Tweet Blackhawk Film Prints You Own

Since quite a few people here are fans of Blackhawk Films and/or got into silent movies via collecting these films in decades past, I thought it would be interesting if we would post what prints we own. I suspect some may have hundreds though!! I only purchased my first Blackhawk via ebay a little over a decade ago and alas currently don't have a working projector to play them on so I haven't bought any more in several years. All of mine are either Super 8 or 8mm.

200" Shorts:
Artful Kate
Don't Shove
Flivvering
Foiled Elopement
Friends
Hogan Out West
Lonely Villa
Perils of Pauline - The Floating Coffin (2 200')
Perils of Pauline - first episode? (1 200' missing the other one)
Prevue 8
Settled at the Seaside

400':
Big Moments from Little Pictures
Dangerous Females (this one is 8mm sound which I've never had access to but it is still entertaining watching it as a silent)
Desperate Scoundrel
Iron Mask (1 reel edition)
Little Mary America's Sweetheart
Through Fire and Air (2 400")

Features:
The Mad Whirl
Mark of Zorro
Peck's Bad Boy
Son of the Sheik
Way Down East

I began collecting Blackhawk Films in 8mm silent and magnetic sound (remember those?) starting in 1965. They were almost exclusively Laurel & Hardy. I used to correspond with Mr. Eastin who politely answered all my inquiries. In time I diversified a bit, but in 1970 I sold off most of the 8mm and began collecting in 16mm. Here are the Blackhawk Films that I still have:

8mm:
BROKEN BLOSSOMS
AMERICA
STRONGHEART (1913)

16mm:
THE TOLL GATE
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
SON OF THE SHEIK
THE BELOVED ROGUE
TEMPEST
OUR RELATIONS
BLOCKHEADS

I've sold off a number of my films over the years, but still have over 100 of them, all Super-8, in a trunk. And I do still thread-up the projector, now and then. It would take me quite a while to list them all, but I can mention a few favorites: a very good Van Beuren print of Chaplin's The Cure, lots of Laurel & Hardy, but an especially nice print of Two Tars with a good music track, lots of Mabel & Roscoe, some enjoyable Ub Iwerks cartoons, some very early Disney, and more.

Actually the prize of my collection is a non-Blackhawk print a friend brought me from Belgium long ago, Laurel & Hardy's phonetic French version of Laughing Gravy, complete with the "inheritance" ending. That's available on DVD now, but for many years it was a real rarity.

[silentfilm]

Bob, your Toll Gate, is it the abridged version (missing the last reel) or the later released (by Blackhawk) complete version? I used to have the first version. It was really sharp, but it had some nitrate decomposition, and the last reel was mostly titles wrapping up the story. I sold it because it was just too disappointing to wrap up the story with several minutes of titles.

I counted and I've got 37 16mm sound shorts and 57 silent shorts, if you include films sold by David Shepard after Blackhawk closed. I've got a lot of Laurel & Hardy, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, W.C. Fields, D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts and silent serial chapters. Some of the more rare titles that I have are:

How to Take a Vacation (1941) with Robert Benchley
Fashions in Love (1936) excerpts from Paramount silent films
Movie Milestones, #2 (1936) excerpts from Paramount silent films
Struggle for Survival (1944) Arne Sucksdorf Swedish nature film
Screen Souvenirs #12 (1932) a look back in the early 1900s
Felix the Cat and the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg (1936)

Crazy to Act (1927) Oliver Hardy's only Mack Sennett comedy
Alkali Ike's Auto (1911) with Augustus Carney and Margaret Joslin.
The Grocery Clerk (1920) with Larry Semon
His Foothill Folly (1917) with Raymond Griffith
A Two-Cylinder Courtship (1917) with Billie Rhodes
The Battle (1911) with Blanche Sweet and Robert Harron
Santa Claus vs. Cupid (1915) with Raymond McKee
The Veiled Priestess (1915) with Marguerite Cortot (from The Ventures of Marguerite)
The Wild Engine (1915/1919) with Helen Holmes. Two chapters of The Hazards of Helen edited together.

The only Blackhawk features that I have are:
$50,000 Reward (1924)
College (1927)
Block-Heads (1938)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

I have a handful of Blackhawk Super 8mm films, but I have not touched them since the 1970s. If anybody is interested, let me know.

Don't forget that other places like Thunderbird and Griggs-Moviedrome put out quality prints back then. I even have a few Niles prints that are good, but they were mostly dupey looking.

Other members of this forum like Jim Reid, Shorty Caruso and Richard Roberts have much bigger collections.

Bruce Calvert wrote: Bob, your Toll Gate, is it the abridged version (missing the last reel) or the later released (by Blackhawk) complete version? I used to have the first version. It was really sharp, but it had some nitrate decomposition, and the last reel was mostly titles wrapping up the story. I sold it because it was just too disappointing to wrap up the story with several minutes of titles.

Bruce, I used to own the abridged TOLL GATE in 8mm but Blackhawk came out with the complete version that I purchased in 16mm. But as you noted, the abridged version offered a sharper image. I own about 75 features in 16mm plus about a dozen short films, and by now I have most if not all of them on dvd.

I started collecting Blackhawk 8mm prints in the late 60s or early 70s. I was a kid and had to do chores and odd jobs to earn my money to buy them. I think I still have:
Features;
Hunchback of Notre Dame
The General
Intolerance

Shorts:
A Harem Knight (Ben Turpin)
Titanic
Preview 8
Wrong Again (L & H)
Double Whoopee

All of my ...stuff... was recently put into storage so, I'm not sure where much of this is. I do still have the Kodak projector that was given to my dad by his parents.

I sent away for these as a teenager in the late '60s, all in 8mm, and watched them so often I felt like I knew every frame. I used to set up the screen and projector in my room, where I had posters of Chaplin, L&H, Keaton, Fields, and the Marx Brothers. Now these reels are in a box under our spare bed.

Chaplin:
The Rink
The Immigrant

L&H:
Putting Pants on Philip
Liberty

Langdon:
Soldier Man

Like many of you, I began buying these when I was young. It's probably the reason I know some of those Chaplin films by heart - when all you have is a couple of 8mm shorts and a projector, you tend to get to know your films very well.

I probably have a few dozen Blackhawks left in 16mm (all Chaplin, I think), and another dozen or so unloved Super 8mm reels eating up shelf-space.

I also wanted to say it matters WHAT Blackhawk prints you have, too. Their silent versions of the Chaplin Mutuals, for instance, are often dupes from the Kodascope prints, and "One A.M." even has many of the original intertitles. The later, sound prints are from the Van Beuren negatives, which were sometimes missing shots.

blackhawk stuff sm.jpg (139.39 KiB) Viewed 1387 times

Well, I have these prints, and a few more...

I made this photo recently to sell these t-shirts at Cinefest and on 16mmfilmtalk.com. Since I'm making a second run soon, perhaps I should offer them here?

The shirts are fantastic!

Since I'm making a second run soon, perhaps I should offer them here?

Please DO!

[silentfilm]

Here's some scans of Blackhawk catalog pages that I saved on my computer when doing research. I have tons of their catalogs.

So, Bruce, do you have a copy of the catalog when they offered LAM?

Oh, this is easy...

I think the only 16mm Blackhawks I have are Bray's Gertie, mistakenly credited to McCay by them, and this seems to have been discontinued at some point. Then some of their printings of older Guaranteed Pictures/Stuart Productions sound T.V. versions of silent Aesop's Fables, such as Transatlantic Flight and maybe a couple others.

One day a few of the silent comedies would be nice to own.

Let's see. Some Tom Mix Westerns. THE LAW AND THE OUTLAW, IN THE DAYS OF THE THUNDERING HEARD, JUST TONY, RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE. William S. Hart: BLUE BLAZES RAWDEN, THE TOLL GATE. Most of the Chaplin Mutual's and several of the Chaplin Essany's. A few Keystone's. A number of Keaton shorts. A few Harold Lloyd shorts, and five of the features. Including GRANDMA'S BOY, SAFETY LAST, GIRL SHY, THE FRESHMAN, and FOR HEAVENS SAKE. Mary Pickford's LITTLE ANNIE ROONEY. Some Laurel And Hardy Two-reelers. Among them TWO TARS, THERE PURPLE MOMENT< and BIG BUSINESS. Plus a variety of other stuff, but I haven't looked at any of it in at least 10 or 12 years now.

I still have the Winter 1981-82 catalog which I think was the last year they were selling film prints. The prices for the 8mm/Super 8 films on your 70's lists that were still available jumped in price from $13-14 to $24-25 and almost all 16mm titles were available only with musical soundtracks at that point. They were also now selling a handful of RKO features on Super 8 sound like MORNING GLORY, STAGE DOOR, and SHALL WE DANCE. The video revolution was just starting to take hold and most of the catalog was now VHS and Beta tapes other than the silent comedy shorts.

Has anybody seen (from the lists) CAPTAIN BARNACLE DIPLOMAT starring Maurice Costello anywhere on video or dvd? Blackhawk says the leading lady was Lottie Pickford but IMDb does not credit her with appearing in the movie and says Hazel Neason plays Costello's sweetheart.

I still have the Winter 1981-82 catalog which I think was the last year they were selling film prints. The prices for the 8mm/Super 8 films on your 70's lists that were still available jumped in price from $13-14 to $24-25 and almost all 16mm titles were available only with musical soundtracks at that point.

I did most of my collecting in the early to mid-70s, and took advantage of sales whenever possible. I remember when the prices went up sharply in the late '70s; someone told me it was because of the films' silver content. In any case, after that, I only bought films once or twice a year, when it was something really special. I got my last one around 1982, then lost interest in Blackhawk when they switched to VHS.

But along about 1999 I noticed that people were selling used prints on eBay, and I've picked up a few more that way. They've generally been good quality, and in some cases practically pristine. The only problem is, sometimes I find that the seller (or some previous owner of the print) has spliced-out the historical intro. I always enjoyed those!

[silentfilm]

Here is the in-famous London After Midnight page, a great myth debunked by our humble forum webmaster.

I'm pretty sure that I've got a 1983 and maybe a 1984 Blackhawk catalog at home. They were mostly selling videotapes by then, with only about four pages devoted to film.

Started (1962), reached one thousand films not long ago, mostly retired from active collecting, except some very rare items - Shorty

Here is the in-famous London After Midnight page, a great myth debunked by our humble forum webmaster.

So, what's the story behind this?
Why was it in there if the film was lost?

[silentfilm]

Click on this link to see Mike Gebert's webpage in the lost London After Midnight.

[silentfilm]

Actually the prize of my collection is a non-Blackhawk print a friend brought me from Belgium long ago, Laurel & Hardy's phonetic French version of Laughing Gravy, complete with the "inheritance" ending. That's available on DVD now, but for many years it was a real rarity.

After Blackhawk went out of business, David Shepard sold the collection until about 2008, when his lab went out of business. He did offer the Spanish reel three of Laughing Gravy (the U.S. version only had two reels, and ends with the policeman quarantining the building), and I'm happy to have a print of it. It sounds like you have the entire French version of the film.

Click on this link to see Mike Gebert's webpage in the lost London After Midnight.

Excellent. Thanks.

Actually the prize of my collection is a non-Blackhawk print a friend brought me from Belgium long ago, Laurel & Hardy's phonetic French version of Laughing Gravy, complete with the "inheritance" ending. That's available on DVD now, but for many years it was a real rarity.

After Blackhawk went out of business, David Shepard sold the collection until about 2008, when his lab went out of business. He did offer the Spanish reel three of Laughing Gravy (the U.S. version only had two reels, and ends with the policeman quarantining the building), and I'm happy to have a print of it. It sounds like you have the entire French version of the film.

Yes, I have the complete French version, running about 35 or 36 minutes, I believe. I once screened it for several French-speaking viewers, and it got big laughs. One guy told me afterwards that Stan & Ollie delivered their lines like kids in a grade school pageant. Which suits them perfectly, of course.

[silentfilm]

Here's a page from what I think is the last catalog I have of theirs, the Spring 1984 supplement #2 catalog. Other than announcements of two new films, a longer version of Laurel & Hardy's Battle of the Century (1927) and Gene Autry's On Top of Old Smoky (1953), these are the only film listings. The rest of the catalog is full of their VHS offerings, as well as CED video discs.

By then Kent Eastin and Martin Phelan had sold the company, and president Ted Ewing has this now unbelievable column,

During the past 60 days or so about 350 of the VideoDisc titles have been rolled back to a price of just $19.98. As fast as we have received notification of these rollbacks we have put them into effect. We are quite pleased to see the industry taking steps to make the CED VideoDisc not only the most permanent form for saving motion pictures, but making for the best possible picture and sound quality at the most affordable prices.
We are continuing to make progress an the first few of our Blackhawk titles to be converted to the CED VideoDisc and hope to be able to announce them to you by early summer.

CED discs used a needle to play the film, just like an old analog vinyl music record. They were easily scratched. CED discs didn't last long in the marketplace, so this was a huge blunder.

Blackhawk also announced that they had four franchise video stores, two in Iowa and two in Illinois. I don't know how long these stores survived.

[Mike Gebert]

Yeah, that's why all the CEDs of London After Midnight are unplayable now.

I'm pretty sure that I've got a 1983 and maybe a 1984 Blackhawk catalog at home. They were mostly selling videotapes by then, with only about four pages devoted to film.

I probably got those too but only saved the 1981-82 catalog since it apparently was the last one with a lot of film in it, although even that early videotape was dominating. Also they were mixing the various formats altogether in listings by genre rather than by format which can make it a little pain to find the films, although the Blackhawk staples like L&H, Our Gangs, and silent comedies on film were pretty much listed together without interruption.

I seem to recall the last films they sold were Columbia 400" Super 8 films in clearance at under $10 each. I was tempted to get some of the CONGO BILL episodes but then they didn't have them all and of course quantities were limited.

I made this photo recently to sell these t-shirts at Cinefest and on 16mmfilmtalk.com. Since I'm making a second run soon, perhaps I should offer them here?

So Jay, are the Blackhawk shirts available, yet???

[silentfilm]

I just picked up a couple of chapters from the serial The Woman in Grey (1920), so here's a Blackhawk catalog listing of some of them from 1975.