The Cure

The Pathescope cutdown [THANKS, RICHARD!] is about 10 minutes long. It
supplies about a minute of footage not found on the Image DVD. I think
it's reasonable to extrapolate that if we had the rest of the print,
we'd find about 2 1/2 minutes of "new" footage overall, which just
happens to be the amount of footage chopped out of the Chaplin Classics
/ Van Beuren edition of "The Immigrant" as well. Add to that reports of
a couple of minutes of "new" footage in a rare print of "The
Floorwalker" (I haven't seen this - but I want to - COUGH), and the
ghastly amount chopped out of "One A.M." and I think it's reasonable to
conclude that ALL of the CC/VB negatives have been edited.

There are a couple of problems in the current DVD of "The Cure" - some
repeated footage in the spa (as others have pointed out), the omission
of some of the intertitles (there are 17 of them in the original), and
some shots missing from the massage scene (present in the older
Blackhawk print) and the scene where Austin throws the bottles out of
the window (more complete in Van Beuren prints, strangely enough).

Needless to say, it would be great if the upcoming Mutual set restored
all of this (and more), but with the exception of "One A.M.," I'm not
holding my breath.

Doug Sulpy wrote:
> The Pathescope cutdown [THANKS, RICHARD!] is about 10 minutes long. It
> supplies about a minute of footage not found on the Image DVD.

You are most welcome. I bought this reel within the past year on eBay
from a fellow in the UK. He didn't have a projector and, going by a
pencil note on the box, advertised it as a reel containing a Laurel and
Hardy film and a Chaplin film. Laurel and Hardy were not on the reel,
but look at what was!!! It gives one hope that there may still be
thousands of miles of 16mm, 9.5mm and even 8mm acetate footage with
more undiscovered wonders.

Richard Ward