Mayer, Murnau’s principal scenarist. But Ford’s FOUR SONS is astonishingly parallel to the treatment written for him by Bing although Bing received no screen credit.

It has always been taken for granted that Murnau was brought to Fox as a result of his huge success with THE LAST LAUGH, and even Lotte Eisner in her admirable book on Murnau sustains this idea. But the facts are that Murnau’s first contract with Fox was signed in January ’25, about a week after the Berlin premiere of THE LAST LAUGH, and long before it was even known in the US. Clearly negotiations must have started long before the completion of the film. Possibly Karl Freund, anticipating the success of the film, and himself wanting to get in with Fox (something he ultimately achieved) promoted Murnau to Fox, hoping to wedge himself into the deal as well. In any event, Murnau was on salary for almost two years prior to the completion of SUNRISE, and the initial contracts make no reference to SUNRISE at all, merely to an unspecified “dramatic feature.”

Von Stroheim’s contract for WALKING DOWN BROADWAY further repudiates those who have always claimed that Fox was out to “get” Stroheim. The contract is a fair and financially generous one. It spells out exactly the limitations of length, so that none of Stroheim’s previous excesses would be repeated. Furthermore, because Stroheim was in need of money at the time, Fox even allowed him to shut down production for two weeks so that he could play a role in RKO’s THE LOST SQUADRON. Quite incidentally, one of the leading Stroheim historians for years asserted that “not a frame” of Stroheim’s remained in the finished work.

Since the film seemed permanently unavailable, this statement was taken at face value for over thirty years. Then, when the film finally surfaced in 1970, this same historian, attending its first screening in New York, commented that it was the first time that he had seen the film! Actually some 65% of the film is Stroheim’s, though admittedly watered down and changed. But it’s still a strong, powerful piece of work, much maligned, and invaluable as a companion piece to GREED since these two films represent Stroheim’s only work in the (relatively) modern, contemporary American scene. The wealth of documentation and stills available on the film prove of immense value to Richard Koszarski, one of the most prominent of the newer film historians, who, working on an AFI grant on a research project on von Stroheim, interviewed James Wong Howe and other survivors of WALKING DOWN BROADWAY (released as HELLO SISTER) and was able to piece together what really happened.

Not the least valuable of the non-feature material discovered at Fox has been the documentary footage. John Ford made his anti-VD Sex Hygiene film for the Army at Fox during World War Two and apart from its value as a Ford film, it betrays an Army mentality not far removed from that depicted by Sterling Hayden in Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE. The “peptalk” documentaries, made for conventions and sales meetings, are both informative and sad: full of optimism talk about grosses, shots of the studio “empire” with its own police force fire brigade and other sub-industries, a Hollywood long-since gone. And one of those all-industry pat on-the-back films, THE WORLD IS OURS (made in ’38) might well turn out to be one of the most valuable teaching films ever made. It is smug, complacent, self-congratulatory, a perfect illustration of just what was wrong in Hollywood in the late 30’s, and why so few important films were being made. On the other hand, in its incredible parade of stars and excerpts from current movies, it shows what was right with Hollywood too, enjoying its greatest boom in the purveying of slick, glossy, purely escapist entertainment movies. In 20 minutes it sums up an era better than any teacher could hope to do orally; or could afford to do by renting films. Hollywood, often distorting its own history deliberately for purely entertainment reasons, in films like THE WORLD IS OURS unwittingly created material that could form a permanent and reliable adjunct to film history courses which, of course, in the ’30s nobody dreamed would ever be taught!

Although neither Fox nor their 16mm sub-distributor have as yet fully explored the possibilities of this whole group of films for use in the growing number of film history courses at schools and universities throughout the country, they may well find, when they do, that some of their less important films serve this function admirably. For example, two literally little films by director William K. Howard. His 1929 THE VALIANT was Paul Muni’s first film. As it begins, Howard tries hard to retain the pictorial style that was so much his trademark, but realizing that the film is after all a one-act-play and all talk, he soon lets Muni take over, and the film becomes literally a talk-fest in just one or two sets. Over the next couple of pictures however, both Howard – and the available techniques – improved. His ’32 THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE, though a courtroom drama and largely told by talk, is quite possibly the fastest sound film made to that time, even eclipsing Mervyn LeRoy’s ’31 HIGH PRESSURE which held the honors until then. Its story may be absurd and its details of unrealistic, but it is a dynamic piece of filmmaking which, dialogue-dominated or not, restores Howard’s pictorial flair and moves with the speed of an electric train. These two films together run a minute or two less than two hours, and in that two hour session one not only has a record of Hollywood’s penchant for importing stage stars for the new talkies, and a check-list of what was wrong with the earliest talkies, but in the two films one has a survey of how within three years Hollywood mastered and harnessed sound, and virtually a case history of how one specific director came to terms with and mastered a new medium.

Many studios, most methodically of all MGM, unfortunately destroyed their original nitrate prints once they had made preservation negatives and copies. Admittedly, their preservation value was bypassed – but many of these original prints were works of art in themselves, containing subtleties of lighting and nuances of toning that could never be recaptured in black and white copies. Donated to museum or an archive, their usefulness could have been extended for many years. Instead, MGM destroyed them by dumping them in barrels of water. Moreover, this destruction was accomplished often without checking the results of the copying. OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS, one of the definitive jazz-age films, was copied without the original material (which was excessively dirty) having been cleaned first. Thus, dirt, grease and large hairs that move back and forth across the image were printed right into the new negative – and are preserved for posterity with all subsequent prints. One shudders at the energy to be expended in years to come by projectionists vainly trying to blow these wandering hairs and blobs from their own projector gates! At Fox however, Alex Gordon has seen to it that the original prints once copied, will continue to be of use and delight to historians, students and non-specialized audiences. They have been split up between the Museum of Modern Art, UCLA and the George Eastman House, and through these institutions are not only shown periodically, but also loaned to other archives throughout the world.

Quite incidentally, while the American Film Institute does a magnificent job in its preservation program, it is an institution concerned very much with its public image. It has to call attention to what it does, and is not averse at times to taking credit for what it hasn’t done. It was rather ironic that a recent Fox retrospective at the AFI’s Washington theatre issued a brochure which profusely thanked a score of AFI and Fox executives, secretaries and office boys, but made no mention whatsoever of Self and Gordon, the men who made it all possible!

The enormity of the Fox preservation undertaking seems to have impressed all but the Fox sales force. At one time scathing in their contempt for the old material, they now assume that everything exists, and frequently call in casual requests for material that hasn’t existed for decades. Moreover, one wonders about the filmic background and imagination of many of the tv salesmen. Presumably because Zasu Pitts is at the head of the cast, Stroheim’s HELLO SISTER is listed on informational handouts as a wacky comedy!

The one major tragedy in the Fox preservation campaign has been the inability to find any kind of print of Murnau’s FOUR DEVILS. The last-known Fox print was loaned to Mary Duncan, one of the film’s stars, to show to some friends in Florida. After the screening, aware that it was a dangerous nitrate print and assuming that Fox had plenty more in reserve, she casually threw it into the ocean – a monumental blunder to rank with Balaclava, Sarajevo and the fall of Babylon as one of history’s blackest moments. There have been rumors in recent years of a print in Germany, and of a print held by one of America’s foremost filmic carpetbaggers, but Duncan, both came to naught. Together with uncut GREED, FOUR DEVILS is the nitrate equivalent of the Holy Grail. One wishes the filmic knights of the world, mounted on white chargers and carrying full aperture duping printers. Godspeed!

All of the stills illustrating this article are, with the exception of FOUR DEVILS, from films rescued and preserved during the past six-year operation.

Full and grateful acknowledgement is paid to the Museum of Modern Art Film Dept., without whose financial participation many of these Films would have been permanently lost.

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