KirchMedia GmbH
and Konrad Elfers’s “Sound Version”
of 1962

An Atlas Film release, 1962. German poster designed by Hans Hillmann. Click here for the brochure given out at the German roadshow screenings. See also this.

Stars and Stripes, photo by Norm Zeisloft Stars and Stripes, photo by Norm Zeisloft

Buster Keaton, famed silent-film comedian, poses with a television camera at the Hesse State Radio studios in Frankfurt in February, 1962. (Norm Zeisloft/Stars and Stripes) FRANKFURT — Buster Keaton, the man with the saddest deadpan face in show business and one of its all-time comic greats, arrived in Frankfurt Monday to show Germans why America laughed at him 40 years ago. For 67-year-old Keaton, it is a triumphal return. He was a little-known vaudeville actor when he sloshed through the mud near Amiens, France, in 1918 as a corporal in the 159th Infantry, 40th Div. This time, he will chug into 13 German cities in a 100-year-old locomotive to kick off a revival of the silent films which made him famous in the 1920s. With the same gifted flair for comic pantomime as he had in 1922, he breezed through an unrehearsed television show at he Hesse State Radio here Monday, then sat down with 30 reporters and photographers and told them why there aren’t any more comics like him today. “The nearest thing we have today to what Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and I were in the old days,” he said, “is Red Skelton. He could have been a star in the silent days. And there’s Jackie Gleason, too, and the late Lou Costello. “And Ernie Kovacs was getting mighty close to it if he’d just been let alone. But there aren’t any real natural comics any more. There are a lot of gag men, like Bob Hope and Jack Benny. But they depend on their gag writers. They’d be lost without them.” Keaton was rehearsing a television show with Ernie Kovacs until 7 o’clock on the night Kovacs was killed last month. Kovacs was driving home on the Los Angeles Freeway when his car struck a tree, killing him instantly. “In the old days,” he said, “we worked entirely without a script. I never made a picture with a script. And most of the time I was my own director. We’d have a story idea. And we’d run through it. We would shoot the first part, then the last part,and then weave the story through the middle. “I never worried about the middle. It always took care of itself. As long as we had a good story with a good beginning and a good ending, we never worried.” Most of his film comedies in the 1920s cost less than $250,000 to produce, he said. “We had a whole studio staff on the payroll 52 weeks a year,” he said. “We made seven or eight ‘shorts’ or about two features a year. If we didn’t like the sequence, we could shoot the whole thing over again for just the cost of the film. A day’s shooting cost us maybe $8.50 for film. Today, the minimum cost for reshooting a scene is $12,000. You don’t have any freedom when you’ve got to pay out that kind of money.” Keaton and his wife leave Tuesday for Munich. The rest of their schedule: Ulm, Feb. 7; Stuttgart, Feb. 8; Mannheim, Feb. 9; Frankfurt, Feb. 11; Cologne, Feb. 12; Duesseldorf, Feb. 13; Bremen, Feb. 14; Hamburg, Feb. 15; Hannover, Feb. 16; Berlin, Feb. 19; and Nuernberg, Feb. 19. French film officials will hold a reception for him in Paris Feb. 22 at the Cinematique Francaise to mark the opening of a run of all of his 38 films, one each day. The Keatons will sail for America on the liner France Feb. 23.

My conclusion: Something is seriously wrong. What? Coupla possumbilities: • We need to remember that the silent image is considerably larger than the sound image. Could it have been that the lab optically reduced the size of the image to fit onto a sound film? Could be. Could be. Could be. But if so, then why is so much of the image lopped off on all four sides? Well, we need also to remember that most film-to-video transfers lop off all four sides as a matter of course. Why? The answer to that question is obvious: The techies want it that way. Why? Cuz. Is that really what happened here? At first, I thought so. Then I began to think not. • Did the lab perhaps decide not to reduce the size of the image to fit onto sound film, but, rather, to crop it to fit? If that is the case, then we need to remember that the soundtrack is on the left side. Usually when silent films are cropped to conform to sound film, it is only the left side that the lab lops off. Here, though, both the left and the right are lopped, pretty much equally. Could it be that the lab decided not to lose 10% of the left of the image, but instead to lose 5% of the left and 5% of the right? That would require some realignment, but such a strategy would be consistent with what we see here. The cinemas, and, of course, the film-to-video lab, would complete the job by lopping off the top and bottom. That might be what we’re seeing here. I really don’t know. • Later I got a VHS and then a DVD edition of the 16mm edition shown in the UK. It confused me mightily. More than 56% of the image was missing, on all four sides. Did that 16mm edition reflect the state of the 35mm edition? • I purchased a 16mm print of the German edition, and, just like the videos, somewhat more than 56% of the image was missing, as we shall witness below. Unable to endure the mystery any longer, I asked the friendly folks at the DFF Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum if they could send me an image of a few frames. They kindly did so, gratis. As a matter of fact, they sent me several different attempts. When the images arrived in my email, I screeched in horror. My cat got worried about me and so she dashed over. I showed her the computer screen and she screeched in horror, too. Oh, I suppose you don’t see a problem. The problem screamed out at me instantly. This looks like the Academy format, with large, thick black bars separating the frames. So, looking at this casually, anybody would assume that this is an optical reduction that retains the entire silent image, just smaller. That is not what this is at all. Shall I explain? Let us compare the above image with the same frame on the Kino K669 Blu-ray. Now, as with any film transferred to video, the Kino K669 trims a bit off of all four sides — much, much less than what most videos trim off, but still. I did an overlay, as best as I could. It is impossible to line it up perfectly, but I came close: Let us compare that to the Lobster DVD: As you can see, the rounded corners so visible on the Lobster edition do not derive from the rounded corners on the film frames. Lobster interpolated them digitally. But, of course, I’m wrong! Again! What we think we see ain’t what we see at all, folks. The thick black bar separating the frames was a defect that appeared on this particular frame, the result of damage of some sort. When we back up a bit, we discover that the problem is much simpler: The left side was lopped off all the way through. See? The other frames have thin black lines separating them, just like silent films and early talkies. Notice something else: There is a second translucent frameline right below the black frameline. Why? Somebody at Beta Technik goofed and at one time misaligned the film on a step printer, resulting in that defect. Why didn’t Quality Control catch that? Apparently there was no Quality Control. Why was the preview formatted differently from the way the feature was formatted? Because the crew that made the preview knew something about silent movies. The crew that made the release prints knew NOTHING about silent movies and had NO IDEA AT ALL what they were doing. They treated a silent film as though it were a contemporary talkie that was designed for widescreen cropping.

Konrad Elfers

For half a minute, I thought that this 1962 Elfers version had been released on DVD. Nope! Take a look at what a customer named Casimir wrote: Wasted Opportunities Reviewed in Germany on 10 May 2013      Of course I bought the Atlas anniversary because of the slipcase, for I wanted the silent film “The General” with Konrad Elfers’s famous music. I still remember this composition, which was arranged in the style of early jazz, quite well.      At the beginning of the 1960’s, the director/star Buster Keaton was traveling in Germany in proper style on an old locomotive with exactly this version in his luggage to promote what is probably his most successful film.      Since the individual DVD covers were based on the poster designs of the 1960’s, I naturally assumed that the versions of the films provided by Atlas would also have been used.      My disappointment was all the greater when I finally found out that in the case of “The General” two relatively recent compositions were chosen instead:      Joe Hisaishi’s from 2004 and a version by Robert Israel from 1995. Although both film scores are available in flawless 5.1 surround sound, they don’t reach the rousing quality of Elfers’s Dixieland score, which at the time was recorded only in mono.      This hurts all the more since Buster Keaton’s legendary silent film classic has already been released several times with music by Hisaishi and Israel. A release of the Atlas Film version with its music on DVD and Blu-ray is still pending.... I purchased this box set in the hopes of finding clues, and I found them! This box set was issued in 2010 by Atlas Film! The website is https://atlas-film.de/, and that gives me some ideas. I think I need to drop those folks a line. And so I dropped them a line. And I heard back. Quickly. Atlas no longer has any materials at all on The General. Nada. Nil. Zilch. I attempted to watch The General on the second disc of this box set, and why am I not surprised to discover that it’s not there? The supplemental materials are all there, but the movie itself is nowhere on the disc.

1962 - Visit from the General ...Through the railway photographer Sarris Overbosch, Rohauer had discovered the GKB 680 parked in Graz. It looked similar to the “General” locomotive. He hired it to be the driving force behind his publicity campaign and he had a few modifications made to make it look more “American.” With garlands and a sign with the inscription “General” on the side, the 680 made its way to Munich, Cologne and Hanover at the end of 1961, where Buster Keaton at the time had his picture taken next to the famous vehicle.      At some point on the way to Hamburg, the General stopped at the Bielefeld depot. A nice picture by Gerhard Fengler and Richard Schulz’s former BSW Photo Group. In the background is the Bl signal box in front of the silhouette of the water tower. The building on the right belongs to the Wittkop company.      On 15 February 1962, the 680 reached Hamburg. A photo shows it catching water at the Hamburg-Harburg train station. Two days later, in the night of 16/17 February 1962, the North Sea coast was inundated by a devastating storm surge. This claimed hundreds of lives and caused large parts of the city of Hamburg to sink under water, including locomotive 680. The GKB 680 was salvaged and then made it safely back to its home boiler house in Graz. There she drove until 1964.      With the end of the steam locomotive age, the 680 was retired along with the fellow veterans of the series. The well-travelled 680 was transferred to the Museum for Transport and Technology, which opened in 1983 and is now the German Museum of Technology in Berlin.

Munich, 5 February 1962

Bremen, 14 February 1962

Hamburg, 15 February 1962

The music is from Jack Patrick Beaver (1900-1963) on an album called “The Crawford Light Orchestra,” Down Local (A1) and Disaster Ahead (A2), 10" 78rpm vinyl from 1957, on the JW Theme Music label, JW 128.

Interesting that Buster said he owned his films. He did, but that’s only part of the story. Little by little, Ray took control of the Buster canon. He scoured the world. He found dreadful-looking shortened dupes of some of the movies in the old exchange in Prague. Others he found at the George Eastman House and at the Cinémathèque Française and heaven only knows where all else. Some looked good, some looked lousy, some looked almost pristine. It was Rohauer who, by hook and by crook, snatched those materials from their owners, and, by contract, gave Buster partial ownership of the films he had earlier made as an employee of Joe Schenck. Buster said he did not want his films butchered, but a few years after he passed away, Ray began to butcher Buster’s movies. The point of this story, though, is simply that Buster saw with his own eyes, heard with his own nearly deaf ears, that audiences adored his film. Young audiences adored his film. Young audiences who had not even been born until long after the release had finished, even they adored his film. In 1926 and 1927, he knew The General was a good movie, but he also knew that it was just-another-movie, making its way through the system like any other just-another-movie, and it completed its run as just-another-movie, and then it was done. Now, 35 years later, he learned that it was not just-another-movie. Audiences recognized that it was something special, something timeless, something forever fresh, something beautiful, something that has no expiration date. By the way, on eBay I just won a repro of another photo of that night: Snazzy duds. Who’s the dude on the left? Does anybody recognize him? Oh. Duh. I wish I had been raised in Germany. The dude on the left? Werner Schwier!!!!!