Pandora’s Box, PBS Movie Theater, Dec 24, 1977, music by William Perry скачать в хорошем качестве

Pandora’s Box, PBS Movie Theater, Dec 24, 1977, music by William Perry

(If you have any copyright claims, please contact me directly at [email protected] and we’ll make things right. Thanks!)   As far as I know, the film per se is in the public domain everywhere. I post this on YouTube by kind permission of William P. Perry, who composed and performed the piano score and who still owns the music rights.   “PBS Movie Theater” was a weekly series, 102 episodes altogether, that ran intermittently from 1976 through 1979. It was the brainchild of Christopher Sarson. Rights were licensed from Janus Films, yet some of the prints were not from Janus at all, but were superior copies rounded up from various collections around the world. In the case of Pandora’s Box, PBS did indeed choose Janus’s full-aperture 35mm print, which must have been the only 35mm Janus print, and it was rather hammered by the time PBS put it to use. Sarson instructed the technicians to run the film at 20fps and hired William Perry to create a piano score. Most educational stations broadcast this on Christmas Eve 1977, and Christmas Eve is the best night of the year to watch this film.   This print is missing four shots between the two titles at 0:19:37. The original prints from 1928 were some 800 feet longer than any known surviving copy. It seems that most or all the deletions are from the gambling boat, and I suspect it was the director himself who trimmed that sequence shortly after the original release. This particular print contains a number of mistakes. Three of the opening credits are misspelled. The eight Act numbers are omitted. At least 19 titles are missing and one title is entirely wrong. Another title that originally specified “sugar daddy” has often been translated simply as “patron,” but in this print it inexplicably becomes “friend,” and that is how the whole point to the sequence was lost. I compensated for these errors as best I could by adding captions.   Unfortunately, no original copies of this movie survive. The earliest surviving three copies are duplicates, one from 1957, one from 1964, and one from 1970. All have massive image problems, and they are all derived from the German version of the movie. The English version had the “NOTICE To the Women of London” in English, as it should have been, as we can see from a unit photo: https://rjbuffalo.com/Pandora_NOTICE.png Alas, we shall probably never see that edition. All that survives is the German edition: “ACHTUNG! An die Frauen Londons!”   After the broadcast, I spent nearly eight years searching high and low to locate this PBS edition of the movie. Eventually someone (I do not remember who) referred me to the Great Amwell Corporation, and Drew Jewett confirmed that the three-reel quad was still on file and that he could run off a VHS for $200. It was a deal. By that time, though, the quad had begun to degrade. You will catch glitches throughout. Ten and a half minutes into the film, there is a 19-second segment that breaks apart, as the control track had vanished. At 0:14:03 the audio goes out for four seconds. The bungled change-over from the second to the third tape reel at 1:57:54 was bungled exactly the same way when PBS transmitted it in 1977.   The quad did not include the glorious “PBS Movie Theater” opening, designed by Philip Gips, which showed visually stunning moments from various movies in the series, accompanied by the opening forty seconds or so of Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Apparently that was cued in from a separate reel, or, more likely, cartridge.   The precious VHS tape then suffered countless adventures that are too complicated to go into here, and it disappeared, but all was not lost. When Great Amwell made a copy for me, it also made a copy for Killiam Shows! A Killiam employee, upon learning of my loss, immediately ran off a second copy for me, for free, and this replacement had better image and audio than my previous tape! Now that this replacement tape is back in my hands after many years of being in distant storage, I decided that it was high time to let the world discover it. I have made no attempt to clean it up or to mask out the color distortions. What you see is exactly the condition of the quad as of September 1985. Sometime between then and 2024, the quad master vanished. I suppose it disintegrated. The copy you behold here may well be the only one left. Some of the DVD and Blu-ray editions have much finer image quality, but no release has anything approaching the musical quality that you will hear on this old video. William Perry’s score is unrivaled, light years ahead of any other accompaniment I have heard for this film, and it should become the definitive score to accompany all future releases. Perhaps someday it can be orchestrated?