The Moving Image

As well as making film history documentaries, Photoplay Productions, run by Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury, specializes in the restoration of silent films. These range from relatively straightforward ventures, involving tracking down the best surviving material and then commissioning a new score, to very complex projects drawing on a large number of sources, as with Napoleon. Having edited several of Photoplay's documentaries, I was entrusted with the editorial aspects of our 2004 restoration of Paul Leni's 1927 film The Cat and the Canary.

Unfortunately no original American release print of the film was known to exist. This was a tragedy, as the real star of the film is the lighting and the photography, the subtlety of which is greatly diminished if not seen in original prints. I first saw the film on Standard 8, in a print so bad that at first I couldn't identify the villain when he was finally unmasked! As Photoplay's restorations are not just television versions but are primarily aimed at theatrical presentation in large concert halls with live orchestra, picture quality is paramount.

The American release existed in the form of a 16mm Show-at-Home print made by Universal for nontheatrical release and also a black-and-white 35mm nitrate print made in the 1930s. However, two original nitrate prints of the European release existed, one Dutch, the other Danish, which we decided to use for our restoration to get the best possible picture quality. Although the American 35mm was made from the original negative, it was made on a continuous printer, whereas the European prints had been step printed, giving them noticeably greater sharpness.¹ They were also tinted.

The job was to have been simple: copy the original (European) tinted nitrate material as the basis for Photoplay's version, and cut in all the intertitles from the American version. (We were keen to retain the original intertitles rather than recreating them digitally, partly for the authenticity of using the original ones and partly because there are several animated titles in the film.) There were a few damaged or missing sections in the European prints, which could also be taken from the 1930s American print. To our surprise, The Cat and the Canary restoration revealed staggering differences between the European and American versions, making this a much more complicated project than anticipated. To understand the difficulties of using the European prints for our restoration, it is necessary to consider how European versions were created originally.