Word: museums
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Charlie Chaplin's old films can still be shown-and are-in commercial theaters practically everywhere in the world. Chaplin has promised his pictures to the Museum eventually, but so long as they are moneymakers, he is not interested in having them used for nonprofitable study. Meanwhile, he vigorously runs down and prosecutes "pirates." A few old Chaplin comedies made for Keystone, Essanay and Mutual studios are being shown to Museum visitors, but post-1918 Chaplin-produced pictures (including Shoulder Arms and The Kid) are taboo...
Mary Pickford films are also scarce. The New York Hat, a 1912 Griffith-directed job, is a Museum favorite. But Miss Pickford has promised to give a selection of her later films to the Library of Congress...
Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 melodrama featuring Lillian Gish, carpetbagging and Ku Kluxing in the Old South, has been voluntarily shelved by the Museum. Film Library officials, recalling that the picture started race riots in 1915 and again in 1921, admit the "greatness of the film" and "its artistic and historic importance." But because of "the potency of its anti-Negro bias . . . exhibiting it at this time of heightened social tensions cannot be justified." Students are advised that Birth of a Nation is still in the Museum's files and gets "limited circulation...
Little Caesar (1930) and Public Enemy (1931), greatly admired by Museum officials for the "idiomatic vigor of their dialogue and their accurate realization of a period," have been withdrawn by the owners (Warner) from Film Library archives. The Museum can't think of any reason why, except "some new, strange reticence on the part of Warner Bros...
...thrillers (Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile) was acquired at firsthand, as her first travel book now proves. It is a breezy, completely unsinister tale of a couple of winters she spent before the war in Syria, where her husband, Archaeologist Max Mallowan of the British Museum, went...