"Breakfasting" In The Black Cat

Here's a still I haven't seen before from The Black Cat, although the scene is referenced by Karloff when asked of Manners' whereabouts at one point in the film. Considering that the feature was released at only 64 minutes, you wonder how many such moments were shot, then discarded, from the final print. The Black Cat was among first features I owned as a 16mm collector, having purchased it in 1973 from a then-friend in Pennsylvania for the princely sum of $125. This was a "dupe," of course, but in those days, it was a truly extraordinary thing to actually possess a print of a favorite movie, and to be able to show it whenever and wherever you pleased. I carried those two plastic 1200' reels into a lot of odd places, for instance setting up the Bell&Howell projector on the information desk at Lenoir-Rhyne College and running The Black Cat when I was supposed to man the switchboard, or playing it outdoors one memorable Summer night on the banks of Lake Norman, along with Chapter 1 of Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe. In 1974, I ran it on campus as part of a double-bill with my bootlegged 16mm print of Red Dust, using stills I'd ordered from the old "Memory Shop" in NYC for publicity. All told, I must have screened The Black Cat at least twenty times during that first year or two of excited ownership. I've now been in possession of Universal's DVD since October and have run it not once. There's a difference between having four 16mm features in 1973, then by 2005, hundreds on mass-market, impersonal disc. I wouldn't want to go back to the way it was, but I also realize that, as a "collector" of DVD as opposed to 16mm, the thrill is gone. Acquiring The Black Cat as neat and shrink-wrapped Wal-Mart product is not the same as hoarding a rare, unattainable, black market 16mm print. Now that's a distinction.