DVDs meant as Bern Act rebuke/not for Chaney fans.
Shame on you Warner Brothers for releasing these DVDs simply to keep Lon Chaney fans from trading copies over the internet. A little background:
The now infamous fan DVD compilation, The "Lost" Films of Lon Chaney, was sold online by a person who spent untold years gathering the best possible reels of Chaney's films and making this compilation of Lon's movies, which were not previously available for sale. Citing the Bern Act (which allows for the trade of personal copies in lieu of official product for sale by the copyright owner), this person sold The "Lost" Films of Lon Chaney, an 11 DVD set featuring all of LC's unreleased films, for $50. If you only figure cost of materials, shipping, and labor (in making the actual copies), this person probably made only a few bucks. But if you figure the cost he incurred acquiring the prints and time spent editing various prints of the same film to attain the best possible transfer, he LOST money on this endeavor.
Warner Brothers,...
hold your horses, don't expect restorations here
Let me state that I owned the laserdiscs of both Unholy 3's, He Who Gets Slapped, The Unknown, West of Zanzibar (in fact, I sold them to Crispin Glover after I burned DVDs for my collection). For those movies, what you are getting are the exact same masters that MGM used back in the 1990s. For Tell It to the Marines, Mockery and The Monster, which I burned off of TCM back in the 1990s, again these DVDs are from those masters. Realizing that the market for these Chaney films is a limited one, I cannot fault WB for using the existing video masters (in the case of The Unknown, they used the only known surviving print of the movie). My guess is that the nitrate negs were trashed long ago with no safety copies made (after all, these ARE silent films, and no studio head was going to allow the use of good funds to copy these on safety film when there was no obvious market for silent films after sound pictures took over).
So as a realist, I accept that these movies are 90 years...
A Great Collection of Lon Chaney!
I purchased all of these discs separately from the Warner Archive section at the WBshop Website. The discs were made to order in DVD-R format. I've had the discs for at least three years now. These are the same discs but in a set, which makes it that much better...and cheaper!
Well, I don't expect any more or any less from DVD-Rs as long as the quality is the same that I saw on Turner Classic Movies. It is exactly the same quality. All six of these movies are classics that I will cherish for a lifetime. I've watched each one several times. "Mockery" and "He Who Gets Slapped" are my two favorites of the set. If they ever release these in Blu-ray format, I will be buying them again.
I've read the other reviews. All I'm going to say is if you are OK with the quality on TCM, you'll love this set. I highly advise any Lon Chaney Sr. enthusiasts to take advantage of this low price for these six beautifully restored movies. No, they are not perfect, but what do...
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