page 357

Film Burning: A Tragic Blunder

This disturbing story was offered by one of the regular members of the About Classic Movies Forum. This is an edited version.

I started collecting films in the 1960s, although my interest in them dates back to my childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. My neighborhood was called the Bushwick/Ridgewood section. It was a fairly poor section of Brooklyn, dominated by American-Italians and American-Germans. In fact we had one theater called the Willoughby, which showed only Italian films, and the Wagner, which showed only German films. I think it was these two theaters that tweaked my interest in foreign films. In later years it's pretty much where I learned to try and understand most of the two languages, since my mother and father never taught me Italian.

Metropolis, by Fritz LangAfter I had been collecting 16mm film for a few years, my mother's older brother Jimmy and his wife came to visit my wife and I in Long Island, and of course to see my two daughters also, since he lived in New Jersey and we did not see each other too often. I had changed one room in my house to a projection room, with a custom-made screen. My Uncle Jim was very impressed.

He then told me about his days with General Patton in WW II. Although he never spoke of the battles, what he did tell that day would have an impact on my film collecting. It seems that after the invasion of Sicily, when the towns and villages were secure, my uncle was chosen to remain behind, because he spoke Italian with a Sicilian dialect. He was with other officers of Patton's army group who also spoke Italian. While they were appointing civilians to village posts as mayors, magistrates, etc., an order came from the higher-ups to gather any Italian or German motion pictures. If the films looked like newsreels, they were to be saved, to be used in possible war trials. All other motion picture films, both 35mm and 16mm, were to be destroyed, burned!

My uncle was part of this detail. They would go into theaters and film warehouses, strip the film from the metal reels, put the film in huge mounds and burn it all. It seems the Allies, namely the Americans, did not want any Fascist films to linger around where they could be shown again. It did not make any difference whether the title was a comedy, a drama, or a historical film. They were all burned. My uncle said many were also silent. He estimated that thousand upon thousands of feet of film were destroyed, and they burned quickly. That was just in Sicily. My uncle and many of his men adored General Patton. As a Sgt. my uncle requested that he re-join General Patton. Since the war was heading into the winter of 1944, his request was approved, and he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, getting frostbite on both legs in the process. When Patton entered Germany, my uncle was given light duty. Among his duties was what he did in Sicily: Gather up German film, save the newsreels, and burn everything else. The Russians and British were to do the same thing in their areas. The reels were stripped of all the film and thrown onto a big truck for scrap metal, and huge fires were set to destroy German films, the same as in Sicily. To me this was as bad as the Nazi book burning, because I felt that films were a form of history and art!

Today, many of the films from Italy and Germany that remain from the 1920s through 1945 were obtained from neutral countries and mostly from private collectors like you and me. While our film industry races against time to save our films from turning to dust, an entire culture of films was destroyed because of war... films by Blasseti, Gallone, Allesandrini, DeSica, Murnau, Lang, Von Sternberg, Pabst, Sirk, and Trenker... destroyed in one minute by a fire on purpose. Thank goodness that films like Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Emperor of California and the original 1943 version of Titanic survived in neutral countries and our own film libraries. Through private collectors in Italy, Scipione L'Africano (1937) was found in a private collection and restored to digital quality. This film boasts a cast of over 40,000 extras and has never been seen on American television. Hopefully some day it will. Other landmark films are now being found in private collections, such as Roberto Rossellini's first direction, La Nave Bianca (aka The White Ship) (1942), and his second, Una Pilota Ritorno (aka A Pilot Returns) (1942). If anything, these films were anti-war films, especially Mussolini's supposed masterpiece of pro-war propaganda, Scipione L'Africano, which showed the degradation of war. This film is now available in DVD and digital video from International Historic Films. A warning, though: It is cut by one-half hour and dubbed in English; you have to go to Europe to get the uncut version as I did.

That's the story that very few people have ever heard about our destruction of Italian and German films. I'm sure the same thing took place in Japan. However, I'm also sure that the Nazis and the Fascists did the same thing to when they marched into conquered territory. What a waste war is... lives lost and cultures destroyed. Let's hope it never happens again.

Respectfully submitted... (sasheegm) Joe from Florida