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I recently purchased this interesting bundle off Ebay. It is a pile of Standard 8 Charlie Chaplain films. Individually they are not that interesting of course, but as a bundle it was quite curious. Each one is produced by Walton, is 400ft and presumably issued in the mid 60’s judging by the multi use packaging, although one does have a slightly newer packaging in the form of an illustration of Chaplin instead. According to my Walton catalogue from late 1979 (no28 super 8 only), they issued 16 400ft Chaplin films, each one represented in this bundle. Its funny that all these 16 prints have remained together for so long and represent the entire Walton output in this form.
Upon receiving the films there was another surprise. The films themselves appeared to be in remarkable condition. One had a Walton ‘seal’ on the film whereas the others had a 45° slice on the head, indicating that none of the prints have seen a projector!
Two prints did have a sound stripe though sadly were mute. Looking through the catalouge over 40 years ago I wondered what the sound editions would sound like and specifically if they were recorded for playback at 18fps. I still don’t know the answer to that one.
Its by chance I purchased these. I’d only been thinking a few weeks previously about buying some decent looking prints of silent comedies, having only ‘Collectors Club’ releases which tend to be beached out and poor quality more often than reasonable.
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