The Hays Office and Captain Spaulding

Hello Franklinlj, you are correct! But there's more to the story. This movie was unseen in the US for decades because of some legal tussle with the rights, but at last it was re-released in September 1974. I saw it multiple times at the Lobo Theatre in Albuquerque. The Lobo incorrectly projected it at a 1.85:1 crop, which was most annoying, but the print was complete. I swear it was. Nobody believes me, but it was complete. "He is the only white man / who's covered every acre..." "I think I'll try and make her!" "Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!" A few years later I was a part-time projectionist working half a mile down the street at Don Pancho's Art Theatre, and I got what must have been that same print. It was complete. Unfortunately, we did not have the proper apertures and lenses, and so we ran it at a 1.66:1 crop as I was madly framing the image up and down all the time to follow the action. Maybe a year or so later it was shown on network TV (opening credits squashed and the rest of the movie cropped from 1.18:1 to the TV standard of 1.33:1) and "I think I'll try and make her!" was deleted. Odd, but hey, you know, network TV, who knows what's on TV censors' minds? I lived with it. But then in 1985 or thereabouts the Playboy Channel ran the movie, and I eagerly plopped in a blank VHS to record this wonderful masterwork. Maddeningly, it seemed to be the exact same transfer that had been shown on network TV, and "I think I'll try and make her!" was still deleted. Oh well. But surely on video it would be complete, yes? When it was released on VHS I saw to my horror that the line was missing even from that edition. When Glenn Mitchell published his Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, I purchased a copy and it was only then that I learned that the line had been deleted by the censors in 1936 and had been considered lost ever since that time. Rubbish! But ever since, in the DVD releases and everywhere else, that line is still missing. Now, to make the story even stranger, a movie expert assured me recently that the September 1974 re-release prints had the image optically reduced to a tiny little square in the middle of the 1.85:1 frame. He is certain of that. He may be right. But that was definitely not true of the print I ran. I can only assume that for the wide re-release several internegs were used to create several hundred new prints, and that no two internegs exactly matched. It would not surprise me at all if some prints were indeed optically reduced so that modern widescreen houses would not lop off nearly half the height of the image. If that's true, that further suggests that multiple editions were simultaneously released in the autumn of 1974, and that the folks at Universal were entirely unaware of this. Here's a project for any of you sleuths, especially if you have access to Universal's print catalogues. Get the print number of the 35mm print that played at the Lobo in Albuquerque in September 1974 and at Don Pancho's in Albuquerque in the summer of 1978. Find out which internegative it came from. Try to find that internegative! If that internegative has vanished, try to learn the whereabouts of any other prints that were made from that interneg! Unfortunately, Universal Studios suffered a massive vault fire on the 1st of June 2008, and I fear that the prints and interneg may have gone up in smoke at the time. Nonetheless, there may well still be rogue prints floating about, perhaps at film exchanges or in 16mm libraries. Please, if you have access to Universal's records, begin a search right now! Please! Thanks! You can contact me at rjbuffalo at rjbuffalo dot com.

Interesting.