Metropolis

January 1955, Brandon Films and
the 55th Street Playhouse
154 W 55th St, Manhattan NY

Time to mention two Harvard students, Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey, Jr., who owned and operated the 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan and the Brattle in Cambridge, MA. (55th Street Playhouse, Treanor and Fatio architects, 253 seats.) In December 1954, they announced a series of ten German and Soviet silent films coming to the 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan in to run for nearly two months. Included in that series was Metropolis. Take a look. There’s something really surprising here:

55th Street Playhouse, 154 W. 55th Street, Manhattan, NY

Where did they get those movies? Well, the program notes inform us that they got the movies from Thomas J. Brandon, owner of a distributorship called Brandon Films. Now, Brandon Films specialized in nontheatrical bookings, such as churches, schools, libraries, film societies, and so forth. Yet I discover that Brandon Films also released an abridgment of Diary of a Country Priest to cinemas in 1954!!! So Brandon Films had two arms, a commercial arm and a noncommercial arm. It appears from the above brochure that Mr. Brandon was also associated with Cinema Classics Releasing. I have Googled and Googled and Googled to no avail, and I scoured the online newspaper archives but I came up empty. All I can do is guess. My guess is that Cinema Classics Releasing was a DBA or subsidiary of Brandon Films, concentrating on commercial repertory product. Alas, if what I surmise is correct, it was just a few years too early. The world was not quite ready for repertory cinemas in 1955. In 1960, yes, but not in 1955. It is good to be the pioneer, but it is not good to be too much of a pioneer. So where in the blazes did Mr. Brandon acquire these ten films? That is a mystery, is it not?

Those ten films were silents from the 1920’s that had not been shown in the US since the early 1930’s. Yes, MoMA had them available for nonprofit educational showings, but the films were not available commercially. I know of no other commercial bookings in those years. So how did Brandon Films and/or Cinema Classics get hold of them?

Shall we attempt to think this through? As far as I know, the only commercial distributor of Metropolis anywhere in the world at that time was Associated British Picture Corporation (together with sublicensee National Films of N.S.W.). Did Tom Brandon merely sublicense the rights from Associated British? Had he done that, there would have been a soundtrack, but yet we learn from the above brochure that the “musical settings” were by one Herman G. Weinberg. Now, Herman was many things, but one of those things was not musician. (He studied the violin but gave up when he decided he was insufficiently talented.) Did he just spin discs as the films played? Did Herman provide the music for all the films, or just for most of them? Were these films even 35mm? Now, when it opened in May 1927, the 55th Street Playhouse had a Robert Morton organ (opus 20058) for accompaniment, with V.G. Purvis at the console. Was the organ removed just because those blasted talkies took over? If you have a theatre, but if you don’t have a fully rigged stage, if you don’t have a pipe organ, if you don’t have live acoustics, if you don’t have an orchestra pit or orchestra chamber, then you don’t have a theatre.

It appears that the three Soviet films were licensed from Artkino, which I think would make perfect sense. Brandon and/or Cinema Classics may have sublicenced the seven German films, but from whom?

There is a little more info on the “Classic Horror Forum” chat group. Steve Joyce (“Barbenfouillis”) posted a followup message on 17 March 2023 with this tasty morsel:

In 1954, the censorship of 1927 was revisited... now with Brandon Films on West 57th Street in NYC (Thomas J Brandon, Pres). The files include some back and forth as to which reel actually needed censorship (7 or 8). Subsequently, permission was apparently granted for Brandon Films to show the film with previously offending scenes in New York for artistic purposes.

The March 1927 Paramount version was no longer available. By 1945 it was locked away, unseen, in a vault at Gosfilmofond in Moscow. So, Brandon and the local NYC censor were definitely discussing a different edition of the film. What edition might that have been? The only known prints at that time were the MoMA edition and the Associated British edition. Nothing else was available back then. Or so I thought. The answer is now in my greedy little hands: Thomas J. Brandon licensed the German films from the United States Office of Alien Property. Metropolis was 16mm, just as I had suspected, but not for the reason I had suspected. Obviously, it was mounted onto 400' reels. I suppose the other German films were also 16mm, but I really don’t know. The 55th Street Playhouse was the only booking, at least for the time being, though eventual television broadcasts were also being considered.

Reproduced courtesy of Forrest J Ackerman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

A CLUE OF MONUMENTAL IMPORTANCE: In the correspondence between Thomas Brandon and the censors, there are multiple references to the dance appearing in Reel 8. That may not strike you as odd, but you need to know that the MoMA edition was 9 reels and the Associated British edition was 10 reels. As we all know, the dance comes a little after the half-way point. In the MoMA prints, the dance concludes Reel 6. In the Associated British print, I’m pretty sure the dance was entirely deleted, but if it was included, it would have been either in Reel 6 or Reel 7. In the original 16-reel edition of the film screened in January 1927, the reels averaged about 830 or 850 feet each (which would be about 9 minutes each at 24fps), and so the dance probably came at the end of Reel 10. Now, what about Channing Pollock’s unreleased 12-reel edition? By the most unlikely coincidence, we’ve been through this already. Fortunately for us, Enno Patalas’s reconstruction from 2001 is pretty much Pollock’s edition, give or take maybe two minutes and surely with some damaged or missing American takes swapped out in favor of some German or export takes. The reels averaged a little under 10 minutes each. In that edition, the dance comes right at about the end of Reel 8. BingoCrosbyana!!!!! Bull’s-eye!!!!! Now scroll back up to March 1927, when the local NYC censor demanded that some eight shots be deleted from the dance scene. The censor made it clear that the dance was in Reel 8. So, did Brandon Films have the Pollock edition of the film? Impossible. The Pollock edition was cut into a million pieces back in 1927. Nobody ever had a chance to make a copy before it was hacked away. Then it was all confiscated by the Soviets in 1945. So, we can conclude, with 100% confidence, that this was not the Pollock edition. So, what was it? Well, Ufa’s edition of August 1927 was extremely similar to Pollock’s edition, but that no longer existed either. Ufa cut it down further and presumably destroyed the trims. Then the Nazis cut it down further yet and presumably destroyed the trims. So, what was this? I bet that somebody pirated the March 1927 British edition. I bet that’s what this was. I betcha. There were certainly plenty of chances, since it was in circulation throughout Britain through about October 1927. Could have happened. Why do I think this was the March 1927 British edition rather than the August 1927 German edition? Because the titles had to have been in English, that’s why. Had the titles been in German, Brandon would not have licensed the film. Could Brandon have made its own English titles? No, because Brandon licensed only a release print, not pre-print materials. Now, you see, the March 1927 British edition and the August 1927 German edition are both presumed lost. Then a bootleg of popped up in Manhattan in January/February 1955 for two weeks, and the only thing it could possibly have been was a copy of the March 1927 British edition. Since nobody could possibly have recognized that, it passed unnoticed. Audiences went to see it, I’m sure. Audiences enjoyed it, I’m sure. But audiences had no clue that they were watching a particular edition of the film that was supposedly destroyed almost three decades earlier. How could they possibly have known that? That was not common knowledge. It was not even uncommon knowledge. It was not knowledge at all in those years. Nobody knew or could have known. Does anybody know the whereabouts of that Brandon print? I just looked through a 1969 Brandon noncommercial catalogue, but Metropolis was nowhere in it. Would it still have been in the commercial catalogue? Or had the license expired and had the print been returned? The US Office of Alien Property no longer exists. What happened to its holdings? We must find this particular print of Metropolis! It is imperative that we find it!!!

I would love to find the poster, too. But you know what? I bet there wasn’t a poster. I bet that Bry and Cy of the 55th just made their own poster, a few stills pasted onto some butcher paper with design and credits written in with a magic marker, and maybe some arrows and showtimes on colored construction paper pinned on..

Haliday and Harvey founded Janus Films not too long after showing that batch of ten silents. Wikipedia says that Janus began operations in March 1956, but Janus’s own Twitter account claims that its official birthday is 3 April 1956. Of course, most of the movies in “The Golden Age of the Cinema” series ended up in the Janus catalogue — but not until the 1970’s.