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London After Midnight - 1927

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Creighton
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« on: October 31, 2007, 09:41:43 pm »

5c. LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is a 1927 film starring Lon Chaney and directed
by horror auteur Tod Browning. It is a lost film and it is mentioned
to torment Jon Mirsalis, a/k/a ChaneyFan.

Q. I heard that a collector has LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT and is waiting
for its copyright to expire so he can release the film.  Is this
true?

A: Almost certainly not.

Tod Browning's LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927), starring Lon Chaney
Sr. in a dual role as a Scotland Yard inspector and as a pointy-toothed
vampire, is the most famous of lost films -- mainly because Forrest
J. Ackerman, with the aid of the film's admittedly tantalizing
stills, spent a lot of energy hyping it as a lost masterpiece in
his teen-oriented horror magazines.  The reality is that those who
saw the film as late as the 1950s, such as William K. Everson and
David Bradley, considered it well short of a masterpiece -- inferior
to Browning's talkie remake, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), with Bela
Lugosi, and not even the most desirable lost film of Chaney's
career.

The most persistent rumor about LAM is that some collector has the film and
has been waiting for the copyright to expire in 2002.  The legend probably
dates back to the early 70's, when a New England rental source named Cecil
Miller listed LAM among his upcoming titles, presumably as a gag.  (Later
versions of the same gag have included reviews of the film on the Internet
Movie Database and April Fool's discussions of showings on Turner Classic
Movies in alt.movies.silent.)  This mythical collector is in for a longer
wait now -- copyright law has been changed, making the date LAM would become
public domain 2022.  For that reason, it is likely that any such collector
who wanted to cash in during his own lifetime would have already come
forward to make a deal with the current copyright holders (Time Warner).

In fact, the odds are not high that any print ever got loose in the first
place.  According to Jon Mirsalis, MGM "was very diligent about collecting
prints after the completion of their print run, making it unlikely that a
retired projectionist has a copy hiding in his attic... The last time the
film was inspected by MGM was in 1955.  It was stored in vault 7 and a
vault fire (circa 1967) in vault 7 destroyed the last known print.  All the
MGM nitrate material was subsequently donated to Eastman House, but by then
the print and camera negative were gone."  As Bob Birchard further points
out, "MGM did a worldwide search when it decided to copy its nitrate to
safety in the 1970's," and turned up nothing.

Even so... another MGM film that vanished around the same time was
Victor Sjostrom's THE DIVINE WOMAN, with Greta Garbo.
Yet a ten-minute fragment of that film subsequently turned up in
Eastern Europe.  So the possibility that LAM will turn up in some
unexpected place cannot be ruled out completely.  Just... nearly
completely.

In the meantime, the closest you are likely ever to come to seeing
LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is in the pages of Philip J. Riley's
book LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, published by Cornwall Books in
1985 -- and by watching MARK OF THE VAMPIRE.

[Thanks to Michel Gebert for the above information on
LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT.]

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/silent/alt-movies-silent/
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