The Celluloid Sleuths

A young, hot-eyed Benito Mussolini stared out of U.S. TV screens this week and spoke in accented English: "I salute the great American people." CBS conjured up the Duce's shade in Mussolini, a fast-moving half hour on Twentieth Century galvanized by rare images of the living past. Viewers caught glimpses they had half forgotten or never seen before: newborn Fascist babies squirming wholesale on a nursery table; the bare-chested dictator on a ski slope; his mistress, Claretta Petacci, in a silken boudoir; an anonymous GI mugging in victory from the famous balcony of the Palazzo Venezia.

Mussolini, the latest example of a notably successful TV specialty, is in great part a monument to a new kind of sleuth: the film searcher. Before Twentieth Century could fit together the show's dramatic jigsaw pattern in celluloid, searchers had to hunt out the bits and pieces of aging film in 25 different hoards in four countries; to give editors a choice, they brought in ten times as much footage as editors could put on the air.

Truffle Hound. The hunting ground of the celluloid sleuths is vast--Government agencies in the U.S. and abroad, old newsreel vaults and a network of private collectors, mostly eccentrics whom one NBC searcher describes as "a basketful of live eels who frequently don't own the film legally." Archives are widely scattered, often poorly indexed, studded with tantalizing gaps left by oversight, fire and disintegration. Nitrate-base film, widely used until 1948, has a lifetime of only 25 years. "It is not unusual," says an expert, "to open a can of film and find nothing but dust." Almost as frustrating is the sheer volume; the vaults of the U.S. armed forces alone hold 166 million feet visible to the public--enough to provide 3^ years of solid viewing, day and night.

The sleuthing job breeds special techniques. The older film gets, the worse its stench. Says Daniel Jones, chief film scout for NBC's Project 20: "I go into an old film vault like a truffle hound. I go to the cans that smell worst first." Then he dumps water on them against the common risk that the old film may burst spontaneously into flames.

To sniff out Mussolini footage. Associate Producer Isaac (Ike) Kleinerman. who helped put together Victory at Sea at NBC, went to Rome last April. He found a trove of early footage in Italian archives, but government officials refused to let any of it out of the country. Instead, he dug valuable old clips out of French newsreel files. And, like the bluebird of happiness, the best footage he had seen in Rome turned up in copies back in Manhattan, where a search unearthed a Fascist documentary shot in the late '205 with a script by Benito Mussolini himself.

Tom Mix for the Prince. Thanks to such searchers as Twentieth Century's Mel Stuart and James McDonough, TV shows glimpses of history that might languish forever unseen. Some of the rare footage comes from wartime enemy-made films, e.g., Japan's own record of the attack on Pearl Harbor. From a onetime lady-in-waiting at the Czarist court, whom he found in New Jersey, Stuart once got 8,000 precious feet of royal family life, including the Czar swimming in the buff. Sometimes unusual film gets scrapped. Example: a shot of Charlie Chaplin doing a little jig for visiting Winston Churchill in Hollywood in 1929. Twentieth Century Producer Burton ("Bud") Benjamin reluctantly threw it out of his hour-long show on Churchill (TIME, Oct. 28) because "it had no place in our story."

The "archive film," as NBC Producer

Henry Salomon calls the TV genre that he pioneered with Victory at Sea, gets relatively little of its footage but much of its filip from private collectors such as Johnny Allen, 47, a Manhattan film technician who rides his hobby fervidly. Allen keeps in touch with 260 collectors around the world (184 in the U.S.), says: "A collector will never divulge the names of other collectors." Many are specialists, collecting only railroad shots, Ernst Lubitsch film or Tom Mix reels. Among themselves, they swap film, rarely sell it. "When we need something," says Searcher McDonough, "we send out word to a couple of key people in this underground." The networks pay $2.50 a foot for collectors' film, though to get a sequence of a debutante describing her dance with the Prince of Wales, Stuart had to put up nothing less than some old Tom Mix film.

The bulk of film comes from the newsreel archives, which started in the U.S. in 1910 and by now, except for Paramount's stubbornly locked vaults, have been raked by the networks. Ironically, it is TV itself that has put most of the newsreels out of business and thereby shut off one source for future historians in celluloid. The networks are now salting away their own voluminous news film against the day when a show like Twenty-First Century may want to picture the quaint old U.S. at the dawn of the space age.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.