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In this Cafe Roxy blog post, the author Ron (Hall?) mentions that he has a 16mm catalog from the 1940s, and it lists both Hats Off (1927) and Battle of the Century (1927) as being available for rental in 16mm. Of course we now now that Hats Off is one of the most famous lost films. Battle of the Century is a Laurel & Hardy silent short that is missing most of its second reel.

So maybe there is a rental print from the 1940s out there somewhere....

The only thing that I can tell you is that the film was originally released in Argentina under the title AFUERA LOS SOMBREROS.

In that blog it is noted that David Shepard said a print of HATS OFF "was supposedly sold on eBay some years ago."

There is a feature film with the same title, so if there was an eBay listing, it was likely for this other film. I think it's safe to say that if a print of Laurel and Hardy's HATS OFF had ever been on eBay, it would have attracted just a wee bit of attention!

After all, if the eBay seller had advertised "Laurel and Hardy in HAT'S OFF," who would have missed that?? Even if it was more vague, with no title listed, "for sale, old comedy with Laurel and Hardy carrying a washing machine up a flight of steps..." I think a few people would have noticed.

Then, once sold, the collector who bought it clams up and doesn't tell anyone about his big find? Uh huh.

I can imagine one or two of the big collectors out there would possibly keep this film in their collections without telling the world, but doubt 99.9% of the rest of us would.

Jim Harwood

The only option to unearth this film (and/or many others) is to go to Latin American film archives that preserve films that have never been identified.

I have seen this situation myself.

I'm with Jim in that if it had been listed on eBay several 16mm collectors would have spotted it, and the bidding would have been very spirited. The word would have gotten out on several forums even before the auction was over.

Absolutely.
No doubt but we would have heard about it.
Wasn't there a musical with this name made in the 30's?

I didn't get it on eBay but I do have a 16mm print of the "other" HATS OFF. A charming Grand National musical about a worlds fair. Mae Clarke stars.

As for 40's rental prints, I found a 1944 print of SHOULD HUSBANDS PAY? - the complete two-reel version - in a flea market a few years ago. It was in mint condition but the can was rusty so the seller chopped the price from $10 to $5. We made a neg and added a musical score. Hilarious film with Fin, Tyler Brooke, Anita Garvin, Anders Randolf etc. I think Blackhawk only had a one-reel version of this film.

Thus, films available even in the 40's can go the way of all flesh. To paraphrase Douglas Spencer, KEEP WATCHING THE TABLES!!!

I'm very grateful for Ray's work on this. SHOULD HUSBANDS PAY? is one of the jewels of anyone's two-reel comedy collection.

I've seen one 1950s list of shorts available for television broadcasters that consists of virtually all of the Hal Roach silent films from the teens and twenties distributed by Pathe (excepting the Harold Lloyd titles) as well as a healthy bunch of the Sennett-Pathe films from the 1920s.
Many of these titles no longer seem to be around now though.

Joe Moore

I too have one or more 16mm catalogs from the 40s that lists HATS OFF. Like anything else, there should be prints out there. I'm mostly looking for the various Dinky Doodle and Col. Heeza Liar cartoons that were also part of such rental libraries. This stuff IS out there, folks.

I would think rental catalogs are reasonably accurate, but the same isn't necessarily true for info from TV distributors. As far as silent material goes, distributors might sew up the rights for every film produced by a specific company (and publicize that fact), but that doesn't mean the original owners had prints on hand. In the case of cartoons especially, it was sometimes up to the distributor to track down existing prints... a task for which he received SOME guidance from the owners, but was hardly an exhaustive search.

Mike

MikeH0714 wrote:In the case of cartoons especially, it was sometimes up to the distributor to track down existing prints... a task for which he received SOME guidance from the owners, but was hardly an exhaustive search.

Mike

I'm curious, what specific instances are you thinking of? I can't say I've ever come across a situation when researching early TV packages of older cartoons.

I know this was the case with WB when they sold their library to PRM (soon to become AAP). There were a number of late '20s titles that didn't exist at that point that they had the rights to.

Tom Stathes wrote:

MikeH0714 wrote:In the case of cartoons especially, it was sometimes up to the distributor to track down existing prints... a task for which he received SOME guidance from the owners, but was hardly an exhaustive search.

Mike

I'm curious, what specific instances are you thinking of? I can't say I've ever come across a situation when researching early TV packages of older cartoons.

Tom,

Sorry I'm so late in replying to your question - I thought you might recall this post I made to the Animation Show Cartoon History forum about two years ago:

http://www.animationshow.com/forums/ind ... c=3638&hl=

It's an excerpt from a 1953 article in THE BILLBOARD about cartoon packages for TV. I know you read it because you commented on it. In the section on Official Films sewing up the TV rights to ALL "Felix the Cat" cartoons: "The greatest step forward in the TV cartoon situation recently was Official Films' acquisition to the TV rights to the 'Felix the Cat' series produced by the late Pat Sullivan. There are an estimated 200 segments in this series altogether. How many of these will ultimately find their way to TV is not definitely ascertainable at the moment. Felix the Cat Productions and Official Films are currently tracking down the whereabouts and condition of all these negatives."

Of course, Official could have been cautious in its catalogs and listed ONLY the titles which they had in hand... but early publicity blurbs for the deal mentioned the "200 titles" claim as in the article.

Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for clarifying- I do recall your informative post which I'm still very grateful for. My memory was playing tricks on me and I think I'd selectively forgotten the Felix situation because that seems to be the only situation like it in regards to the cartoon packages. Everything else I've reviewed so far suggests that distributors bought whichever films remained, usually directly from the still-active or defunct studios when their representatives or original founders were still actually living and active in the field. Max Fleischer sold his to Guaranteed/Stuart/FilmVideo; Paul Terry to the same conglomerate as well as Commonwealth and Sterling; and J.R. Bray handled the TV distribution of his own films as a newly formed package based on whatever prints he still had or could find elsewhere. So, the Felix situation may be the only like it in terms of cartoons...the other distributors seemed to just take whatever they could find from defunct studios or bought whatever films remained from their original producers. I know it has happened with live action packages but again aside from Felix, I've seen no documentation that a distributor bought rights to and advertised lists of cartoons that they didn't actually have.

Information I had about L&H & others was the when the late Robert Youngson was making his compilation features, original nitrates(negs etc) from Hollywood to NYC where he edited his films. Supposedly these went to a vau
lt later in NYC and left with no further thought to them. The report also said he had the complete Battle of the Century that he placed in this vault and never made any attempt to preserve any complete rare material he was working with.

I have got somewhere some of the catalogues of TV films(all types), theatrical films etc available to TV which I got in the 1970s when I belonged to Nostalgia Book Club(Arlington House, publishers New Rochelle, NY). The features films listed countless films from the beginning of the talkies and told you the length & who owned them for TV, running time etc. But it also listed titles that were made by a particular company but no longer available. An example was Good News(MGM 1930) which was listed as Unavailable. Negative deteriorated. This film had 2-strip color sequences and does exist at least to all but the last reel and I have pieces of it on disc(Laserdisc). It has been said the last reel had been found and I had heard that they had the sound(maybe from discs?) and used stills to pad out the footage. Who knows.

However, the TV program books were different because they only listed the TV series that were available to screen and if not that show was not listed in any form. The do list whether a program was on video(TV gauges), 16mm or 35mm or all. Still very handy at the time before the internet.

The 1940s rental-catalog mention of HATS OFF was published by George Hirliman, co-founder of Film Classics. Looks to me like he took a printed inventory of the Roach titles Film Classics was handling (including HATS OFF and THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY), and reprinted the listing in his rental catalog, without checking to see if he actually had the film elements on hand. (This happened to Hirliman in 1944 when he had planned to reissue three Laurel & Hardy shorts to theaters; he found that the films were silent and had no accompanying scores or soundtracks.)

I split this thread into a separate topic for the GOOD NEWS color discussion, which was fascinating and quickly drifting to become appropriate material for the TECH TALK subforum (which is where it can now be found).

--Christopher Jacobs
http://hpr1.com/film
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs