The Blanks

Serious students of the motion picture do a lot of their serious studying at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The Museum's Film Library, launched in 1935 on Rockefeller money, has gathered one of the world's best collections of old & new films.

Last week the Museum's film students were well into a 67-week course called "The History of the Motion Picture (1895-1946)." They were seeing The Great Train Robbery (1903) and D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Chaplin's Easy Street (1917) and De Mille's Male & Female (1919). In coming weeks they will flock to see Valentino, The Big Parade with John

Gilbert (1925) and Flesh and the Devil with Garbo (1927).

But the Museum's excellent collection has several gaping blanks. "A motion picture cannot be bought in the same way you might buy a book, or a pair of shoes," the catalogue explains. "Whoever holds the original rights to a film retains the legal control of whatever prints may exist." Students must therefore look elsewhere if they want to study several old movies that are high points in U.S. film history.

Charlie Chaplin's old films can still be shown--and are--in commercial theaters practically everywhere in the world. Chaplin has promised his pictures to the Museum eventually, but so long as they are moneymakers, he is not interested in having them used for nonprofitable study. Meanwhile, he vigorously runs down and prosecutes "pirates." A few old Chaplin comedies made for Keystone, Essanay and Mutual studios are being shown to Museum visitors, but post-1918 Chaplin-produced pictures (including Shoulder Arms and The Kid) are taboo.

Mary Pickford films are also scarce. The New York Hat, a 1912 Griffith-directed job, is a Museum favorite. But Miss Pickford has promised to give a selection of her later films to the Library of Congress.

Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 melodrama featuring Lillian Gish, carpetbagging and Ku Kluxing in the Old South, has been voluntarily shelved by the Museum. Film Library officials, recalling that the picture started race riots in 1915 and again in 1921, admit the "greatness of the film" and "its artistic and historic importance." But because of "the potency of its anti-Negro bias . . . exhibiting it at this time of heightened social tensions cannot be justified." Students are advised that Birth of a Nation is still in the Museum's files and gets "limited circulation for research purposes."

Thomas H. Ince, one of the few early U.S. directors of importance, is scantily represented--in the Film Library or anywhere else. Most of the best Ince films (1910-18), starring William S. Hart and Charles Ray, have disappeared, with no trace of prints.

Little Caesar (1930) and Public Enemy (1931), greatly admired by Museum officials for the "idiomatic vigor of their dialogue and their accurate realization of a period," have been withdrawn by the owners (Warner) from Film Library archives. The Museum can't think of any reason why, except "some new, strange reticence on the part of Warner Bros."

Mae West's She Done Him Wrong (1933--a "lightheartedly tough and amoral film"), which launched the best known of the West gags ("tall, dark and handsome"; "come up and see me some time"; "the finest lady that ever walked the streets"), has also been shelved--by request of the Hays Office.

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