Answering Richard Warner's Question on Nitrateville

[Richard M Roberts]

https://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=36130

Yeah, I gave it five days Richard, kinda a waste of time posting it over there, wasn't it?

To answer your questions, the awning sequence in MY WIFE'S RELATIONS was indeed missing footage from the surviving materials, not an alternative ending. If you notice when he gets on the Reno Express, Buster's suit is still splashed with mud from his falling into the puddle when the cops try to take him away.

I looked through the entire 9/30/22 edition of MOVING PICTURE WORLD and could not find a review of or reference to THE FROZEN NORTH, but there is definitely still footage missing from the surviving materials, it is currently one of the shortest of the Keaton two-reelers in what exists.

Yes, the Cineteca Milana print of HARD LUCK was used in the Brownlow restoration, though I believe Brownlow got it from the infamous Mr. Rohauer rather than the archive. Rohauer had been sitting on various prints of the film for some time before the deal with Kevin to restore it was struck, and the original Brownlow restoration was missing bits from the opening and the swimming pool gag. There was all sorts of bits and pieces on that film that existed during it's years of "lost" status. I have a 100-foot 16mm toy film that is an excerpt from it that was printed in the 1940's.

Perhaps Ed Watz or one of our fellow Mafiosi can fill us in further.

Ya should have come here first.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Richard Warner]

Thanks for all that information, Richard. I'm very grateful. The mud on Buster's suit is a great bit of observation and clinches it for me! Looks like the book I found got it wrong about THE FROZEN NORTH and MOVING PICTURE WORLD, but there must be more to that film.
For some reason, Keaton's 1920 to 1923 shorts are my favourite silent comedies, perhaps because THE SCARECROW was the first silent movie I ever saw in a cinema, on a big screen, with live piano accompaniment, back in 1971, and it knocked me out. That's why I'm interested in the state of survival of the rare ones.
If only complete American prints would turn up for films such as FROZEN NORTH,THE ELECTRIC HOUSE & DAY DREAMS, I feel sure they would be more highly rated.
May I ask one more question about HARD LUCK? Have you, or any of your colleagues, ever seen the high dive in an actual print, rather than DVD, Blu-Ray etc? I'm just wondering if it really is 1920s animation, or something more recent to fix a jump cut. The surrounding footage in both the Brownlow version (without the dive) and the Lobster version (with the dive) looks like the same source, right down to jump cuts and (in the pre-stabilisation versions) jitter.
Thanks again,
Richard
P.S. I didn't post here, as I was still wiping the egg off my face from my HER FRIEND THE BANDIT idiocies of a few months back! Glad I'm forgiven.....

[Richard M Roberts]

Yes Richard, that bit of animation is genuine, Buster may have been an athletic acrobat, but he was not an Olympic diver any more than he was a pole vaulter.

We have foreign archives to thank for a number of Keaton films, especially the Arbuckle Comiques. Considering how many films do not survive period, we should be thankful foreign versions of some of the Keatons have allowed us to see them at all.

Hey, your question started a pretty interesting conversation about HER FRIEND THE BANDIT, nothing wrong with that.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

[Richard Warner]

Thanks again, Richard. That blows a pet theory or two out of the water, and not just mine. Perhaps that "T"-shaped pool was used because it made faking the crater easier for the Chinese gag. Didn't Buster first mention doing the stunt for real in Harry Brundidge's 1930 book? Although more honest than most, Buster could "enhance" a good showbiz anecdote with the best of them. In that interview, he says of THE BUTCHER BOY, "I was hit with pies covered with flour, bitten by a dog and dropped in a barrel of molasses". Of HARD LUCK itself, he says "I emerged from the hole with a Chinese wife and five half-breed children".
And, much as I love the Keaton shorts, you're right about the lucky survival of some in less-than-wonderful European prints. I'd rather see one of the missing Langdon Sennetts or late Chase silents turn up than an existing Keaton in better shape.
Richard W.

[Ed Watz]

A very enjoyable thread, gentlemen. I know that HARD LUCK eluded Rohauer for the longest time. In the late 1960s Rohauer had 16 of Keaton’s 19 starring shorts available for theatrical screenings. By 1980 he could add CONVICT 13 (Enrique Bouchard’s two-reel version) and THE LOVE NEST (from the Czech Film Archives) to this list. That left HARD LUCK as the sole missing Keaton short.

It wasn’t until sometime around the mid-1980s that Rohauer acquired a copy of the Cineteca Milano's HARD LUCK. As Francesco Bello noted in his Griffithiana article, it was a fairly complete (though sometimes splicy) print, publicly screened at the archive since the 1960s. And the reason it took Rohauer so long to acquire it? Many of the European archives didn’t like dealing with Rohauer, but there was a lot more bad blood between RR and those in charge at Milano.

Acting the victim, Rohauer told me early on that Milano and a few other archives refused to reveal their “secret list” of holdings, even though his “spies” had told him that Milano had several silent Keatons in their collection. But apparently at that point (late 1970s) he had no idea that HARD LUCK existed in several archives and had been floating around for years in 100ft 16mm cutdowns in France (from Pinguin Films, Cinette, and other home movie distributors). One outfit even sold 50ft versions in 8mm!

After I no longer worked for him, I learned years later from Erwin Dumbrille that RR had contacts at other film archives who were persuaded to acquire dupe copies of HARD LUCK from the FIAF members who refused to deal with Rohauer. He would eventually get his HARD LUCK copies through these intermediaries. I don’t know what he promised the “fence” who facilitated these deals. And, Rohauer finally looked at a UK film collector’s magazine and picked up one or two of those 16mm cutdowns.

Again according to Erwin, Rohauer was going to screen his HARD LUCK Milano dupe in 1985 at one of New York’s revival houses. It was even advertised (without any fanfare) in newspapers promoting a Keaton Film Festival. But at the last minute Rohauer pulled the print, perhaps in anticipation of Kevin Brownlow’s eventual restoration.

The Kino-Lobster set of 1917-1923 Keaton shorts (with the existing Arbuckle Comiques) issued in 2016 contains the third and most complete restoration of HARD LUCK to date. It’s the only version that ends with Buster and his Chinese family scampering off after coming out of the hole in the ground.

[Richard Warner]

Thanks for that, Ed. Your tales of Rohauer are always fascinating. I have to thank him for introducing me to Buster via his frequent Keaton Seasons at the Academy Cinema in London's Oxford Street back in the 1970s, but the deeds of that scoundrel never cease to amaze. Thank Heaven he was pre-internet, or none of us would have been safe. Incidentally, like you, I bought a two-reel CONVICT 13 from Enrique Bouchard in Argentina, although mine was on Super 8mm, plus other things like Chaplin's RECREATION and a lot more Keaton. I had to sell all my films many years ago (job redundancy), but I clearly remember that the prints I got from him of THREE AGES, MY WIFE'S RELATIONS and THE FROZEN NORTH were dupes of "Raymond Rohauer presents" versions. You were very wise not to alert RR about Mr Bouchard!
Richard W.

[Ed Watz]

Thanks Richard, and I’m truly sorry you had to eventually sell those Bouchard prints. The last I heard, Enrique was alive and well and still residing in Buenos Aires. He was interviewed in a documentary about the restoration of METROPOLIS when a complete 16mm print was rediscovered in Argentina. I think TCM in the States ran it at least once years ago. Unfortunately I couldn’t locate it on YouTube.

[John Bengtson]

I wrote a post a while back about Buster’s Hard Luck dive, illustrated with photos and frame grabs. The dive was staged beside a “T” shaped pool, with part of the T covered over with paper or some other material to look like brick. Buster’s trajectory during the dive seems to defy the laws of physics, and the frame grabs clearly look like an animated special effect.

https://silentlocations.com/2019/03/21/busters-paramount-backlot-plunge/

Readers speculated whether Buster genuinely dived through the paper “brick” in one take of the high dive, now lost footage, but unwilling to repeat the stunt for the European release, faked the dive using animation for the European prints instead.



Richard points out something that never occurred to me. The T shaped pool allowed Buster to fake the crater leading to China. They would have had to drain the pool first (various aerial photos show they kept it empty anyway when not in use), but the T made the crater easier to film. If Buster had filmed at any other studio, which all had only rectangular pools, Buster would have had to dig a genuine pit adjacent to an actual pool to stage the joke.

It therefore seems plausible Buster did not use the T shaped pool in order to dive through the brick, but instead to easily film the crater afterward.

[Richard Warner]

Ed,
Back in my film collecting days, I ended up with all the Keaton Studio features and shorts except THE LOVE NEST and HARD LUCK, and almost half of them came from the resourceful Mr Bouchard, who was always friendly and most helpful, even offering to send some sample footage for free prior to purchasing a film if he thought the print quality was on the poor side. Yes, it was a wrench having to part with several hundred 8mm and 16mm films, plus more than a thousand vintage jazz 78s (my other hobby), also LPs books and ephemera, but in my old age I've had the satisfaction of getting most of the films and music back in the form of DVDs, CDs and Blu-Rays. I'm extremely grateful to all the hard-working collectors and distributors who have made that possible, together with the authors of new books and internet postings who have provided further entertainment and enlightenment. That includes the three gentlemen on this thread. Thank You!
John,
For a long time, I thought the Keaton dive was recent computer-animation to fix a gap in the footage. Looks like I was wrong, so I only just thought of the need to build a crater for the Chinese closing gag as an alternative reason for using the T-shaped pool. Glad you think that brainwave has some merit!
Richard W.

[Richard M Roberts]

John, your reader's speculation that Buster actually did the dive in the American version but had to animate it for the foreign version holds no water, Buster's production company always shot at least two cameras for American and Foreign negatives and, in the case of chancy stunts, even more cameras to protect the shot. The much more obvious reason it's animated is that the stunt did not work practically, and that can be gleaned just by looking at the set-up of the pool.

Even with an elongated diving board that stretches beyond the middle of the pool, the trajectory and the angle does not look viable, Buster has to not only dive, but project himself forward in the air too far to realistically make the faked edge of the pool which is a few feet from the edge of the water. If they elongated the diving board more, it would look unrealistic, it's too long as it is now, they're shooting it from an angle on the left side of the pool to make it look shorter than it is already and probably, if they used a wire on Buster, it would look worse than the animation. Since it is only the set-up to their big gag, and not the gag itself, Buster and his staff went for the animation fake, which looks real enough and goes by quick enough for them to move to the actual punchline of the gag without spoiling it.

Despite Buster's amazing athleticism, he and his crew have no problem doing very good fakes when the need arises. I watched NEIGHBORS again recently and noticed when Joe Keaton knocks the upside-down and clothes-pinned Buster in a spin-around the clothesline, it's a dummy. It's a dummy, not Buster, sitting in the tree that's knocked down by a rock in SEVEN CHANCES. When Buster is propelled off the ladder tilting on the fence in COPS, he's obviously on a wire. Buster risks his life enough for us, do we really want him to do it when the laws of physics just aren't going to allow him to get away with it, and Fred Gabourie was brilliant in designing and setting up the special effects to call as little attention to them as possible.

Enrique Bouchard was wonderful in that, being in Argentina, he could thumb his nose at Rohauer safely beyond Raymond's legal grasp (remember, ex-Nazi's moved there too for pretty much the same reason, Mr Rohauer aside), and his prints, though not always the best, were indeed rare and treasured things to be had at the time. I was also always amazed at the fact that, when I sent Enrique a check for a print, the print would always arrive exactly two weeks later, and I would always get the polite, nicely typed letter on the thin, onion-skin air mail stationery of the time answering any inquiries I might have had, and these letters were apparently translated and typed by his wife because Enrique did not speak very much English. Even though I've upgraded on many of the titles I originally got from him, his prints are still in my collection, perhaps more for sentimentality's sake than anything else, but he was a major resource for American Collectors in getting to see a number of rare and suppressed titles at the time. He still is alive as far as I know, and here's to him.


RICHARD M ROBERTS