Fear and Desire

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I found the above many moons ago at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1827164897920384059, which redirected me to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70cd1PNl5dw&feature=gv, which shortly afterwards disappeared. This is countless bootlegged-VHS generations away from a 35mm print. The above video is interesting, and I was so dumb that it fooled me. I chanced upon it on YouTube in 2012 and downloaded it for the simple reason that my VHS was buried in some box I couldn’t find. I skimmed through the YouTube video and it seemed to be exactly what I remembered from the VHS. Then I bumped into a thread on IMDb in which there was discussion of a VHS that was longer than the new Blu-ray, with different edits and a different narrator and a few actors dubbed with different voices. I ordered the Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema and when it arrived I plopped it into my computer and at the same time ran the YouTube version. It was difficult to do, and I only got through the first couple of minutes, but by Jove they were right! These are different! Different edits, a few different shots, different narrator, and eleven and a half minutes longer! Fascinating! Then just now a perfect stranger wrote to me to explain that I was hallucinating, for the YouTube version is nothing more than the regular version slowed down by ten percent. I wanted to double check, but now I can’t find my Blu-ray! Fiddlesticks! Just one day later, a friend, who happens to be a rather well-respected Kubrick scholar, wrote to tell me exactly the same thing. Well, ognuno è soggetto ad ingannarsi, and I can never go a day without someone proving me wrong — sometimes spectacularly wrong. It’s one of those things I’ve just learned to live with. The above is embedded from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbokkV1Roj4



Documents for further research on
FEAR AND DESIRE
Along with Some Commentary


Much of the commonly available information on Fear and Desire is erroneous, based on rumors that have circulated for far too long. Let’s set the record straight, shall we?

AP Wire Story, The Winona [MN] Republican-Herald
Wednesday, 27 December 1950, p 6
Fascinating! In December 1950, before its première, The Day of the Fight was 12 minutes long? You don’t know why that’s fascinating. I’ll tell you why that’s fascinating. A bootleg VHS in my possession has TWO versions of The Day of the Fight. One version is 12 minutes, yes, and it’s identical to the one now on the Blu-ray available in the UK. The other version is 16 minutes! The two versions have different opening and closing credits, and the longer version has a four-minute prologue. It also has slightly different narration spoken by a different person! I had long thought the 16-minute edition was the original. Now that we have this news story, I wonder if the 12-minute edition was the true original which RKO decided to pad out. The 16-minute edition was once available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgiZXyFBjM, but it’s been taken down. Phooey.
The New York Times
Sunday, 14 January 1951, sec 2 p 5

Postproduction costs were higher than expected, and so the movie sat in limbo for a year and a half while Kubrick raised more funds and finally got a gig directing 2nd unit on “Omni” as well as working on two promo shorts (one for the State Department and then one for the Seafarers International Union — talk about opposites!), which paid him just enough so that he could complete postsync on Fear and Desire. I keep reading that the movie was shot mute, and that this “mistake” caused the budget to skyrocket. That’s an overinterpretation of what Kubrick said. He said the cost was too high not because he re-recorded all the sound, but because he didn’t know what he was doing when he re-recorded all the sound. It was a learning process, as we shall verify below. In fact, production audio was recorded, but not synchronized, as Paul Mazursky explained: “The sound on the movie was terrible — the original sound. It was captured with a wire recorder. Wire. And it didn’t work. It was a guide at best, but it was terrible, ridiculous. And a year later, a year later, we had to loop the entire thing in New York, and that cost another $20,000 or so.” Okay. Fine. Much or all of it would have had to be re-recorded in a studio anyway. That would hold true even for a movie shot with state-of-the-art equipment today. (You’re going to challenge me with the story of A Clockwork Orange, aren’t you? The dialogue came through perfectly in the direct sound, but much of the effects had to be added in. Besides, most of A Clockwork Orange was indoors. Outdoor sound in a forest is a whole different kettle of fish.)

The New York Times
Sunday, 29 June 1952, sec 2 p 3:

Back in the 1970’s, in some reference work, somewhere, I ran across a mention of this documentary on the World Assembly of Youth. Maybe it was in a trade annual, maybe in a magazine article; I don’t remember. (Wait! I found it! It was in the 1963 Current Biography.) Then I ran across yet another reference, somewhere, that Kubrick had possibly made other shorts for the State Department as well. My vague memory is that a journalist asked what other State Department movies he had done, but Kubrick declined to answer. So for close to 40 years I’ve been wondering about this flick on the World Assembly of Youth. If you want misinformation, go to Wikipedia. If you want real information, read on. This is what little I know. The World Assembly of Youth (WAY) was founded in London in 1948 as a Western (read: CIA) counteroffensive to the Soviet-backed World Festival of Youth and Students. After three years of preparation the first WAY conference began on Sunday, 5 August 1951, and ran through Thursday, 16 August 1951, at Cornell University. See also:

• “World Youth Parley Is Discussed Here,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 10 April 1951, p 29.
• “Mrs. Roosevelt to Speak Here for World Assembly of Youth,” The Cornell Daily Sun 67 no 154, Tuesday, 24 April 1951, p 5.
• “Youth Group Seeks Housing,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 12 June 1951, p 23.
• “First Group Here for Youth Session: Anti-Communist Gathering at Cornell to Draw 500 from 60 Nations Next Month,” The New York Times, Thursday, 26 July 1951, p 5.
• “6 Japanese Arrive for Anti-Red Rally,” The New York Times, Friday, 27 July 1951, p 5.
• “Eisenhower Uses Jet Plane as Text: Talk at Netherland Ceremony Marking U.S. Craft Transfer Links Freedom to Unity,” The New York Times, Sunday, 29 July 1951, sec 1 p 17.
• “56 Arrive by Plane for Youth Assembly,” The New York Times, Saturday, 28 July 1951, p 6.
• “Vatican Prelate at St. Patrick’s: Cardinal Piazza Is Welcomed at Mass—Sermon Stresses Nation’s Spiritual Basis,” The New York Times, Monday, 30 July 1951, p 14.
• “Mayor Welcomes Youth Delegates: 150 from 63 Free Nations Are on Their Way to World Assembly at Cornell,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 31 July 1951, p 27.
• “The Eleanor Roosevelt Program,” Program 210, Tuesday, 31 July 1951, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum catalogue number 72-30(210).
• “Youths Meeting Here: Delegates to World Assembly Open Four-Day Session,” The New York Times, Wednesday, 1 August 1951, p 25.
• “Monteux Ends Stadium Stay,” The New York Times, Thursday, 2 August 1951, p 17.
• AP Wire, “Mrs. Roosevelt Entertains Delegates to World Assembly,” The New York Times, Friday, 3 August 1951, p 9.
• “Education Notes: Varied Activities on the Campus and in the Classroom — CORNELL—Youth Assembly,” The New York Times, Sunday, 5 August 1951, sec 4 p 9.
• “World News Summarized,” The New York Times, Monday, 6 August 1951, p 1.
• Warren Weaver Jr, “63 Nations’ Youth in a Miniature U.N.,” The New York Times, Monday, 6 August 1951, p 5.
• “Daughter of Nobel Prize Winner at Ithaca,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 7 August 1951, p 14.
• “Three Youth Rallies,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 7 August 1951, p 24.
• AP Wire, “Mrs. Roosevelt Sees Hard Job for Youths,” The New York Times, Thursday, 9 August 1951, p 5.
• AP Wire, “Youth Group Shapes Worldwide Program,” The New York Times, Saturday, 11 August 1951, p 13.
• AP Wire, “Youth Delegates Go on an America-Style Picnic,” The New York Times, Monday, 13 August 1951, p 19.
• “Harry S. Truman Library & Museum” diary for Tuesday, 14 August 1951.
• Warren Weaver Jr, “Acheson Condemns ‘Regimented’ Path: Tells World Youth Assembly, over Telephone, It Spells the ‘Degradation’ of Man,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 14 August 1951, p 9.
• “Youth, 1951,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 14 August 1951, p 22.
• Warren Weaver Jr, “Youth Assembly Approves Aid Plan: World Group Votes Resolution for Technical Assistance to Underdeveloped Areas,” The New York Times, Wednesday, 15 August 1951, p 11.
• “Youth Parley Urges End to Travel Curbs,” The New York Times, Thursday, 16 August 1951, p 15.
• AP Wire, “Youth Group Hails U.S.: First World Assembly Meeting Ends on Cornell Campus,” The New York Times, Friday, 17 August 1951, p 6.
• “Letters to The Times: Youth Assembly Praised,” The New York Times, Saturday, 18 August 1951, p 10.
• AP Wire, “Youth Head Re-Elected: Sauve of Montréal Named to 3d Term by Assembly Council,” The New York Times, Wednesday, 22 August 1951, p 21.
• “Letters to The Times: Moslems Under India’s Rule — Their Status Reviewed in Questioning Stand of Pakistan,” The New York Times, Tuesday, 28 August 1951, p 22.
• “f.o.i.” (For Our Information), 29 September 1951 (4th typewritten page).
• Joel Kotek, Students and the Cold War tr by Ralph Blumenau (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
• David Maunders, “Controlling Youth for Democracy: the United States Youth Council and the World Assembly of Youth 1946–1986,” Commonwealth Youth and Development 1 no 2, 2003, pp 22–51.
• Holger Thuss and Bence Bauer, Students on the Right Way: European Democrat Students 1961–2011 (Brussels, European Democrat Students/Centre for European Studies, May 2012), pp 154–155.

My old, disproved, guess as to what really happened: Apparently Kubrick somehow got a gig to do a promo on this conference. My guess is that at the end of the conference, the State Department collected all of Kubrick’s footage and said “You’ll be hearing from us soon,” and I bet Kubrick never heard from them again. I assume the footage was never assembled, and the movie was probably never even given a title. It’s probably in a forgotten banker’s box somewhere in a storage unit rented by the State Department.

Oh, heavens to Betsy! That was my guess, and my guess was dead wrong. In late 2020, a renowned Kubrick scholar told me I should pre-order James Fenwick’s new book, Stanley Kubrick Produces. I ordered the cloth-bound edition, which is actually not cloth; it’s coated cardboard. Nice. Fenwick found World Assembly of Youth and plopped it onto YouTube. There are no credits on it at all, but that didn’t stop Fenwick from obtaining the full list of credits, which nowhere mention Stanley. Now, go-getting Stanley had a tendency to take more credit than he was due. Okay. Did he just hear about this obscure movie somehow, see that there were no credits on it, and take it upon himself to claim credit? I don’t think so. He must have been involved somehow, perhaps as a unit photographer, or perhaps as an assistant director, or perhaps as an uncredited member of the camera crew. Another possibility: Perhaps he was replaced before he began his new job. Impossible to tell. I would love to get a full list of playdates for this movie.

Ya know what’s sad about this movie? What’s sad is that the idea for WAY was good, but it was never permitted to be more than an idea. A bunch of youth from around the globe descend upon lovely Ithaca, New York, and have intelligent conversations, discussions, round-tables, lectures on how to fix the world. They have good ideas, but there is no mechanism by which to put these ideas into practice. This reminds me of the IHEU, which was the same thing. There was no political involvement, no political influence, none, none whatsoever. The WAY, like the IHEU, had no means of passing laws, dictating policy, or even influencing policy. It was not civic engagement; it was just an illusion to make people feel better. People meet, talk, and go away — and nothing changes.



If this ever vanishes, download it.


At about this time Joseph Burstyn, Inc., licensed the movie for US cinema exhibition, and insisted on changing the title to Fear and Desire.

AP Wire Story, Rocky Mount [NC] Evening Telegram
Sunday, 9 September 1952, p 8B:
The New York Times
Monday, 8 December 1952, p 35
The New York Times
Sunday, 15 March 1953, Sec 9 p 5

The publicity folks quickly realized that “a cast of unsung, youthful professionals” is not what brings stampeding mobs to the doors. So they tried a different strategy: Play up the sex angle (even though there isn’t one) and make a vamp out of a bit player. But that makes no sense at all, and I’m certain Kubrick was blind-sided by this approach. I have seen the occasional ad in which Burstyn tried to make a gritty drama look risqué. For instance:



Of course, that’s false advertising. I have been going through The New York Times and The Los Ángeles Times to search for more examples, and I’ve not been too successful. Burstyn’s advertisements exercised exemplary tact. They were beautifully designed, elegant, appealing. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see some representative examples. He promoted his films intelligently, targeting precisely the intended audience. But then, as he admitted in an interview, after they had played out, he would give the movies a brief second wind by promoting them as a sex flicks. That is not what he did with Fear and Desire. For Fear and Desire he began by advertising it as a sex flick, and he never tried any other approach. I don’t understand.
The Syracuse [NY] Herald-Journal
Monday, 30 March 1953, p 27

It’s the day before, and Burstyn has already paid a sleazy publicist to do what a sleazy publicist is paid to do.

Let’s see what Paolo Cherchi Usai says about this production: “Kubrick returned to New York with 50,000 feet of exposed film, both safety and nitrate negative film on Kodak and DuPont stock, about one-tenth of the footage shot in an ordinary Hollywood production. If it is true that Kubrick had already determined the continuity and the timing for every shot, then a few weeks would have been enough for him to edit it down to its final version — 5,940 feet — with a running time of about 66 minutes, not counting the titles at the beginning and end.” That’s entirely fascinating, you see, because the footage count that Paolo provides, 5,940', is, actually, exactly 66 minutes, to the microsecond. This is several minutes longer than the version currently available. More interesting yet, the weekly edition of Variety (1 April 1953) and Motion Picture Herald (4 April 1953) both provided the running time as 68 minutes.
The New York Times
Tuesday, 31 March 1953, p 36


This advertisement is so difficult to interpret. It seems to have been Joseph Burstyn’s idea, trying to make the movie seem somewhat salacious. Now, I’ve collected many major advertisements that Joseph Burstyn, alone or with partners, published in The New York Times. As I mentioned, all you need do is scroll to the bottom of this web page to look through them. His other ads were in good taste, but then we get to this advertisement, which is wholly out of character. It is complicated, and it is almost entirely misleading. There is little resemblance between the film and the ad. Burstyn here was pathetically attempting to follow in the footsteps of P.T. Barnum. Burstyn’s standard style of advertisements worked well, earned him respectable bookings, earned him money. Why, for this movie, did he suddenly change his modus operandi? Such a strategy might work in the opening few days, but in the long run it would backfire. This ad campaign, surely, is why in later years Kubrick insisted on doing his own ad campaigns. If the promotional materials are to be believed, though, on the opening day this ad did the trick. Take a look:



So, what can I say? Of course, the Guild was an “art house,” with a loyal audience that attended regularly, regardless of what was on the program. As with all successful “art houses,” patrons were of the opinion that if it was good enough to play at the Guild, that was endorsement enough. The rumor mill has it, though, that the flick was a flop. Maybe it played itself out after a couple of days, and then once word got round to all the DG’s that no trenchcoats were required, the remaining crowds died off? I don’t know. I don’t have access to the boxoffice receipts. According to Bruce Goldstein, programmer at Manhattan’s Film Forum, “It opened during a cold snap that lasted from the day it opened till the day it ended. Then it lifted. It was so cold, it kept people away. It was like the curse of Kubrick” (WSJ, 27 March 2012). Wrong. I just checked the weather reports every day from before the opening to after the closing, and there was no cold snap. It was typical April weather for NYC: a low of 34 to a high of 72. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for evidence. We shall soon see, though, there is a good indication that ticket sales plummetted.

Let’s pull what info we can from the ad. The documentary short, Royal Destiny, is 17 minutes. Time for arithmetic: 68+17=85. That works well with the generous time slot of 1 hour 54 minutes, more than enough time to clear the 450-seat house and seat the next audience. That would soon change.

As far as I know, this was the only booking of the original 68-minute version.
The New York Times
Wednesday, 1 April 1953, p 35

A. W. = Abe H. Weiler
The Brooklyn Eagle
Wednesday, 1 April 1953, p 8
The Lowell [MA] Sun
Thursday, 2 April 1953, p 30
Excerpt from a syndicated gossip column:

The Syracuse [NY] Herald-Journal
Saturday, 4 April 1953, p 15

The sleazy publicist continues to do what the sleazy publicist is paid to do,
because Burstyn has surely built up a well-oiled publicity machine:

The New York Times
Sunday, 5 April 1953, Sec 2 p 1
The New York Times
Sunday, 5 April 1953, Sec 2 p 4
The time slot is now 1 hour 35 minutes, which would allow only ten minutes to clear the house and seat the next audience. If there were previews, that would have made the intermission between shows even tighter. This is not evidence that the feature was shortened. Not at all. If the house were largely empty, management could save some money by scrunching the showtimes closer together. That would cut an hour of the operation each day, which would reduce salaries and reduce heating bills as well. If the audiences were sparse, there would have been no need for lengthy intermissions. We can guess, rightly or wrongly, that Martin Perveler (Kubrick’s uncle who had supplied much of the funds for the movie and who owned the copyright), Joseph Burstyn (who took a greater-than-normal risk to release this movie), and Kubrick himself were painfully aware that ticket sales had gone south. The situation surely influenced all three to rethink their strategy. They did, as we can see below.
Now that Winchell played ball yet again, Burstyn’s staff cobbled together a four-page press book. Oh that press book.... We see that it provides the running time as “68 minutes.” Who used this press book? I don’t know of any other bookings, anywhere, that used these ads. Subsequent bookings, as we shall see, employed yet a different strategy.
The New York Times
Sunday, 12 April 1953, Sec 2 p 6

Gone for now are the old blurbs (“brilliant,” “unforgettable,” “subdued”) and to replace them are different blurbs, which convey an entirely different message, making it appear that the “girl” Virginia Leith is the star and the focal point of the leering camera lens. The old blurbs would have a revival, and would then be abandoned again.
The Winona [MN] Republican-Herald
Tuesday, 14 April 1953, p 7

There was a plethora of articles about newcomer Virginia Leith, whose first film rôle consisted of but a single scene in Fear and Desire in which she spoke but a single word. A few years earlier she had been featured on the cover of Pageant magazine (vol. 6 no. 6, November 1950), which noted that she had graduated in 1944 from from Cleveland Heights High School where she was voted “the girl with the sweetest smile in the class” (why do I not believe that?). Apparently she was working her way up as a photo model, and that’s how Kubrick came to cast her. Now, though, suddenly, with a minor rôle in a minor amateur movie that has had only one booking, she found herself the topic of gossip columns and suddenly she found she had won the admiration of Darryl Zanuck, who signed her up to be the new Ava Gardner at 20th Century-Fox (see below). Who was manœuvering all this behind the scenes? How much money did this all cost? Who was spending that money? Why? What was really going on? I don’t understand.

The New York Times
Tuesday, 14 April 1953, p 30
The New York Times
Sunday, 19 April 1953, Sec 2 p 6
The Beckley [WV] Sunday Register
Sunday, 19 April 1953, p 6

Excerpt from a syndicated column:
UPI Wire Story, The Mexia [TX] Daily News
Friday, 24 April 1953, p 5

The New York Times
Sunday, 26 April 1953, Sec 2 p 4



Life
11 May 1953, pp 122, 125


Who was behind this? Was it Burstyn who was pulling teeth to get this write-up? Or was it Perveler? Or was it, more likely, Virginia Leith herself, or at least her parents or agent or significant other? Whoever was responsible, and for whatever reason, the remarkable result is that a movie that held little commercial promise got such eye-catching publicity in such a wildly popular mainstream magazine. If the distributor and/or producer wished to capitalize upon this stroke of luck, the most intelligent thing to do would be to capitalize on this Life article, with such clichéd phrases as “THE EXCITING NEW MOVIE YOU READ ABOUT IN LIFE MAGAZINE.” The publicity folks had only the most rudimentary understanding of this basic strategy. They bungled it. Horribly.

Something strange now happened. According to Paolo Cherchi Usai (p 30 fn 15), copyright claimant Martin Perveler submitted a “Request for Return of Copyright Deposit” on 29 May 1953, on file at the Library of Congress Register of Copyrights, LP 2595. The reason, I am convinced, was that Kubrick had been busy at work re-editing the movie. To re-edit, he surely revamped his work print and then attempted his new edits by splicing up Burstyn’s backup print, and I bet he bungled it. He needed a clean print of the film. To save the expense, Perveler retrieved the LC deposit print. My guess is that Fear and Desire had returned enough of a profit that it could fund a second edit and more prints. It would have been better if they had just kept the money.

Interestingly, Usai further notes (p 31 fn 36) that the 35mm print held by the George Eastman House in Rochester “shows some cement splices clearly not motivated by any break or damage to the material. Kubrick’s later practice of editing his films after their initial release... might present itself here in the earliest evidence available to the researcher. The splices may also account for the fact that FEAR AND DESIRE was announced as having a footage of 5,940 feet [66 minutes], while the surviving print is 5,467 feet [60 minutes 45 seconds] long....” So my guess is that the George Eastman House owns the print once held by the LC, but with Kubrick’s splices.

This suggests that there must have been THREE prints of the original 68-minute edition. One played at the Guild. A second was a backup held by Burstyn. A third had been sent to the LC as a copyright deposit.

Again, let’s think this through. What first-time 24-year-old filmmaker would have the luxury to approach his producer and his distributor about re-editing a movie? Impossible, or nearly so. It wouldn’t happen. Perveler wanted a return on his investment, and so did Burstyn. They probably had discussions with Kubrick about how to increase sales. Perveler must have laid down the law, demanding his money back or else. The only hope would be for a revised version that could be double-featured with something more commercially promising.

As an analogy, think of a small mom-and-pop business that gets its start courtesy of a venture capitalist. Venture capitalists are commonly referred to as “angels.” I have a different word for them. An “angel” demands collateral in the form of the small-business owner’s house, and then demands a minimum of a 700% return on his money over a maximum of five years. If funds don’t immediately start pouring in according to that unreasonably high expectation, the “angel” will relieve mom-and-pop of all managerial duties and replace them with industry goons, who will trash the mission statement, plunder the company, run it into the ground, and reduce mom-and-pop to utter destitution and homelessness. Uncle Martin was an “angel,” and though he did not treat his nephew as harshly as the average “angel” would, he was not to be trifled with. He gave the movie one single opportunity to prove its innate wealth-generating capabilities, and when it failed he exercised his “angelic” right to get his money back by any means possible.

Once the camera neg was re-edited, there was no further need for Kubrick’s spliced-up copy, and so Burstyn donated it to the recently established nonprofit George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film for a tax credit. (By the way, to settle the all-pervasive misinformation once and for all, the George Eastman House has NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING to do with Kodak. They are entirely different companies. No shared staff. No shared governance. No shared anything. Elephant hunter George Eastman invented flexible film in 1888 and founded Kodak in 1889. George Eastman bequeathed his mansion, built in 1905, to the University of Rochester in 1932. Ten years later the University of Rochester transferred the property to a board of trustees who planned to found a new nonprofit, which was ultimately chartered in 1949, dedicated to forming a museum of photography and motion pictures. I promise to murder the next person who dares to equate the nonprofit educational institution with the for-profit manufacturer. You will never see a movie at the Kodak archive, because Kodak does not have a film archive. If you took a trip to Rochester to see Fear and Desire at the archive, you did not go to Kodak; you went to the George Eastman House. They are not the same! And yes, I’ve been in both. Yes, I have visited a number of the Kodak buildings, which have security about as strict as that at the Pentagon. But I was a SMPTE member at the time and so I could go in for conferences. Kodak is a massive series of factories, in modern buildings, remotely situated in industrial areas. The George Eastman House is an old-fashioned mansion, on a residential street, with lots of photographs on display.)

So... what exactly did Kubrick change? As I have long argued, there is almost no such thing as missing information. Everything we want to know is openly published somewhere, but we can’t find it because we don’t know where to look. So let’s look at the most obvious source imaginable, the IMDb. Commencing on Wednesday, 14 December 2011, there was a conversation about the “68 and/or 72 minute cut.” Almost a year later, on Wednesday, 28 November 2012, a user who goes by the pseudonym of “fishpoo” responded more fully than we could have expected. He loaded the bootleg of the 72-minute version onto his computer, and loaded the 61-minute Blu-Ray edition as well. Using the Sony Vega program he overlaid the two in order to see clearly where the gaps were. To his surprise there were none. What he found instead were some different takes, some different angles, some instances of slightly different dialogue, and some different voices! Of course, as we know, he was wrong. I was wrong too. What he actually witnessed was the 61-minute movie slowed down by 10%. The print that Perveler donated to the Eastman House is about 66 minutes, physically trimmed from the original 68 minutes. So, in this particular case, information is missing after all, at least, for the meanwhile.

The Albuquerque Journal
Saturday, 30 May 1953, p 3
The Pottstown [PA] Mercury and the Pottstown News
Saturday, 6 June 1953, p 4

Excerpt from a syndicated column:



The Life layout was 11 May 1953.
The Los Ángeles Times
Thursday, 11 June 1953, Part III p 11
THE DOUBLE-BILL REISSUE
So there you go. This isn’t “THE EXCITING NEW MOVIE EVERYBODY READ ABOUT IN LIFE MAGAZINE.” This is not an elegant, appealing, eye-catching advertisement. This is the worst type of promotion with a useless quote from Life. Now let’s think this through. Burstyn was noted for simple, attractive advertisements, not this brainless rot. This exploitation schmear is far worse even than the original Fear and Desire poster. The one-sheet poster was not good enough to attract the élite and discriminating audiences that this movie needed to succeed. Walter Winchell’s blurb misrepresents everything. The visuals make it seem that this is a sordid movie about a scantily clad “STRANGE HALF-ANIMAL GIRL.” I’ve been around long enough to recognize an advertising campaign based entirely on panic — or vendetta. Worse, it’s released as a unit with a second feature, lasciviously entitled The Male Brute. Now, you’ve probably never heard of The Male Brute, and that’s because that’s the reissue retitling of Savage Triangle, an English-subtitled version of Le garçon sauvage. The byline of that second feature emphasizes that this is the story of a FRENCH PROSTITUTE. Oy vey. (There has been some conjecture here and there that The Male Brute was actually a retitling of a Buñuel movie called El Bruto. Nope. Evidence? Here’s an advert from The New Oxford [PA] Item, Thursday, 8 December 1955, p 4. More evidence? Here’s the AMPAS record. Even more evidence? Look carefully at the ads reproduced below. Even better evidence? The Reno Evening Gazette, Tuesday, 19 October 1954, p 2.)

Both films, of course, were in distribution by Joseph Burstyn, Inc. Why was he targeting the DG demographic? The raincoat crowd who enjoy seeing smut would not enjoy these two flicks at all. And the crowd who might possibly enjoy watching these two flicks would have no interest in smut. Further, a pre-packaged double-bill invariably looks cheap and sordid. This was a hopelessly unintelligent advertising campaign guaranteed to lose dough. This was entirely out of character for Burstyn, and that’s why I’m so puzzled.

Of course, you’ve probably read the passing references to Fear and Desire having been released on the “art circuit” — references such as, for instance, Pyramid Beach, 18 September 2010 and Wikipedia. Apparently, yes, there was an art circuit in 1953, much to my surprise. There had earlier been a few tiny tiny tiny little independent cinemas in the 1920’s that had tried to book exclusively “artistic” films, and they quickly went bankrupt. A few daring entrepreuneurs continued in the 1930’s, and this time the idea caught on. According to James Naremore’s “No Other Country but the Mind,” in the booklet accompanying the UK Blu-Ray, by the mid-1950’s there were at least 470 such cinemas sprinkled throughout the USA!!!!! I’m stunned. Has someone written a book about these specialty cinemas? If not, get to it and write one! I didn’t know that the “art-house” movement was that widespread until around 1960, but I was wrong. It was to such cinemas that Burstyn released his Rossellini and De Sica flicks, and other foreign and off-beat movies as well. Unfortunately, that’s not generally where Burstyn’s company released Fear and Desire.

Now we can understand why Stanley Kubrick so hated this movie. Kubrick had put monumental effort into making Fear and Desire, and he was probably over the moon when Burstyn took an interest in it. Kubrick surely admired Burstyn’s business acumen and his championing of films and filmmakers who otherwise would not have gotten any exposure in the US. Instead of getting a similar treatment, though, Burstyn and his successors unceremoniously dumped Fear and Desire into the exchanges to be picked up by any cinemas that were wanting for more popular fare. This movie was thus shown ritually, without properly targeted marketing. It played briefly, it went away, it was forgotten. We can surely understand why, later in his career, Kubrick would insist on overseeing the bookings. He didn’t want a repeat of this disaster.



As we can see from this photo of a cardboard window card on display at the touring Stanley Kubrick exhibit, Fear and Desire also played the Roxy beginning on Friday, 12 June. The 12th of June fell on a Friday in 1953. You think that that’s straightforward, don’t you? You think that the Roxy was “THE” Roxy in Manhattan, S. L. Rothapfel’s palace? It was definitely not. “THE” Roxy was the premier showcase for major Hollywood product and had no use for Burstyn’s “little” movies. Besides, on Friday, 12 June 1953, “THE” Roxy was running Titanic and something about the coronation of Elizabeth II (presumably The Coronation: 2nd June 1953) together with a stage show on ice called Gay Paree. A lot of cinemas in a number of cities and villages named themselves after the Manhattan Roxy, among them: ALABAMA: Anniston, Russellville, Selma; ARIZONA: Buckeye, Holbrook; ARKANSAS: Blytheville, Eureka Springs, Hot Springs, Little Rock; CALIFORNIA: Glendale, HelenaA, Long Beach, Pleasanton, San Diego, Santa Rosa, Whittier; COLORADO: Denver; CONNECTICUT: Norwalk; FLORIDA: Arcadia, Jacksonville, Orlando, Pensacola, St Petersburg, Tampa; GEORGIA: Americus, Atlanta, Baxley, Brunswick, Cochran, Gainesville, Savannah; IDAHO: Blackfoot, Caldwell, Cascade, Cœur d’Alène, Lewiston, Meridian, Priest River, St Anthony, Twin Falls; ILLINOIS: Berwyn, Chicago, Coulterville, East St Louis, Galatia, Harvard, Lockport, Moline, Mounds, Ottawa, Shelbyville, Springfield, West Frankfort; INDIANA: Frankfort, La Porte, Perú, Princeton; IOWA: St Ansgar; KANSAS: Wichita; KENTUCKY: Franklin; LOUISIANA: New Orleans; MARYLAND: Baltimore; MICHIGAN: Bay City, Detroit, Flint, Hillsdale, Howard City; MINNESOTA: Clarkfield, Hinckley, Minneapolis, Owatonna; MISSISSIPPI: Biloxi, Clarksdale, Newton; MISSOURI: Blue Springs, Carthage, Hopkins, Kansas City, St Charles, St Louis; MONTANA: Choteau, Forsyth, Kalispell, Missoula, Shelby; NEW JERSEY: Camden, Glassboro, Irvington, Maple Shade; NEW YORK: Buffalo, Potsdam; NORTH CAROLINA: Old Fort; NORTH DAKOTA: Cavalier, Fargo, Gilby, Langdon, Maddock, McClusky, Neche, Steele, Towner, Washburn; OHIO: Caldwell, Cleveland, De Graff; OKLAHOMA: Ardmore, Billings, Muskogee, Perry, Picher, Ponca City; OREGON: Coquille; PENNSYLVANIA: Ashland, Ephrata, Harrisburg, Hazleton, Hollsopple, Lock Haven, Meyersdale, Nesquehoning, Northampton, Philadelphia, Richeyville, Slippery Rock; TENNESSEE: Alamo, Clarksville, Cleveland, Dickson, Gallatin, Knoxville, Memphis, Murfreesboro, Nashville, Rogersville; TEXAS: Houston, Olton, San Ángelo, Wichita Falls; UTAH: Brigham City; VIRGINIA: Chincoteague, Martinsville, Norfolk; WASHINGTON: Aberdeen, Bremerton, Eatonville, Enumclaw, Everett, Kennewick, Longview, Morton, Newport, Puyallup, Renton, Tacoma, Walla Walla, Washougal; WEST VIRGINIA: Clendenin, and Huntington. Vincent LoBrutto’s book on Stanley Kubrick indicates that, after the Guild, Fear and Desire was shown in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Ángeles. As we learn below, it opened at the Studio in Philadelphia and at the State in Los Ángeles. So maybe this window card is from Detroit or Chicago? Each city really did have a Roxy. But neither hypothesis works. The Detroit Roxy was third-run triple-feature in those days. And the Chicago Roxy closed in 1952. So where was this?

To trace LoBrutto’s leads, we can utilize Google, and with that modern tool we can discover that a book called American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond might fill us in a little on the Philadelphia engagement, for a note mentions that an article called “Male Brute at Studio,” in the Philadelphia Daily News of 25 July 1953, p 10, would indicate that the double bill was playing at the Studio Theatre. Since it was sufficiently noteworthy to rate a review in the paper, it was most likely the Philadelphia première rather than a move-over or second-run. Then on 7 August 1953 it returned to Manhattan for an engagement at the Rialto Theatre (Arthur Mayer’s intimate 1935 building, not to be confused with Rothapfel’s much-mourned 1917 theatre palace which had previously occupied that same lot). Presumably that was the double bill, as LoBrutto notes that the advertising was even sleazier than it had been at the Guild. It is difficult to check these claims, especially since the Rialto did not advertise at the time.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Wednesday, 2 September 1953, p 6


This is the earliest newspaper advertisement I have yet found for this double feature. This was the opening day at the Vogue, lavishly promoted as you can see. It ran through Tuesday the 16th, and then it popped back up on Sunday–Tuesday, 24–26 January 1954.

The Vogue Theatre, 1455 Coney Island Avenue, Midwood, Brooklyn NY
The Lethbridge [AB] Herald
Monday, 21 September 1953, p 3

And now my favorite Virginia Leith story so far. Why? Because Alain Bernheim later became Gore Vidal’s European literary agent. ¿Small world, que no?

Now there was a problem. On Sunday, 29 November 1953, shortly into this double-bill reissue, Joseph Burstyn Amber took a flight to Paris. When land was almost in sight, he suffered a heart attack. The plane made an emergency landing in Ireland, but it was too late. He was only 53. His death spelled the doom of Fear and Desire. Instead of being shipped to the classy cinemas with which Burstyn had cultivated cordial relations, the movie was frequently consigned to third-run and drive-in cinemas, and was also used as filler for first-run houses. Those were exactly the wrong strategies. The discriminating audiences who would have enjoyed Fear and Desire were unaware of its existence.









That’s why I had so much trouble tracing his family: I didn’t know his full name!
“Bursztyn” in Polish means “amber,” which begins to explain things.
Well, back to the old drawing board.

Wisconsin State Journal
Tuesday, 15 December 1953, Sec 2 p 4

The booking was only four days, closing on Friday night, 18 December 1953. The New Madison Theatre, 113 Monona Ave (not to be confused with the earlier Fischer’s Madison Theatre), first opened in late 1936. In 1953 it was still a first-run house, and so how this double-feature landed here is anybody’s guess. The New Madison seems to have closed down right at the end of 1956 and was bulldozed in 1957.
The Long Island Star-Journal
Wednesday, 16 December 1953, p 22

I don’t know how long it ran, though I suppose it was only three days or so.
This proves that there were at least two prints, as this showing was simultaneous with the Madison showing.

The Cameo Theatre, 25–15 Steinway Street, Astoria NY.
The New York Times
Wednesday, 16 December 1953, p 67 col 5:

Probably nothing worth pursuing, but hey.
The Red Bank [NJ] Register
Wednesday, 30 December 1953 p 3

One night only! New Year’s Eve midnight show.
The Eatontown Drive-In, Route 35, Eatontown NJ, opened 21 April 1950. Demolished.
The Waterloo [IA] Daily Courier
Wednesday, 6 January 1954, p 16

Four-day run, ending on the evening of the 9th.
The San Antonio Express and San Antonio News
Sunday, 7 February 1954 pp 6F and 7F



It seems that this ran from 5–11 February. The run was certainly not longer than a week. The Arts Theater, 719 Fredericksburg Road (now renumbered 701), San Antonio. We can see from the name of the establishment that this was one of the 470 or so “art houses” that had sprouted throughout the USA by the mid-1950’s. We can see from the local newspaper that the police were in the habit of raiding the place for showing “lewd and lascivious films,” which, of course, were much tamer than current-day soap operas and talk shows.
The Wisconsin State Journal
Sunday, 21 February 1954, sec 2 p 6
Thursday, 25 February 1954, sec 3 p 3





This was the second run, which ran from Monday, 22 February, through Thursday, 25 February 1954.

The Majestic Theatre, 115 King Street, Madison WI 53703.
The Rice Thresher [Houston TX]
Friday, 26 March 1954, p 8



The Avalon Theatre, 743 South 75th Street, Houston TX
The Rocky Mount [NC] Sunday Telegram
Sunday, 28 March 1954, p 6B

The Tucson Daily Citizen
Tuesday, 15 June 1954, p 11

Virginia Leith is still in the gossips, and Fear and Desire is still associated with her. This suggests that Burstyn’s family, the successors to Joseph Burstyn Inc, were still trying to promote this movie.

The Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune
Tuesday, 6 July 1954, p 2, and Wednesday, 7 July 1954, p 2

Two-day run.
The El Paso Herald Post
Friday, 1 April 1955, p 18

Ran only two days, maybe three. The double feature was split up shortly after this screening,
and Fear and Desire remained in circulation on its own for at least another half-year or so.

The Yandell Theatre, 1116 E Yandell Dr, El Paso, opened 1947, closed 1960.
The Los Ángeles Times
Wednesday, 13 July 1955, Part III p 9

In order to be eligible for an Academy Award, Fear and Desire needed to play commercially at a cinema in Los Ángeles. And so it did. It was not nominated. As we can see, it was no longer doubled with The Male Brute, but was instead a filler at the State Theatre for two weeks, 13–26 July 1955. With such a hopelessly lackluster nonpromotion, it is hardly surprising that the movie was not reviewed and that it passed entirely unnoticed. Was somebody deliberately sabotaging this movie’s chances? This double feature ran for two weeks, through Tuesday, 26 July 1955.
The Yonkers [NY] Herald Statesman
Wednesday, 19 October 1955, p 10, and Tuesday, 26 October 1955, p 15
What’s interesting here is that Fear and Desire was still floating around more than two years after its première. And still there’s that lascivious blurb from Winchell combined with the enticing legend: ADULT ENTERTAINMENT ONLY. Oooooooo yum yum naughty naughty pant pant howwwwwwwwwl.... I assume the only reason it was double featured at the Elmsford Drive-In was simply that the drive-in needed a second feature and Fear and Desire was the only film available from the local exchange that week. After this it appears that Fear and Desire ran out of steam. It didn’t help that distributor Burstyn was dead. His family kept the company running for another couple of years, but his family surely didn’t have his experience. Uncle Martin Perveler (1910–1982) owned the copyright, and it’s hard not to imagine that he had had his fill with these reels of celluloid. Enough was enough. He was not about to throw good money after bad. He forever withdrew the film from circulation. He retrieved the three prints and handed them to his nephew, glad to cut the losses on a failed investment.

(The Elmsford Drive-In, 333 N Saw Mill River Rd, Elmsford NY. Opened 23 June 1953, closed 1988. Demolished.)

SUMMARY
CITY CINEMA PROGRAMMING PLAYDATES
Manhattan NY The Guild Art House 30 March – 28 April 1953
????? The Roxy First Run 12 June 1953 – ?
Philadelphia PA The Studio Art House 25 July 1953 – ?
Manhattan NY The Rialto Third Run 7 August 1953 – ?
Brooklyn NY The Vogue Art House 2–16 September 1953
Astoria NY The Cameo Third Run 16 December 1953 – ?
Madison WI The Madison First Run 15–18 December 1953
Red Bank NJ The Eatontown Drive-In 30 December 1953
Waterloo IA RKO-Orpheum First Run 6–9 January 1954
Brooklyn NY The Vogue Art House 24–26 January 1954 (revival)
San Antonio TX The Arts Art House 5–11 February 1954
Madison WI The Majestic Second Run 22–25 February 1954
Houston TX The Avalon Art House 26 March 1954 – ?
Wisconsin Rapids WI The Palace First Run 6–7 July 1954
El Paso TX The Yandell Third Run 1–2 April 1955
Los Ángeles CA The State First Run 13–26 July 1955
Elmsford NY The Elmsford Drive-In 19–25 October 1955

The above is by no means a complete list, but it is sufficient to provide us with the clear impression that, though there was never a major or appropriate promotion, Fear and Desire moved around enough that Burstyn’s company probably earned its investment back, but it doesn’t follow that the film per se was profitable. Kubrick maintained that he never earned sufficient profits from this movie to pay back his loans, and that he had to make good with his creditors through subsequent income. If the other advertising campaigns were as imperceptible and/or misleading as those demonstrated above, then it is no wonder that this inexpensive movie never earned its money back.

Boxoffice
Monday, 23 March 1964
Now here’s something nobody ever talks about, and yet this is a major bit of information. How could this have passed under the radar all these decades? Did nobody attend? Or did everybody in attendance suffer amnesia? James B. Harris, Sterling Hayden, and Timothy Carey, among others, were on stage on 7 April 1964, the final night in a tribute entitled “The Art of Stanley Kubrick,” held at the University of California. Previous to that climactic evening, there had been a retrospective of all his feature films minus Spartacus. The retrospective included Fear and Desire. Now, where did the print come from? My guess is that Martin Perveler loaned it, probably for a hefty price, but I can’t be sure. The print could conceivably have come from the heirs of Joseph Burstyn. Maybe. It could have come from the Eastman House, though I really doubt it. It could even have come from Stanley Kubrick, who loaned it as a courtesy to his friends. If the print came from the Burstyn heirs, then what was the running time?

Though this article is datelined Los Ángeles, it referred not to UCLA. The Wheeler Auditorium was and still is at the Berkeley campus. It’s an imposing, austere, forbidding edifice. It would not seem conducive to a good relaxing evening at the flicks.


Oh the stories we’ve all heard — Kubrick was so ashamed of the movie that he tried to buy up all the prints and that he burned the negative. Yeah right. (The story about burning the negative apparently got its start in an article by Mark Carducci, “In Search of Stanley K.,” Millimetre, December 1975. It was a nasty article, and Carducci was printing rumors, which were all that were available at the time.) The truth, obviously, was that, with Fear and Desire, Kubrick’s nerves had been shot, his money had been depleted, he was in default with his creditors, and his relations with some family members must have been strained past the breaking point. In 1953 Kubrick was distraught at witnessing a nearly empty auditorium as his film unspooled, with the minuscule audience laughing at Paul Mazursky’s awful dramatic performance midway through the movie, and he was totally demoralized when his uncle and his respected distributor, in a last-ditch effort to rescue their investment, sold out by dumping the movie onto the exploitation circuit, hawking it as the cheesiest sleaze. Also hovering in the background was the recollection of his first marriage, which had unravelled during (because of?) the production, and that surely made the movie even more of an unpleasant memory. Kubrick decided to move on and not look back at that painful experience. He did not want a repeat of the distress, and was relieved that there would be no further public screenings. He possessed most of the prints, the negative was hidden away in some lab vault somewhere, his distributor had passed away, his uncle refused to release it again, and so the movie was effectively dead. He could breathe a sigh of relief.

Then two and a half decades later, in 1989, the nightmare began. In early December of that year the Bologna International Festival of Free Cinema ran it. Weekly Variety, 6 December 1989, was intentionally coy about revealing the source, but it was the Eastman House’s print. (That was reminiscent of Alexander Walker’s book, Stanley Kubrick Directs, in which he stated that there was only one traceable print, which was in a private collection and unavailable for public viewing. He was certainly referring to the Eastman House.) Then there was more. John Boorman programmed a Kubrick retrospective at the 1993 Telluride Film Festival, and when Kubrick discovered that among the films Boorman was going to introduce was Fear and Desire (I presume the Eastman House’s spliced print) he telephoned him to beg, “Don’t show it.” Apparently in that same year the print was also shown at the US Library of Congress. Then in 1994, under the auspices of the Eastman House, there was a “NEW 35MM PRINT” that played at the Film Forum II. Kubrick again was so distressed he tried to have the screening stopped. When the programmers refused to cave in, he had Warner Bros. issue a press release in which he denounced the film as “A bumbling, amateur film exercise, written by a failed poet, crewed by a few friends, and a completely inept oddity: boring and pretentious.” (I would love to get a copy of that press release.) Methinks he overreacted. It wasn’t the movie itself that so shamed him. Yes, the movie is often awkward and filled with beginner’s mistakes, but the only really rotten sequence is the one with Sidney overacting in front of the prisoner. The scene was a good idea, but horribly written, acted, and executed. Other than that, the movie is really not that bad and has much to recommend it (though that assessment may come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen only a lousy bootleg such as the one at the top of this web page). Had it just been given half a chance it would have earned its money back, but it was never given any chance at all, and the money folk rubbed Kubrick’s nose in it. It was the painful memory of the distribution and all the attendant betrayal that drove him to despair. Emotionally he tied it all together. He didn’t need any flashbacks. According to a web site called “Pyramid Beach,” “Since that 1994 screening, Kubrick successfully prevented announced showings of Fear and Desire in Los Ángeles, Ohio, and New York.” I don’t know if that’s true.

Yet I do know it’s true that Kubrick had a print at home. You probably want to know how I know that. Simple. Back around 1997 or 1998 I was hoping to see this movie, so I called Saturday Matinée Video in North Hollywood. The guy who took my call said, “Well, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I have a copy. The bad news is that I’m not allowed to let it out. If you want to see it, you’ll have to come over to the shop and watch it here.” Considering that I was living in the Buffalo area at the time, that was not such a convenient idea. He told me how he got that unusual VHS. Stanley Kubrick had phoned him up, looking for a rare video to send as a gift to an uncle. (I asked the guy at Saturday Matinée, “Which video?” Response: “I can’t remember.” Drat!) Saturday Matinée had that rare video, but Kubrick preferred not to pay for it. He suggested a trade, and spouted off a number of obscure titles. As soon as he said “Fear and Desire” that was good enough! Kubrick supplied the video on the condition that it must never leave the premises and that it must never be copied. So that’s how I know that Kubrick had at least one print, and probably all three. (So much for the urban legends about Kubrick refusing to allow anyone to see the movie! He was freely giving out VHS copies to anyone he thought deserved one!) By following simplest logic, the only possible conclusion is that the print(s?) he had at home are the ones that had circulated on the double bills.

Without using any physical evidence at all (because we don’t have any), we shall attempt to reconstruct the print history by using logic and deduction alone. The rushes were edited into a workprint, of which a second copy was made for looping. Once the neg was cut and the sound was mixed, we can assume that the workprint was discarded. So let’s skip that step and move on to the prints proper:

1.
There was a 68-minute 35mm print for the première booking at the Guild in Manhattan. In addition to the private critics’ screening on 26 March 1953, it ran six shows a day for four weeks. That’s 169 screenings — actually probably less than 169, since there were probably no tickets sold at all for a number of the showtimes. Whatever happened to this print? It couldn’t have worn out after only 169 screenings. Where did it go? Who has it? Does it still exist?
2.
There was surely a backup print at Burstyn’s disposal, which Kubrick chopped up in an attempt to rethink the movie. That process probably began while print #1 was still showing at the Guild. In the process of re-editing, this print may well have been reduced to gouged confetti.
3.
Paolo Cherchi Usai tells us that another print of this 68-minute version (“photoplay in 8 reels”) was deposited at the US Library of Congress, but that Perveler, who had raised the funding for the production, requested that it be returned. Clearly Kubrick cleanly spliced this print to match #2 and make a streamlined version, and this probably replaced the print running at the Guild. There was probably no money to pay for neg cutting or new prints. Once some funds were in hand, the neg was re-cut. This spliced streamlined print is certainly the print that was donated to the George Eastman House. Eastman later made a 35mm copy of it for public screenings.
4, 5, 6.
This was derived from the re-edited camera negative. The total length was 5,467' print, or 60-minutes and 45-seconds. Three new 35mm prints were made, at least two of which circulated as double bills, sometimes to less-dignified venues. By the way, once the neg was cut down to 60m45s, the trims were probably all discarded. Kubrick later had at least one of these prints at home. He probably had all three. Obviously he had managed to collect it/them from his uncle once the film was withdrawn from circulation.

In all likelihood that’s a complete catalogue of all the prints ever made — six. That was it, not counting the two later museum backups (Eastman House and MoMA). So print #2 was discarded. Print #3 was donated to the Eastman House. Prints #4, 5, and 6 were in Kubrick’s possession. That leaves print #1 unaccounted for, and that’s the print that most interests me. Admittedly, the scanty evidence also leaves open other possibilities. There may have been only five prints, for instance, and print #1, now cut two minutes short, might be the one at the Eastman House. Absent the bookkeeping and lab records, we’ll never know for sure. We should focus our attention on the people in charge of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. When Burstyn passed away, his siblings Sylvia, Julius, Benjamin, and Edward took over the business.

• Mrs Silvia Hirsch of Brooklyn.
• Benjamin Burstyn Amber.
Born in Poland, 10 April 1903; died in Mayfield Heights, OH, 15 September 1977.
Physician.
Lived in Cleveland, OH, and later Beachwood, OH.
• Julius Burstyn Amber.
Born in Poland, 3 March 1907; died in Mayfield Heights, OH, 29 July 1979.
Lived in Cleveland, OH, later Beachwood, OH.
• Edward Burstyn Amber.
Born in Poland, 1911; died in Uniontown, PA, 22 November 1961.
Lived at 137 Downer Avenue, Uniontown, PA, tel GE 7-4650.
Lived at 57 East Berkeley Street, Uniontown, PA.
Manager of the jewelry department at Kaufman’s Department Store and president of the Kaufman’s Employee Association.
In June 1955 Edward was appointed Uniontown Cinerama representative.
His wife was Florence Y. Kastner Amber, 22 September 1915 – 13 January 2008.
Children:
Gordon Lee,
Philip M.,
Arnold B.,
Michelle L.
• There was another brother too, Louis Burstyn Amber of Miami Beach, FL.
He seems not to have been involved.

If there were six prints, then one of those Burstyn Amber siblings must have had print #1. I can’t imagine who else would have had it, and by heaven they’re going to be hard to trace down! There’s a possibility that it was not the Burstyns, but Martin Perveler who held on to the print, though I really doubt it, because by that time it was useless to him. If Martin Perveler had had it, he would have given it to Kubrick. Kubrick would only show people the second edition, not the first.

We may never learn how the 61-minute camera neg managed to migrate to an unidentified film lab in Puerto Rico that later closed down, after which (in the 1980’s?) it was rediscovered. By that time the film had fallen into the public domain, so I hear, since no one had bothered to renew it. (I assume the aging Perveler had other things on his mind just prior to his death.) In 1993 the neg was donated to the Archivo Generál. In 1994 a new 35mm print was made by Eastman House from its archival print for showing at the Film Forum II. In 2010 the Library of Congress in collaboration with the George Eastman House used the camera neg to prepare a new release, which was issued for specialty screenings on DCP. This was finally issued on Blu-Ray and DVD in 2012.


That bit about “first time since 1953” was a bit of an exaggeration, but okay, why be picayune?

The Binghamton [NY] Press
Thursday, 22 March 1956, p 38
The Niagara Falls [NY] Gazette
Thursday, 22 March 1956, p 16
Now let’s try to figure out where the bootlegs came from. I haven’t done direct comparisons, but from a casual look it appears that all the 61-minute bootlegs derive from a single source. My educated guess is that Stanley Kubrick, as a favor to a movie enthusiast, gave out one of his VHS copies of Fear and Desire, with his standard request that it not be loaned out, duplicated, or shown to the public. Apparently somebody got naughty and disobeyed. That’s what resulted in the tidal wave of VHS bootlegs that flooded the black market back in the 1990’s, each under-the-counter copy looking worse than the last, as copies were being made of copies that were made from copies of copies of copies of copies of copies.... That makes me wonder where, how, and when Elusive DVD got its 61-minute copy, which is pretty darn close to the original. Their online advertisement states that “Elusive DVD has done the impossible and has located and restored a print of this ‘elusive’ film.” I don’t see how on earth they could have found a print — unless someone with access to a telecine snuck the Eastman House’s backup print out of a booth late one night, ran off a video master, and then quietly returned the print the next morning — without getting caught. No. I don’t think so. For a first-run Hollywood blockbuster, yeah. For an archival print shown at a specialty cinema, no way. I think it much more likely that they found a VHS that Kubrick had handed out to somebody.

UNOFFICIAL (BUT PERFECTLY LEGAL) RELEASES:

Why did I decide to write this essay? Because in the autumn of 2012 I made the mistake of visiting the Kino Lorber page for Fear and Desire. I didn’t think of that as a mistake, but it loaded “cookies,” and then that ad started stalking me thanks to an insidious new technology called “display-ad retargeting.” For months and months and months, whenever I browsed the Internet, there was that blasted ad following me around. Everywhere! Yes, it was attractive, and I actually liked it, but hey, it was driving me nuts! That’s why I finally lost my temper and wrote this essay. This is the ad that drove me to it:



And you know what drove me even more crazy? Early on Saturday afternoon, 2 March 2013, I saw that advertisement yet again, and I was ready to scream. A moment later I decided that I would capture that advertisement and tame it by adding it to my web essay. Immediately the ad disappeared. I started getting new “retargeted” display ads, all of them for web sites that I’ve never visited! It took me the entire rest of the day to locate something I could previously never get rid of! I finally found it thanks to the WayBackMachine. Now that I’ve done that, I thought I might as well go all out and grab the other display ad, even though this one was merciful enough not to stalk me for half a year:



Oops. Now that I’ve opened my big mouth, this retarget has begun to stalk me:





OFFICIAL RELEASES:




If this ever disappears, download it.


If this ever disappears, download it.

The comparisons are most interesting. You see, people tend to get angry and irritated with me when I suggest that I am picky about which particular version of a movie I choose to watch. “Why do you care which version? It’s the same movie!” they scream at me at the top of their lungs, in fury and utter exasperation. I hope the above demonstration begins to explain things. You will notice something else as well. The image on the left is properly cropped (about 1:1.375). The image on the right shows too much height, all the height of the original frame (about 1:1.21), which was never meant to be projected on screen, and which probably not more than 10 or 15 cinemas in the entire world had the capability of projecting in 1953. The film was obviously composed for a crop. I’m now glancing through the recent Blu-ray release from Eureka’s “Masters of Cinema” disc, and it’s lopped to 1:1.375 or something close to that, but much of it seems to be slightly out of rack, a little bit high, shaving off a smidgin too much of the top and showing a smidgin too much of the bottom. I was sort of hoping that the Blu-ray would reveal the entire height of the frame, more than was ever meant to be shown. That would have made me so happy. Oh well....



The 61-minute reissue version, straight from the camera neg, is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (Region A) with an extra consisting of The Seafarers. It was supposed to have included more, but something must have gone awry. Kino Lorber’s original plan was realized by Eureka’s “Masters of Cinema” series (Region B), where you really can get The Day of the Fight (the 12-minute rather than the 16-minute edition), Flying Padre, and The Seafarers, along with a booklet. If your xenophobic American Blu-ray player can’t handle Region B, trade it in for one that can. I won’t recommend a make/model because by the time I finish typing the model number the manufacturing will have ceased. I won’t recommend a vendor, because oy have I had problems. Have patience, make it a point to maintain your temper, and keep trying. Eventually you’ll be rewarded.


The Italians overdid it a bit methinks. If this ever vanishes, download it.
The New York Times Weather Reports


Wednesday, 25 March 1953:


Thursday, 26 March 1953:


Friday, 27 March 1953:


Saturday, 28 March 1953:


Sunday, 29 March 1953:


Monday, 30 March 1953:


Tuesday, 31 March 1953:


Wednesday, 1 April 1953:


Thursday, 2 April 1953:


Friday, 3 April 1953:


Saturday, 4 April 1953:


Sunday, 5 April 1953:


Monday, 6 April 1953:


Tuesday, 7 April 1953:


Wednesday, 8 April 1953:


Thursday, 9 April 1953:


Friday, 10 April 1953:


Saturday, 11 April 1953:


Sunday, 12 April 1953:


Monday, 13 April 1953:


Tuesday, 14 April 1953:


Wednesday, 15 April 1953:


Thursday, 16 April 1953:


Friday, 17 April 1953:


Saturday, 18 April 1953:


Sunday, 19 April 1953:


Monday, 20 April 1953:


Tuesday, 21 April 1953:


Wednesday, 22 April 1953:


Thursday, 23 April 1953:


Friday, 24 April 1953:


Saturday, 25 April 1953:


Sunday, 26 April 1953:


Monday, 27 April 1953:


Tuesday, 28 April 1953:


Wednesday, 29 April 1953:


Thursday, 30 April 1953:

Other Joseph Burstyn Movie Ads
and Related Info

The New York Times, Sunday, 27 October 1935, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Sunday, 27 October 1935, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Thursday, 31 October 1935, p 16:



Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Monday, 4 November 1935, p 24:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 5 November 1935, p 33:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Sunday, 10 November 1935, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 20 November 1935, p 27:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 20 November 1935, p 42:


The New York Times, Thursday, 21 November 1935, p 27:


Unsure if this was a Burstyn or Mayer-Burstyn release. See also this MoMA press release from 1971.

The New York Times, Sunday, 8 December 1935, Sec 9 p 7:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 17 December 1935, p 44:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 25 December 1935, p 30:

Never issued on video.


Mayer-Burstyn, Inc.
and
Mozart Film, Inc.


The New York Times, Saturday, 2 December 1936, p 34:

Interesting wording.
Yes, Arthur L. Mayer was Joseph Burstyn’s distribution partner from Day One.
This is also our only contemporary reference to
The Land of Promise
as having been a Mayer/Burstyn release.

The New York Times, Sunday, 10 January 1937, Sec 10 p 4:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Sunday, 10 January 1937, Sec 10 p 5:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 13 January 1937, p 20:


The New York Times, Saturday, 27 February 1937, p 9:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 17 March 1937, p 31:


The New York Times, Thursday, 15 July 1937, p 17:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 25 August 1937, p 25:

War for Buttons became Generals without Buttons.
No idea what Sacred India was unless it was Tukaram maybe? But whatever it was, it wasn’t released here after all.

The New York Times, Friday, 10 September 1937, p 19:


The New York Times, Saturday, 11 September 1937, p 20:


The New York Times, Sunday, 17 October 1937, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Sunday, 17 October 1937, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 20 October 1937, p 27:


The New York Times, Sunday, 24 October 1937, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Sunday, 6 March 1938, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Monday, 7 March 1938, p 13:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 8 March 1938, p 23:


The New York Times, Sunday, 13 March 1938, Sec 9 p 4:

La guerre des gosses will eventually be issued on blu-ray but probably without English subtitles.

The New York Times, Thursday, 26 May 1938, p 31:


The New York Times, Sunday, 13 November 1938, Sec 9 p 4:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Monday, 14 November 1938, p 15:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Tuesday, 15 November 1938, p 27:


The New York Times, Saturday, 19 November 1938, p 9:

Never issued on video.

Life 5 no 23, 5 December 1938:




The New York Times, Wednesday, 8 March 1939, p 19:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Sunday, 12 March 1939, Sec 9 p 4:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Monday, 13 March 1939, p 12:


The New York Times, Monday, 27 March 1939, p 11:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 17 May 1939, p 28:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 2 August 1939, p 17:

Mozart was released by Mozart Film, Inc., which I assume was another iteration of Mayer & Burstyn.
The Revolt of the Dead must have been a proposed title for J’accuse, which Mayer & Burstyn released as That They May Live.
Shadows of the Past was Schatten der Vergangenheit, which opened at the 86th Street Garden Theatre on Friday, 20 April 1940, without any advertisements.
It reappeared at the Thalia on Monday, 9 September 1940, but again without any ads to speak of.
The New Gulliver was revived in an English dub at the Thalia from Thursday–Sunday, 28 September through 1 October 1940, minus advertising.

The New York Times, Sunday, 27 August 1939, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Sunday, 3 September 1939, Sec 9 p 4:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Tuesday, 5 September 1939, p 21:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 7 November 1939, p 31:


The New York Times, Sunday, 12 November 1939, Sec 9 p 4:


The Los Ángeles Times, Tuesday, 21 November 1939, Part II p 17:


At last on video through Dorian. I can only assume that Peggy Thompson’s source novel, A Kiss in the Dark, was never published?

The New York Times, Friday, 22 December 1939, p 15:


Once issued on VHS in France through Film Office’s “Les Grands Classiques” series.
Never issued on video with English subtitles or dubbing.

The New York Times, Saturday, 23 December 1939, p 9:


The New York Times, Sunday, 28 January 1940, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Sunday, 28 January 1940, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Saturday, 3 February 1940, p 9:


The New York Times, Sunday, 4 February 1940, Sec 9 p 2:


The New York Times, Sunday, 4 February 1940, Sec 9 p 7:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 21 February 1940, p 15:


The New York Times, Saturday, 30 March 1940, p 11:


The New York Times, Sunday, 7 April 1940, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 9 April 1940, p 27:


The New York Times, Sunday, 14 April 1940, Sec 9 p 4:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Monday, 15 April 1940, p 21:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Friday, 4 October 1940, p 29:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Friday, 4 October 1940, p 29:


The New York Times, Sunday, 6 October 1940, Sec 9 p 3:

Well, as we learned above, it played in Los Ángeles, no prob, but NYC’s judges had a different opinion.

The New York Times, Sunday, 6 October 1940, Sec 9 p 4:

Never issued on video.

The New York Times, Tuesday, 8 October 1940, p 31:


The New York Times, Sunday, 2 March 1941, Sec 9 p 4:


World Theatre Program Cover, Monday, 3 March 1941:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 4 March 1941, p 20:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 5 March 1941, p 17:

Three columns by five inches!

The New York Times, Sunday, 13 April 1941, Sec 9 p 5:


The New York Times, Sunday, 20 April 1941, Sec 9 pp 4–5:


The New York Times, Sunday, 4 May 1941, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Friday, 22 August 1941, p 19:


The Los Ángeles Times, Friday, 22 August 1941, Part I p 15:


The New York Times, Friday, 19 September 1941, p 27:


The New York Times, Sunday, 19 October 1941, Sec IX p 1:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 18 November 1941, p 33:

Public domain.


The New York Times, Wednesday, 19 November 1941, p 26:


The New York Times, Friday, 21 November 1941, p 23:


The New York Times, Sunday, 23 November 1941, Sec 9 p 1:


The New York Times, Monday, 24 November 1941, p 11:


The New York Times, Friday, 28 November 1941, p 27:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 3 December 1941, p 32:


The New York Times, Friday, 26 December 1941, p 21:


The New York Times, Sunday, 5 April 1942, Sec 9 p 4:


The New York Times, Sunday, 12 April 1942, Sec 8 p 4:


The New York Times, Monday, 13 April 1942, p 12:

This one seems to be Joe Burstyn minus Arthur Mayer.
Never issued on video.

Read another review at The New Masses, 21 April 1942.


The New York Times, Tuesday, 14 April 1942, p 17:


The New York Times, Sunday, 20 December 1942, Sec 9 p 3:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 8 June 1943, p 16:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 9 June 1943, p 17:

Not on home video.

The New York Times, Monday, 10 January 1944, p 8:


The New York Times, Sunday, 11 November 1945, Sec 9 p 3:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 13 November 1945, p 24:


The New York Times, Sunday, 24 February 1946, Sec 1 p 41:


The New York Times, Sunday, 24 February 1946, Sec 9 p 3:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 26 February 1946, p 21:


The New York Times, Sunday, 21 April 1946, Sec 9 p 3:

Portrait of a Woman was never issued on video.
Hymn of the Nations is on video but only in an expurgated edition.

The New York Times, Monday, 22 April 1946, p 26:


The New York Evening Post, Saturday, 22 November 1947, p 5:


The New York Times, Thursday, 25 December 1947, p 30:


On DVD but without subtitles.

The New York Times, Friday, 26 December 1947, p 22:


The New York Times, Monday, 29 March 1948, p 17:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 30 March 1948, p 26:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 14 July 1948, p 27:


The New York Times, Thursday, 15 July 1948, p 26:


The New York Times, Saturday, 12 February 1949, p 11:


The New York Times, Sunday, 13 February 1949, Sec 9 p 3:


The New York Times, Monday, 14 February 1949, p 15:




The New York Times, Sunday, 11 December 1949, Sec 9 p 5:



The New York Times, Tuesday, 13 December 1949, p 44:


The New York Times, Sunday, 18 December 1949, Sec 2 p 3:


The New York Times, Monday, 26 December 1949, p 33:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 27 December 1949, p 27:



Amber Films, Inc.
and
Joseph Burstyn, Inc.


The New York Times, Sunday, 5 November 1950, Sec 9 p 5:

I don’t think Cielo sulla palude was ever released in the US.
(Available on Region 2 PAL DVD but without English subtitles.)
Amber Films was renamed Joseph Burstyn, Inc.

The New York Times, Sunday, 10 December 1950, Sec 9 p 7:

Omnibus film consisting of:
Marcel Pagnol’s Jofroi (52 min),
Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (40 min), and
Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (which had been paired in Italy with La voce umana) (44 min).

The New York Times, Sunday, 10 December 1950, Sec 9 p 9:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 13 December 1950, p 50:


The New York Times, Wednesday, 17 February 1951, p 23:


The New York Times, Thursday, 21 February 1951, p 26:


The New York Times, Sunday, 9 December 1951, Sec 2 p 9:


The New York Times, Sunday, 16 December 1951, Sec 9 p 7:


The New York Times, Tuesday, 18 December 1951, p 42:


The New York Times, Monday, 14 April 1952, p 22:

Finally issued on video but without English subtitles.

The New York Times, Monday, 29 September 1952, p 12:

At last issued on video, but without English subtitles.

The New York Times, Tuesday, 30 September 1952, p 38:


The New York Times, Monday, 6 October 1952, p 22:


The New York Times, Friday, 31 October 1952, p 29:

At last on home video, but without English subtitles (and also with).


The Los Ángeles Times, Tuesday, 3 February 1953, Part II p 5:


The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 15 February 1953, p 10:


The New York Times, Monday, 2 March 1953, p 19:

On Region 2 PAL DVD without subtitles.
Four-column 9" ad, the size of a major Hollywood ad. Burstyn was getting bold.

The New York Times, Wednesday, 11 March 1953, p 34:

Now we understand why Burstyn was getting bold.

The New York Times, Tuesday, 6 October 1953, p 33:


The New York Times, Sunday, 29 November 1953, Sec 2 p 5:

Half a day after this article reached print, Burstyn passed away.
Green Magic would be released through the I.F.E. Releasing Corporation beginning on Monday, 16 May 1955.

After Joe Burstyn passed away, his siblings kept his business running. According to IMDb, Joseph Burstyn, Inc., released Side Street Story on 4 July 1954, a short called Romantic Youth on 5 October 1954, René Clair’s 1950 revision of À nous la liberté on 6 October 1954, Umberto D. on 7 November 1955, and Stella on 10 June 1957. Umberto D. could well have been one of Joe Burstyn’s personal picks, and so could Side Street Story and À nous la liberté. Stella and Romantic Youth were not completed until after Joe’s demise, which proves that at least one of his siblings was on the lookout for new “product.” It appears that Joseph Burstyn, Inc., closed up shop in 1957. By the way, IMDb posits that Burstyn Inc also released Tanga-Tika, but that’s rubbish, for it was actually released by an outfit called George J. Schaefer & Son.

Original contents copyright © 2013 by Ranjit Sandhu.
Holders of copyrights of any reproduced materials above may contact me about proper licensing arrangements.