Comments on: Will We Ever Find “Hats Off”?

by: PeterM

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:27:40 +0000

I love your article about Hats Off and the other apparently lost L&H films.’I have two stills from Hats Off which are not easily seen anywhere, and would like to share them on this wonderful site (see below).

You mention five missing films. Make that six: Even Lucky Dog was once considered a lost film. As I understand it, Robert Youngson found it when he needed it for one of his compilation movies.

It was me, by the way, who helped to bring the French 16mm print of Why Girls Love Sailors to light, what an experience that was!! You just ask a french collector about the missing L&H films, and immediately you are offered a vhs copy of Why Girls Love Sailors! I have since then located and identified the trailer for the German version of Pardon Us.

by: Miss Levity

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 14:39:27 +0000

There should be a post all over America- search your attics for our lost film Hats Off!
I recently watched Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns, during the Buster Keaton episode, Paul mentioned that there was a time when these silent films were burned for the expensive Silver ammonium (or something like that)
Lets hope this has not happened to our lost Hats Off and The Rogue Song.

by: Find Hats Off

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:05:24 +0000

Hey, this is a great article, and I appreciate you writing it and putting it here. This is a great website- I just registered, and I’ll be sure to come back here often.

I think that an important thing to remember in looking for Hats Off is that if it exists, it most likely is in a mislabelled can, or it’s a print given another title altogether. If you call up a film archive and ask, “excuse me, do you have a copy of Hats Off?”, they’re going to type that name in their computer list and say, “no such title in our collection”. If Hats Off existed under the title of Hats Off, someone would have noticed this by now (unless if it’s buried in some vast archive behind what was known as the “iron curtain”) . What anyone with access to old films has to do is to look at practically EVERYTHING, because it could be mistakenly stored in film cans labelled for something else, like newreels or whatever. It might even be mistakenly labelled “The Music Box”, because of its scenes on that staircase. Hopefully, the film is out there somewhere.

It’s encouraging that so many films that were lost have been found, like Duck Soup and Why Girls Love Sailors. It’s good that they’ve found long-lost foreign language versions of L+H films, since those films have slight differences and added bits of business. I read somewhere that Tree In a Test Tube wasn’t even known to have existed in the first place- that it was sporadically shown without fanfare, and then forgotten, so that no one knew about it at all. Then someone was cataloging some huge collection of WWII government films, in 1973, and came across this previously unknown title without even expecting to find any such thing. Hopefully, someone with access to old films will come across Hats Off.

by: cseguin

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 16:40:47 +0000

I’m constantly amazed at the “new” Laurel & Hardy material that pops up. My favourite of recent years was the radio show “Mr Slater’s Poultry Market”. To me it was like discovering a completely lost, unknown 2-reeler…with the benefit of experiencing Mr Laurel & Mr Hardy in a medium they seldom visited, and hearing them in front of a live audience.

BUT, what really caught my eye in this article was…where did the frame grab from ROGUE SONG come from?

Chris

by: birdofafeather

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 17:09:43 +0000

One L&H bio reports that a movie buff actually saw a print of Hats Off in the 1950’s, but when he went back the next day to purchase the print, it had become inexplicably lost. Maybe that one’s an “urban legend” as well.

by: Mr. Farrell

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:44:48 +0000

A reincarnation of Noah Young?? Yikes, I bet he was attractive!

by: Slapsticon Rob

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:32:35 +0000

Wow. My first glimpse of this site (and a great one ’tis) and already posting my second comment. Mr. Guiol’s reference to unprocessed film seems suspicious. You only process the negative. Then the custom was to make an inter-negative from which all positive release prints were struck. It is true that Roach made two orginal negatives (U.S. and foreign), but is Guiol claiming neither one had ever been sent to the lab to be developed? If so, the film would never have been released. And there are only two video companies that Guiol could possibly be negotiating with: Turner and Richard Feiner, the only claimants to the rights to the silent MGM L&H’s. And Turner was sued by Feiner, forcing Turner to stop showing and sellling L&H’s Laughing Twenties on VHS and laserdisc. Finally, his terminology is off. Most people use the word “prints” instead of “movie copies”. And “spools”? Film is stored on “reels” or “cores”. As to Guiol’s identity, no doubt he is who he says he is, but I once received an e-mail from someone claiming to be the reincarnation of Noah Young. Well, anything is possible. I guess.

by: Slapsticon Rob

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 03:00:06 +0000

There was a Hats Off “sighting” in the mid-1950s. An early TV film distributor named Lake (I have a Xerox of his catalog) listed Hats Off as available for TV bookings. He had a few hundred Roach and Sennett titles in his catalog, mostly Pathes but a few MGMs. Now many of the other silents on his list are now considered to be lost films, which raises the possibility that Lake had lots of Pathes, but rather than actually catalog them, he copied titles from old release charts under the assumption that he probably had the prints. There were a few lost Charley Chases on his list too. The surest way to guarantee a film’s survival is for it to have been syndicated to television. And the fact that there aren’t a gazillion 16mm prints of Hats Off floating around suggests that Lake never did own this title. We have almost the entire run of late silent Felix the Cat cartoons thanks to early TV.