I haven't seen it since the early 60's, nor have my friends, and I've not noticed it turn up on TCM. It doesn't seem to be available on VHS, laserdisc, or DVD. This movie is a classic, in every sense of the word, I hope this movie hasn't been lost forever. If anyone has any information on the current existence of this film, please let me know @ [email protected].
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I first saw it on tv in the 60's.I taped it off tv here in the UK in about 1983;to my knowledge it's never been shown since anywhere over here.Don't TCM usually show MGM movies?"Beal" is Paramount.Seems to be a very rare movie-no idea why-I'm glad I managed to catch it!
shareAlthough they didn't used to, but TCM shows movies from pretty much every major studio now. I've seen lots of paramount movies on there in the last few years. One way to try to get TCM to show it is to go their website where they take requests and submit it. I don't know of any paramount movies from the 40's having been lost or deteriorated beyond repair, and surely a print of a movie from 1949 such as this one must still exist.
sharei have it on video but the quality isnt great, its watchable. Chris.
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I just checked my viewing record, it showed in the UK on Channel 4 on 22 Apr 1983; I rated it very highly 6/7, great film, hopefully will make a comeback.
shareI just saw this tonight at a Noir City event here in Seattle. According to the guy running the festival (Eddie?), all the previously made prints are in the hands of the private parties. However, he managed to convince the studio to look in their archives and find an original negative, which they printed off for him. So, this evening, we were the second group to view this print, which was glorious in its cinematographic clarity.
Check around if you live near a big city, and see if Noir City is coming around near you. Although the religion angle was a bit heavy handed ("What kind of man wouldn't touch a Bible?"), it was a well made film, and a joy to watch.
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There really needs to be an outcry to get this film on DVD. At the very least it should be run every year at election time!
share"The guy running the festival" is the famous film noir historian, Eddie Muller.
I just streamed "Alias Nick Beal" on an under-the-radar website which offers for free viewing countless rare movies, many of which I thought were lost. They even have the very rare Joan Crawford vehicle, Letty Lynton, which has been tied up in litigation for eighty-four years! I hadn't seen Beal in many decades, since my teens, and was completely blown away by it. What a pity that Universal, always a schlock studio, has a stranglehold on the library of what was possibly the greatest dream factory of them all, Paramount.
This film belongs to Universal, even though it was made by Paramount. All of the 1929-1949 Paramount talking films belong to Universal. This film - along with so many of the other older Universal and Paramount films - was the bread and butter of AMC pre-2002, but since AMC went to contemporary programming they have no venue. A print exists in good condition in the Universal vaults, they just don't care to do anything about it. Universal has a DVD-R burn on demand program just like the Warner Archives except they are unpredictable in what they release and the quality of those releases. You may get something splendid like "Ruggles of Red Gap" which was released in excellent quality, or you may get something that looks like it is a transfer of a beta-era VHS like when Universal released "This Day and Age", which is very obscure. Why did they release it? Probably just because Cecil B. DeMille directed it.
Too late to make a long story short, you need to bug Universal to release this via their DVD-R program or else it will not likely be seen again.
I'm watching it for the first time, you can download it for free on a torrent site.
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