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beginning a search for nitrate film by writing to every fire brigade in Australia, tracked Mr
Smith down - just six months too late. Only a fragment – several minutes of the 1924
film The Digger Earl – had been overlooked in the purge. It was only in later years that
complete copies of one of Smith’s silents, and both of his talkies, were tracked down
from other sources.

Four Finds

(1) National Films, Fatty Finn and Charlie Chaplin
National Films of New South Wales was a small, independent distribution company
owned by showman Gerry Tayler. For many years, until around 1960, it occupied top-
storey offices in Pitt Street, the heart of Sydney’s central business district. Their film
vaults, containing thousands of reels of nitrate film, adjoined the offices: though they
were never known to have a mishap, one can speculate that a nitrate fire would have
turned the building into an interesting variation on the roman candle!
As an independent in an industry dominated by a small number of major, overseas-
owned companies, National worked in the margins, supplying city independents,
country exhibitors, and specialist users. Their inventory included American product like
the “Joe Palooka” series, various Australian features and short subjects, and even some
silent material handed down by the majors after the advent of talkies. National regularly
serviced Sydney’s five newsreel theatrettes with elderly silent comic shorts – by the
1950s, the only place where one was likely to see such material on 35mm. As a
schoolboy, I was a regular frequenter of the newsreel theatrettes and among other
things, over the years, they were where I first saw several of Chaplin’s Mutual shorts –
all of them, I later learned, part of the series reissued (with music) by the Van Bueren
studio in the 1930s, and emanating from National Films.

Another 1950s
frequenter of the
newsreel theatrettes
(whom I was to meet
much later in life) was
John Morris, a student
at Sydney University
and keen member of its
Film Group. On one
occasion, he was
intrigued by a silent
offering which featured
the antics of some
Sydney children. He
tracked the print to its
source – National Films
– and established that it The Kid Stakes (1927)
was a segment of a 1927
comedy feature called The
Kid Stakes, based on a popular comic strip called Fatty Finn. Morris established that
National had long ago inherited three prints of the film, which they had subsequently cut
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