The General

Oy. I find out now, only after it’s too late. According to Wikipedia, Gerald Potterton was born in 1931 in London and began to attend Saturday-morning kiddie shows at age five, which would have been in 1936. According to Gare Joyce, “The Railrodder: Silent Film Star Buster Keaton Drove the Last Spike in His Movie Career with a Tragicomic Cross-Canada Journey,” The Keaton Chronicle, April–May 2022:

The General played a significant role in Gerald Potterton falling in love with the movies in the days before the Second World War. “I remember watching Buster’s movies — it would have been about 1938, 1939 in south London, where I grew up, at the Odeon,” said Potterton, interviewed at the age of ninety-one at his long-time home in Québec’s Eastern Townships. “They had a Saturday morning kid show with Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin and Buster. I howled with laughter with Laurel and Hardy but with Buster, I was more amazed by his antics in The General and his shorts.”

Jaw-dropping. That means that, as recently as 1939, at least one London cinema, the Odeon (which I assume was the Odeon Streatham), was still booking prints of Buster Keaton’s silent movies, including The General!!!!! Those prints were over a decade old. I am amazed. Intrigued, I hopped onto Newspapers.com in the hopes of finding advertisements or announcements, but, alas, there was nothing. Of course, Newspapers.com has only a small selection of British newspapers of the time, but I was hoping against hope. In all likelihood, though, these matinées were never advertised. I suppose that there was a sandwich board on the pavement out front and maybe an announcement on the marquee, perhaps even a hand-drawn broadside in a poster window, but I doubt there would have been more than that. This gets awfully difficult to trace.

The distributor of The General was still certainly Allied Artists, which was the London office of United Artists. As for L&H, their films were still in release at the time, and so reruns at kiddie matinées should not be surprising. As for the Chaplin flicks, those were likely the Van Beuren editions of his dozen shorts for the Mutual Film Corporation, with those wonderful scores compiled and arranged by Winston Sharples and Gene Rodemich with sound effects by the Van Beuren cartoon crew. I wish they had also scored Buster’s movies, but, sigh, ’twas not to be. Of course, Van Beuren’s editions were withdrawn in 1937 when the company closed down, but that was in the US. Perhaps outside the US the distributors were able to extend the contracts through the receivers? Four of the Van Beuren Chaplins were combined for The Charlie Chaplin Carnival in 1938. Is that perhaps what Potterton saw? There is a fair chance that among the Chaplins were also the six Keystone productions that Exhibitors’ Pictures Corporation reissued in 1930, which remained in distribution for some years and which had scores I have never heard and know nothing about. There is an even better chance that among the Chaplin films were a dozen of the shorts he made for Essanay, which Exhibitors’ Pictures Corporation issued under a DBA called King of Comedy Film Corp. in 1939, stretch printed and again with scores I have never heard and know nothing about. Further, there was an Edwin G. O’Brien and something called Producers Laboratories, Inc. (1600 Broadway, NYC), who from maybe the 1930’s through maybe the 1950’s were distributing several of Charlie’s Essanay shorts.

If you know more about these bookings, please give me a holler. Thanks!

Kiddie Matinées in London