A Trip Thru the Poster Box!

I went to my first film convention in 1969 -- Cinecon #4 in Hollywood -- and have been going to one or two a year ever since. Mostly I get to the Syracuse Cinefest every March, and it just celebrated it's 30th year. But the topic today is my movie posters and I found many at these film gatherings where they showed rare, vintage films in one room and sold memorabilia in the room next door. In those early days they sold a lot of 8mm and 16mm film prints. I collected 16mm since that was the only way to see rare films back before the days of home video. I largely overlooked the posters, but today the films have lost value and good posters are out of sight. Had I only known where to put my money....

So I never collected posters seriously and I rarely looked thru the many bins of them at conventions. There were too many posters and they cost too much. However, one year I fortunately noticed a bunch of lobby cards from Alfred Hitchcock films. They could not have cost that much or I would not have been tempted to buy. I don't recall the prices but I imagine around $10 apiece, so I perused and purchased about 15 of them trying to get at least one card from each Hithcock film that was available. I should have just bought them all, of course. They range from a Rear Window reissue that is worth little, to unattractive ones from The Wrong Man and To Catch a Thief to the rather valuable Mount Rushmore card from North By Northwest and the title lobby cards from Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious. Also Grace Kelly standing by the telephone in Dial M for Murder, two from Strangers on a Train and Janet Leigh at the window in Psycho and Cary Grant at bedside with glass of milk from Suspicion. Here is my actual card of Notorious that is sold by moviegoods.com. I know it is a copy of my card because of the minor flaws like the tiny white flake at the top of Cary's head.



One reason I never acquired many movie posters is that I never framed and displayed them. That would take effort and cost money. Even today the only framed movie posters I have up in my office are a Belgian poster of The Searchers, that a friend gave me already framed, and a Fine Arts Serigraph reprint poster of Donald Duck in Sea Scouts, which we of course bought framed. An original one-sheet of the Disney sold at auction for $6,600 in 1992; mine is worth what I paid for it, or maybe $75, and there is no channel for re-selling it as a collectible. This Searchers poster sold in 2009 for $175. Many Belgian posters are gorgeous, but they are not dated and were sold for years to fans, so there is no particular value or way to prove that one has an original first issue poster. Mine is because I know the foreign source that gave it to me, and I enjoy it.

I have a far less attractive American window card for The Searchers that sells for more, and it resides where most of my posters do -- in some box or other. They have been in boxes for years, and because I have a poor memory it is always an adventure to open the boxes. One time they languished unlooked at for a very long time, like thru the entire 1980s. Remember that poor memory, so I don't really know, but it was so long that I was genuinely surprised by some of the posters I found. One of the biggest surprises in my life was to unfold a one-sheet for Singin' in the Rain. It is the familiar poster pictured here, but the surprise was to gradually realize upon close scrutiny that it was not a reproduction and it was not a re-issue from later years. Those posters would be marked as such in fine print at the bottom. Therefore, it could only be and indeed is ... an original issue one-sheet from 1952!

How did I ever get this one-sheet, one of which sold at a Christie's auction in 1993 for $1,265? I don't recall (yes, really) but have a guess. In 1973 I was running a film society in Minneapolis and had some contact with a man running a film series in St. Paul, John Scanlan. John told me he got posters to put up at his shows from a warehouse in Kansas City. I forget the details but any poster collector knows exactly which warehouse this is. So I asked John to order a few posters of any kind from a few favorite films. I know that's where my insert of White Heat came from and also a reissue poster for Dead End. My guess is that Singin' in the Rain came from this source (for about $10) and I never noticed that it was an original, or valuable. Several collector friends have examined the poster over the years and urged me to get it mounted on linen, which I finally did. So now it is stored in a tube, rather than folded in a box or framed and hung like it should be. Maybe I will get around to that someday.

I have just consigned 7 posters to Bruce Hershenson's Min-Major Auction in July. One poster is the Notorious lobby card pictured above. The most valuable one, I suspect, is a lobby card that apparently few have ever seen because it has never been auctioned before. I could not find any image of it online and it features two major cult stars about to kiss. On top of this, the 1928 Paramount film is lost! I will publish this poster image here as soon as emovieposter.com scans it properly in preparation for the auction.


Visit the combined Festival Films/Café Roxy Website!

Blasting Off!

"Space Patrol! High adventure in the wild vast reaches of space. Visions of daring in the name of interplanetary justice. Travel into the future with Buzz Corey, Commander in Chief of... The Space Patrol." Thus began every exciting adventure from 1950 to 1955 on Saturday morning. It is the first TV series I recall regularly watching (at a friend's house) before we had television ourselves. I suspect I did not see it until 1952, but stuck around until it snuck away and at the age of 9 may have felt too sophisticated to miss it.

Space Patrol has been on my mind lately since I recently watched a few episodes and spotted an ad for a toy I had as a kid -- the official Space Patrol Periscope. You could use it to peak over fences (had none) or around corners in rooms or trees (had those) or around space rocks on the moon to watch villains at their dastardly deeds (never tried that). Another ad was for a totem head helmet that was actually used as a prop in the show. The buy-for-home-model was of course cardboard, and I suspect the ones on the show were identical! Not sure I had one of those, but I do recall a Space Patrol space helmet with secret one-way vision: you could see out the plastic but no one could see in to see who you were. The things cost about .25¢ but were super exciting to get in the mail, unpack and unfold!

So these thoughts were running through my head when I named today's blog, which has nothing else to do with Space Patrol!

"Blasting Off!" refers to my revamped, refurbished, reinvigorating and resoundingly fabulous new-look website! Please, kindly, go take a look at it.

Most pages look like this sample one on the left. The two side bars are common to most pages. On the left is the Festival Films section that concentrates on public domain films. At anytime while browsing the site you can click on the vintage television set and return to the Catalog of Public Domain Films home page. Here you can pick any genre of interest -- Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, etc. -- click and go to that page, which will look like the example shown here of lists of films that are in the public domain. I have already added the genres of Muscle Men, Exploitation and War films. Coming soon -- Kung Fu -- or I may call it Kung Fooey. The Action-Adventure page is being revised with Jungle Films added so far.

At the top of each genre I clarify that all films are available on DVD-R, and some as double features as noted. Here is a typical entry: Jungle Bride (1933) 63m. Charles Starrett, Anita Page. Persons shipwrecked on the coast of Africa face many jungle perils. A nice Monogram effort. Bonus feature: Tentacles of the North (1926, silent) 54m. Two ships are trapped in the Arctic ice. I also note that higher end video masters are available on formats like BetaSP and DVCam. Companies who process into commercial DVD releases need the highest quality with least compression. Whereas small TV stations and online streamers can use the more economical DVD-R format.

A quick click on the large Café Roxy sign will take you to a Roxy home page with links to all the programs. These pages are still in the old format which is mainly all the posters that both advertise each program to YOU and are also for your use to promote your showings. So the website -- here's another chance to go look at it -- is divided simply into the two aspects of Public Domain Films: 1) What they are, and 2) What you can do with them.

Here is how I got the long overdue, desperately needed and greatly appreciated website make over. I have one son, Jeffrey, who is a computer programmer. He has worked his way up through a number of jobs and only this year got hired by a firm in Silicone Valley. Jeff moved to Menlo Park and works in downtown Foster City, California. In his new job he is doing more website design than he had before, and he ran across a template he thought would work for me. Just a few weeks ago in the May 2 blog I wrote about combining Festival Films and Café Roxy websites. Jeff's offer and the final results happened since then! Thank you, Jeff, I am really happy with how the new site looks and works.

I have plenty of work ahead putting in several hundred new titles and revising many pages, but the framework is all set. Please go check it out for yourself and email me any comments to fesfilms@aol.com.


Did I mention you can reach the new website by simply clicking here?

Surprising B-Westerns #2

A truly surprising B-Western might unfold thusly: A cowgirl rides into town with her sidekick, perhaps played by Maude Eburn, meets a young, helpless (male) rancher whose elderly mother has just been killed by the bad guy. (We can assume the boy's father died in child birth.) The heroine with two six-guns takes up the cause to save his ranch, they almost fall in love but instead she rides off into the sunset at the fade out.

That film was never made, although a handful of B-westerns had a girl lead -- Dorothy Page. Dorothy started as a singer with Paul Whiteman, and was tested by Universal in the low-budget musical Manhattan Moon (1935). Her three westerns for cheapie studio Grand National were not particularly successful, as audiences didn't warm to the idea of a singing cowgirl the way they had to a singing cowboy. If you can, check out The Singing Cowgirl (1938), Water Rustlers and Ride 'Em Cowgirl (1939). I have only seen Water Rustlers, where she stars above the ineffectual Dave O'Brien, and can attest that it looks and feels like every other B of the era except for the switch in gender emphasis.

My candidate for a recently viewed western that surprised me is Texas Cyclone (1932) starring Tim McCoy. Tim had such a colorful life that I would like to share it with you courtesy of the IMDB:

One of the great stars of early American Westerns. McCoy was the son of an Irish soldier who later became police chief of Saginaw, Michigan, where McCoy was born. He attended St. Ignatius College in Chicago and after seeing a Wild West show there, left school and found work on a Wyoming ranch. He became an expert horseman and roper and developed a keen knowledge of the ways and languages of the Indian tribes in the area. He competed in numerous rodeos, then enlisted in the U.S. Army when America entered the First World War. He was commissioned and rose to the rank of colonel, eventually being posted as Adjutant General of Wyoming, a position he held until 1921.

In 1922, Tim was asked by the head of Famous Players-Lasky, Jesse L. Lasky, to provide Indian extras for The Covered Wagon (1923). He brought hundreds of Indians to Hollywood and served as technical advisor on the film. After touring the country and Europe with the Indians as publicity, McCoy obtained further work in the movies, both as a technical advisor and as an actor. McCoy rapidly rose to stardom, making scores of Westerns and occasional non-Westerns. In 1935 he toured with the Ringling Brothers Circus and then with his own Wild West show, but returned to films in 1940 teaming with Buck Jones and Raymond Hatton in The Rough Riders series.

So why did Texas Cyclone surprise me, one might ask? The plot is a bit different and far-fetched with a surprise ending I won't reveal: When Pecos Grant arrives in Stampede, Arizona, he is greeted as Jim Rawlins, a former inhabitant, believed dead for five years. Utah Becker, town boss and traditional enemy of Rawlins, starts a fight but Pecos quickly ends it. On the advice of Sheriff Lew Collins, Pecos, a rancher from Texas, decides to keep up the pretense. He finds that Helena, Rawlins' wife, is having her cattle rustled by her own cowhands, and he fires three of them and accuses Becker of being behind the conspiracy against Helena. Pecos sends for his Texas riders and succeeds in running the Becker gang out of Stampede.

The principal interest is in the actor who played the cowhand that Tim did NOT fire, because I never knew he had made a film with Tim McCoy even though I have enjoyed most of his other westerns for years and years. 20 minutes or so into the film Tim walks into the bunkhouse to meet his wranglers and off in the corner stands John Wayne, who dominates every subsequent scene he is in. A plot contrivance has Wayne wounded by henchmen so that only Tim faces the final shoot-out with baddie Wheeler Oakman. To be perfectly clear here, John Wayne is playing Tim McCoy's sidekick, in a dynamic similar to James Ellison and Russell Hayden doing much of the fighting and romancing for the older William Boyd in the Hopalong Cassidy series.

Wayne also made Two-Fisted Law in 1932 during his short stay at Columbia and also with Tim and Wheeler and, I forgot to mention him in the cast -- Walter Brennan in one his youngest roles ever as a "codger" at the age of 38. Wayne's Lone Star western Desert Trail, shown in the poster here, is from 1935.

There is another reason to rush to see Texas Cyclone from Netflix or a rental store (are there any left?) The film was copyrighted and renewed by Columbia, who still holds 35mm material, so the DVD is the result of a recent high definition transfer. No B-Western has ever looked this good on video!


Posters for all Café Roxy shows can be viewed at Roxy Programs.

Polishing Off Matinee #3!

"Polishing Off" is a phrase affectionately used by Mr. Tod Slaughter in many of his films, as in to "polish off" a patron in Sweeney Todd means to cut his throat and send him downstairs to meat pie heaven. I have been polishing off the programs and posters for the Matinee 3 series and you can view the entire line-up Here.

One of my missions, as mentioned in an earlier blog, is to spread the joy of Slaughter-dom to the uninitiated. To that end (pun) drop everything and go watch Tod Slaughter At Home. This 1936 short shows Mr. Slaughter off at his best, laughing maniacally throughout. A sign outside his door reads "Sweeney Tod Slaughter," alluding to the curious connection between his name and his most famous role. The over-the-top humor continues when a newsreel photographer enters to film his subject but is strapped in a barber chair for a shave. A scantily clad young lady wanders in from a neighboring set so that Tod can carve out an unexpected present for the barber victim. Leonard Maltin commented: "This is GREAT! Thanks for leading me to it!"

And I feel great about my decision this week to add Tod Slaughter's Crimes at the Dark House (1940) to week 11 of my third Saturday Matinee series. I just acquired excellent material on the film, which led to the inclusion, but I also feel it is his most enjoyable film for audiences today. In the first scene Tod creeps up on a sleeping man and pounds a spike into his brain! He then impersonates the man back in England to claim his estate and promised bride while murdering his numerous enemies. The film is based on the celebrated novel "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins, which has been re-made for TV in various countries in 1957, 1960, 1966, 1970, 1980, 1992 and 1997! Whew! I think Hammer Films made a version as well. Basically, this version is an old-fashioned melodrama centered around the black villainy of the protagonist. You can view a short scene in the trailer I made to plug next week's film in Matinee Show #10.

That link actually shows trailers to the last four shows in the series. Besides Crimes at the Dark House, enjoy my productions plugging Missile to the Moon, The Big Show and Speak Easily. I simply take some good scenes out of each film, add "Next Week" lingo and sometimes words over the film clips, and that's all folks! The three best shots are in the prevu for Missile to the Moon -- a hypnotic scene by the moon woman, the giant spider attack and the rock men. Like a good trailer, this should inspire feelings of "I gotta see this!" Not true. You just gotta see the trailer!

I thought about but did not use Sweeney Todd in the Matinee. Sweeney starts a little slow and you need to know the story to appreciate it. Most people do know the story, but due to self-censorship, one assumes, this version does not clarify what happens between the bodies dropping into the cellar and what turns up in the meat pies. You know, don't you??? To make room for Tod and his more enjoyable Crimes film, I bumped Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. Most fans have seen the Holmes film, and while not bad it just doesn't compare with the promised joys of seeing Mr. Slaughter cackling on the big screen.

Notes on some of the other Matinee programs will appear in upcoming weeks.

Posters for all Café Roxy shows can be viewed at Roxy Programs.

Café Roxy -- Into the Future!

"Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives." That's one of my favorite lines by Criswell at the start of Plan Nine From Outer Space. I'm old enough to actually remember watching the "Criswell Predicts" TV show where he ESPed audience members, except that show is not listed at the IMDB so I must have dreamed it all!

Anyway, I started this blog and the Café Roxy website just over a year ago. Happy Birthday to us! I don't even know which day that might be. I did weekly blog entries, plus a few extras, all through 2009. Then around Christmas time I got into a big project and got out of the habit of weekly jottings. Some may have thought I died or the Café closed. Not the case, but I am remodeling. The Café Roxy website has exploded with hundreds of programs and no sign of slowing down. However, no one goes to the Roxy website unless I tell them to go look via email or they find the link at my www.fesfilms.com site. I just googled "Café Roxy" and the following came up at the very top of the list:

Festival Films: Your #1 Source on the 'Net for Posters and Films!
Cafe Roxy is an idea for coffee houses and all eateries to increase traffic by ... Check out the Cafe Roxy Blog for insights on using public domain films. ...
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Of course, no one in the world is going to google Café Roxy because it is not famous! If anyone googles "Cartoon Brunch" they will find a link to my blogs about that subject, but Cartoon Brunch is not a concept that many are looking for info on. However, the general public has heard of "Public Domain Films." Google or Yahoo search those words and Festival Films does come up on the first page. That is how new customers tend to find me. This past week I have had two discussions with individuals who are just starting small TV stations and are looking for public domain programming and two others that start out "We have a community movie theater and...." It has been wonderfully convenient for me to tell them to go check out Café Roxy, browse the posters to see what looks exciting, show the posters to your friends for their comments, then use the posters to promote your shows.

While the Roxy site was growing weekly, my Festival Films site where everyone was going first was languishing. I have started a revision at the Festival Films home page that clearly (I trust) delineates the two aspects of my public domain business: 1) Public Domain films -- What they are, and which ones are, and 2) Café Roxy Programs that entertain today. You can click on the new logo/poster above to go to Café Roxy or click on the image to the right here to go to the public domain Catalog, etc., home page.

In fact, all of the Café Roxy pages are now part of the Festival Films website, which makes for a much stronger site and also means.... I don't really need a separate Café Roxy website. Or do I??? I will keep the domain name for the time being, but the Roxy website may close shortly with a re-direct link to Festival Films. Please email me at fesfilms@aol.com from now on.

Saturday Matinee # 3, Week #5, features Joe E. Brown in Earthworm Tractors (1936) with Guy Kibbee, June Travis, Dick Foran and Carol Hughes. Alexander Botts is a self-described natural born salesman and master mechanic, who is trying to make a big sale of Earthworm tractors to grouchy lumberman Johnson. Since Botts doesn't really know anything about tractors, and since the old-fashioned Johnson is opposed to tractors of any kind, it isn't going to be an easy sell. But Botts perseveres, encouraged by Johnson's daughter. It still entertains with some great slapstick scenes of the Tractor running amok. Joe E. Brown will eternally be remembered for his role in Some Like It Hot, which was on TCM again just last night. The added short subject is Buster Keaton in One Week. The Parkway told me this week an interesting fact that I had suspected -- whenever there is a single Keaton short on the bill, some people come just to see Buster!

The Parkway also told me that in the few weeks their Saturday Matinee had gone dark, they got lots of inquiries to keep it going! Many, many cities and small towns have neighborhood theaters that are being under used. All you need is a good video projection system and the free posters you can download right off the website.

Visit my spiffed up website at Festival Films.

Saturday Matinee #3

This is the one-year anniversary of starting this blog about films in the public domain, Café Roxy programs, what films influenced me in childhood or whatever.

The Parkway Theatre in south Minneapolis finished the second series of Saturday Matinees a few weeks ago. This past week I learned they want to keep going and ASAP, so I've been busy planning, postering and mastering the next 12.

I picked the 1935 The Phantom Empire as the 12-chapter serial. Retro sci-fi with robots and death rays is always fun, but add in cowboys, cars, planes, radium, a lost city and Gene Autry in his first starring role equals an unbelievable, unforgettable amalgam of Astounding. I don't have time to show the trailers at the Parkway, but they can add a link to them and you can watch the trailers here. The short trailer that plays first appeared in theaters after Chapter #2 had concluded. It urges kids to come back every week for more, much like the weekly trailers for what will happen next week in "Lost" or "24." All scenes in the short trailer center on the futuristic city of Murania, with no shots of Gene Autry since he presumably just got killed off at the end of Chapter #2, right? The long trailer runs nearly 5 minutes!

The first chapter of the serial runs about a half hour, so I needed something short and vastly different for the feature. Hercules and the Princess of Troy is actually a pilot for a Hercules TV series that never happened, but it's in color, stars movie Tarzan Gordon Scott and has a sea monster that rivals the one in, um, "Creature from the Haunted Sea." Popeye battles Hercules in the 1954 Paramount color cartoon "Greek Mirthology," which certainly fits into the show even if a far cry from the best of the Fleischer gems. Remember that all the films must be in the public domain. "The Other Fellow" is a delightful 1940 one-reeler from the Jam Handy company, that is actually a commercial release by Chevrolet to promote good driving. Edgar plays 4 different roles as car drivers with diverse problems on the highway.

Program #2 needed to be a big change from #1 so I picked comedy shorts. This is not an honest recreation of a Saturday Matinee (other than the serial chapter and cartoons) since the 3 comedy shorts are from the silent era. However, it will be wonderfully entertaining and hopes to attract a different audience. They will not see Harold Lloyd hang from a clock in that iconic image from the 1920s, but they will see him dangle from a skyscraper under construction in "Never Weaken" (1921). In "The Fourth Alarm" (1926) Hal Roach's Little Rascals start their own fire department with screwball vehicles and real fire to fight. Buster Keaton plays dozens of roles, including filming himself 7 times in the same scene and dancing of all things, in "The Playhouse" (1921).

The East Side Kids short feature Kid Dynamite (1943) was chosen purely because I had it in excellent quality and wanted to use it. More serious than some of the East Side Kids, Dynamite examines a rivalry between boxer Mugsy (Leo Gorcey) and Bobby Jordan who is dating his sister, all in the context of enlisting in World War-II. Daffy Duck in "Scrap Happy Daffy" (1943) battles not only enemy spies who are after the scrap heap he has saved for the war effort but he gets to bop Der Fuhrer in person! The Fleischer Color Classic "Ants in the Plants" (1940) was added for a little color, but it does feature little guys, a colony of ants, going to war against the big, bad Anteater.

And finally, for today, poster and program #4. I picked King of the Cowboys (1943) with Roy Rogers because I already had a trailer for it and did not need to make one. (The trailer of course appears in program #3 to advertise what is coming next week.) King is one of Roy's 10 or 15 best films. From IMDB: "It's World War II and saboteurs are menacing Texas. Only singing cowboy Roy Rogers and his wonder horse Trigger can save the day! The Governor sends Roy to help bring in a gang of saboteurs. Roy joins a traveling show and soon learns the saboteurs communicate during Maurice's mind reading act that uses a hidden receiver. But Maurice is on to Roy. Roy narrowly escapes when Maurice leaves him tied up in a warehouse they are blowing up. But Maurice then kills a man and blames Roy who now finds himself in jail." Curiously, Roy's sidekick this time around is Smiley Burnette, who is with Gene Autry in "The Phantom Empire." The Tom and Jerry cartoon "In the Bag" is western themed and Superman in "Volcano" is added for the color.

Each show includes a coming attraction trailer to promote next week's feature film. While I had the original trailer for Roy Rogers, I make up the others using clips and "Next Week" type wording. So the trailer for Program 2 includes clips from each of the three comedy shorts. For Kid Dynamite I just took most of the first scene and faded into the Main Title and then into Coming Next Week. The trailer for Program #5 is finished since I needed to include it in Show #4, and that film is the Joe E. Brown comedy Earthworm Tractors. I took an early scene of the tractor out of control, cut it and added the main title. It looks like a fun film and should attract viewers to come back next week, as if robots in Murania are not enough!

Four posters and four shows in one week was fun to put together. I'm not sure exactly what the other 8 shows will be, but you can bet I will report them here in the near future.

Visit my website at Festival Films.

Tarzan Escapes

I have been fascinated, intrigued and obsessed with the film Tarzan Escapes since I was 8 years old when I first saw it in a movie theater as part of a double feature with the 1932 Johnny Weismuller film Tarzan the Ape Man. This was an official MGM theatrical release that played all over the country in 1954 and 1955. The films had not been reissued to theaters in years, if ever, and had of course not been released to television as yet. Tarzan Escapes was the third in the popular series with Johnny and Maureen O'Sullivan and their last solo film before Boy showed up. I don't know why the reissue bypassed Tarzan and His Mate, but that's what the double feature was. The poster shown above is from the 1954 reissue. The film could also be booked separately by theaters and was likely available for matinee bookings over the next ten years or as long as MGM kept prints of popular films in regional film depots.

I had never seen a Tarzan film before. I am not sure I had even seen a horror film of any kind before since my parents did not allow it. I was just old enough in those innocent but safe days to be dropped off by myself at a matinee showing in Madison, Wisconsin. So what's the big deal you might be wondering? Those are good adventure films but have been out on video for years. Not true! I saw a version of Tarzan Escapes that has never surfaced on video, a virtual lost film since the theater showings in the 1950s. Of course I did not know it at the time. I had never read about the films. I can't recall what I knew about Tarzan other than the newspaper ad for the double feature that sounded exciting. My parents let me go. By myself. It must have sounded like safe kiddie fare for a quarter.

The Tarzan Escapes print differed in several ways from what exists today. I am certain that it included the same lion fight that was lifted from Tarzan the Ape Man because I noticed (for the first time in my life) the use of stock footage. In the surviving copy Jane sends Tarzan out to get food. He kills a Gnu, hacks off meat and takes to the trees ahead of a lion, but in what I saw he grapples with and kills not one but two lions. It was an intense and scary scene that I had never seen the likes of before, and yet I saw it twice that day, once in each Tarzan film. I recreated this scene a few years ago and you can watch it on Youtube here!

There is a second scene that I think I saw that is totally missing today. After Tarzan is caged by the bad hunter who wants to take him back to civilization to exhibit him as a freak, he is carried away by natives from the hunter's safari. The hunter is taking Jane back with him and so naturally needs to hide Tarzan's capture from her. The missing scene is when the safari natives with Tarzan are surprised and slaughtered by the really, really bad natives who then set out to carry Tarzan back to their village. If you watch the film today you might notice this gap, or you might think that when Tarzan escapes by rolling his cage down a steep embankment that he had escaped the hunter's natives. Both the lion fight and this scene were cut after complaints of too much violence during preview showings in 1936.

The real missing scene that gave me nightmares as a child and that no one has seen since is THE ENTIRE CLIMAX OF THE FILM! You can see what surrounds the missing scene here! The escaping safari enters a forbidden juju cave. Look closely and you can count about 40 natives going in the cave but only 10 emerging safely from the other end. They were killed by giant vampire bats! These bats were so large that they could scoop up natives in their talons and fly off with them. That is the shot that reportedly sent kids screaming in terror from theaters during the 1936 previews, and alarmed mothers who protested.

New and sanitized prints were quickly made up for the 1936 release, but many reviews around the country indicate the uncensored prints with the bats were also shown, and it was this negative that was chosen in 1954 to strike the new 35mm safety prints that went out. Unfortunately, the cut version was later used for all subsequent restorations and videos. You can read much more about my experience and memories at I Saw the Giant Vampire Bats.

Tarzan Escapes was an even more troubled film than having its climax cut at the last minute. It was first filmed in 1935 but the film turned out so bad that MGM could not release it. Instead, they completely re-wrote it, added actors and re-shot for a 1936 release. The only thing they kept was the attack of the vampire bats. And then they cut that! Many stills and lobby cards survive that show scenes from the scrapped 1935 film, scenes that are not in the present film. One basic change is that in the lost 1935 film Tarzan and Jane lived in a cave, while for the "remake" they built that elaborate tree house. The 1935 film had Great Apes (men in ape costumes) like those in both Tarzan the Ape Man and Tarzan and His Mate, while the 1936 film had none.

Go read my article for more details. Since I wrote that article a few seconds have surfaced from the 1935 film. Alas, not a single frame of a bat flying! The few seconds show Jane with a Great Ape. This is part of a 1935 MGM promotional reel made for France. It includes Laurel and Hardy and Jimmy Finlayson and can be seen here. The promo reel was obviously made some months before the intended 1935 release of Tarzan Escapes, a release that never happened of the original film. Also made well in advance is a 1935 trailer for the film that mentions the bats although, again, no actual frames of them attacking are shown. This fascinating trailer is at the head of the promo reel.

Hey, everybody, the vampire bat footage might still exist! It could have been included in foreign versions of the film sent to Europe or South America in 1936, and could survive in foreign archives. The bats could survive if any of the 1954 prints on safety film found their way into private collections. A more modest goal is to talk to anyone else who saw the bats in a theater in the mid 1950s. While I am certain I did see Tarzan and his natives fighting those giant bats in the swamp, I do not recall how they escaped. Did a tribe of pygmies carrying torches enter and scare off the bats? That is in the original script for the 1935 film, but no pygmies are in the surviving 1936 film.

And so the quest goes on!

Visit my website at Festival Films.