My Fair Lady on super 8

[Steve Lee]

Last week while scrolling through Italian E bay I thought I saw something but at the time it didn't register being advertised with a different title, it was bugging me. So about two hours later I went back to see if I could find it again, in case my eyes were playing tricks, but they weren't.

For what was being asked as a buy it now, I would have had to be stupid not to have hit that button. Well it arrived yesterday,
And I have only run through two of the reels (the first and last) today to see if it is complete, and it is.
The film is the full length feature of My Fair Lady on 8 x 600' reels, Scope and Italian sound. The colour has faded, but is still very watchable. I had no idea that this had ever been released on super 8, nor do I remember it being released as a digest, if someone can verify on this I would be grateful to know.

I guess the next job will be to dub it back into English. I think it will be an easy one to do, being a musical there are many reference points if it starts to go adrift.

[Brian Fretwell]

I only know of the trailer being released in the UK by Derann.

[Graham Sinden]

CHC released an edited 'making of' documentary on a 200ft reel.

Graham S

[Steve Klare]

Interesting: I have a 200 Foot Pathe Pic called "Auto Cine" about a brand new (in about 1965) drive-in theater in Rome.
The feature on screen that night was "My Fair Lady"...in English!

-Great movie: If it's not my favorite Musical, then it's certainly locked in my top three!

[Osi Osgood]

There were literally countless super 8 features that came out of Italy. From one fellow collector friend in Italy, back in the day, when a film would end, (and sometimes even before it would end), before shipping it back to the distributors, someone would take the print to a local print lab and make a quick negative. The problem with this, beyond being illegal, of course, was that the prints could be in very marginal to horrible shape, making for some really awful super 8 prints. Yes, it was on super 8, and really rare, but the quality being so bad, you often wondered why they would do it in the first place.

[Adrian Winchester]

Congratulations on a nice rarity, and although I'm not an expert on Italian releases, I think very few were in scope. It's just as well that the seller knew it was in scope, as that doesn't appear to have been flagged up on the box! Interesting that it's on eight spools as it could potentially have fitted on six.

[Steve Lee]

Well I have managed to work my way through all 8 reels and can't find anything majorly wrong with it. The focus is sharp and is totally complete from start to finish.

The reason it is on 8 reels is because it has the original intermission, complete with the musical play out and play in between parts, also has the play out music after the end credits, all of this takes up about 400' in total.

I do own a couple of other Italian prints, Dumbo which is on Agfa stock and is very good, but my copy of The Rescuers has more lines on it than Clapham Junction. These are actually not on the super 8 stock, but are printed on it from the 35mm master !! As Osi say's what was the point to this ?

The one part that I can't seem to be able to get my head around is that it beggars belief how they got away with this !
These are not brown paper bag under the counter jobs, as the presentation and packaging put a lot of the official distributors to shame, with their strong cardboard slipcases boxes, nicely printed, embossed spines, it's just crazy.

To me the whole experience has been a bit surreal. To thread up a machine with a film that has not been known to really exist on this gauge, and to hear that magnificent Andre Previn arrangement of the overture belt it's way out of the projectors speaker, it sends tingles down your spine.

For what I paid for the print it would be impossible to purchase 8 empty reels for this money. And at the end of the day I have got to learn the Italian for " I'm a good girl I am ".

[Osi Osgood]

A lot of Italian super 8 features, even if there wasn't enough film to fit a 400ft spool, the whole features would still be marketed on 600ft reels. It has the intermission? Perhaps someone got ahold of the roadshow version?