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Topic: Niles Films.
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Panayotis A. Carayannis
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 969
From: Athens,Greece
Registered: Jul 2008
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posted June 29, 2019 11:34 AM
Generally,their sound films are from good to very good. Their silents were copies of Blackhawk editions,from very average to very bad,like those of Collectors Club. The b&w features were public domain.When they later upgraded themselves with exclusive releases of the Sherlock Holmes series,the Benedict Bogeaus color adventures from the fifties and several other later titles,the quality of those,came from "original" elements and was very good to exellent.Unfortunately,most of the color ones have turned reddish by now! Of course,in every case there are exceptions.
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted July 03, 2019 11:14 AM
I watched Cattle Queen of Montana last night, based at least in part on this thread.
-it runs the gamut: sharpness, color, sound, steadiness neither all good or all bad everywhere in the print. Sometimes everything lines up at the same time and it's pretty good for a minute or two!
It's not very well written either, but I guess that can't be Niles' fault!
-still the same: when I got this thing and could project an entire feature for the first time, I thought it was pretty good. Even though if I ever nominate it for Friday Night Feature, I hope Doug does an intervention (and let's my wife know too! -obviously something's not right!), it will always be kind of a favorite.
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Gary Crawford
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 979
From: Manassas, VA. USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted July 05, 2019 06:29 AM
Yes...Niles was an enthusiastic film company that churned out hundreds of films.....and sold so called "used" films in 16mm..which I suspect were new dupes. The very first 16mm feature I ever bought was from that used list... Night at the Opera. It's own releases ranged from the totally unwatchable(White Zombie) to the superb...such as The Invisible Ghost and Meeting at Midnight and Rocketshop. And inbetween. They sent out a catalog every so often in the same small newspaper format as The Big Reel and , at the time, Blackhawk. While they did dupe other companies' releases quite a bit, they did advance the cause of film collecting, offering prints for a smaller price than other companies. And a wide range of films. The quality of those prints fully depended on the quality of their originals. Good originals.....good prints. As I recall, they also were pretty fast on shipping out films.
Someone mentioned on here Thunderbird.(Donahoo) That one man company took collecting a big step forward by being the first to go through Library of Congress copyright records and find titles that, for some reason or other, had not had their copyrights renewed. And so we got our first Super 8 sound chapters of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe and features like the 39 steps, My Man Godfrey, etc. His quality was pretty consistently good. At one of the Cinecons in Hollywood, he was there ANd...when you got your registration envelope, you found a short edited nice version of the silent cartoon with score, Felix All Puzzled....either in Super 8 or 16, depending on what you collected. I still have and show that little gem. Mr. Donahoo had his personal problems, but he was a VERY enthusiastic supporter of film collecting and collectors and helped prove that we super 8 people would buy feature films in the format and would buy serial chapters as well. I think he was perhaps one factor that led Columbia and others to put out 8mm digests of their films, knowing that there was a market for them.
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