Back in the sixties, "home video" for most of us consisted of silent 8mm (and occasionally 16mm) movies. They were all old films, many of them in the public domain, and they were usually dupes from not-the-greatest source material, often edited via meat cleaver. Still, the idea of owning a movie and showing it on your home projector was very tempting. I had a bunch of Castle Films as I explained way back in this post.
I also had a lot of Blackhawk Films, many of them starring my faves, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Blackhawk — based in Davenport, Iowa — was the class act for those of us who cared about film history and preservation. They put out a lot of very old films that no one else would have issued and they usually secured very good source material and treated the movies well. I no longer have an 8mm movie projector but I have a box of Blackhawk Films in a closet here. Some things mean so much to you that you can't bear to throw them away.
One thing they put out was an excerpt of the 1927 Laurel & Hardy film — one of their earliest — The Battle of the Century. This is the one which was held up as containing the biggest pie fight ever in movie history until the 1965 film, The Great Race. The latter cost a helluva lot more money and time to shoot and involved a helluva lot more pies…but didn't yield anywhere near the same laughs.
For a long time — while Blackhawk Films was around and for years after — Battle of the Century was a "lost" film. There were no known prints anywhere of the complete two-reel short. The only known footage was the end pie fight scene and I believe the reason that much was available went something like this…
Robert Youngson was a man who produced films featuring highlights from other films. For instance, his 1957 feature, The Golden Age of Comedy, gave us moments from some of the great silent films of Will Rogers, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin and others, including Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. Among the clips of Stan and Ollie he included was the famed pie fight scene…and in duping that scene from the negative in some studio vault, he was unaware he was saving that footage. A few years later, that negative had rotted away…but the scene was still there in Mr. Youngson's film.
That's presumably where Blackhawk Films got it. Here is their release of the what they had — the last few minutes, silent and with no music. (By the way: Ignore the opening cards which say that Hal Roach wrote, produced and co-directed the film. The official credits said it was "Directed by Clyde Bruckman" and "Supervised by Leo McCarey." "Supervised by" meant a number of different things back in the days when movie credits were not such formal titles. It sometimes meant "Directed by" but more often meant "Produced by.")
Decades later, some of the rest of the movie was found and later, all or most of it was located. There are a couple of different restored, "complete" versions around with newly-added music and here's one of them. If you look real carefully in the prizefight scene, you might spot a very young Lou Costello working as an extra…
