An historian finds it difficult to re-see films after
their initial
releases and his memory is not always reliable. I can offer various
examples of the fallibility of memory.
The film which made the strongest impression on me at
the end of the "silent" period was Sternberg's
Underworld
(1927). I therefore felt it important to discuss it in detail with my
students at the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques,
Paris) where I taught film history with Jean Mitry after 1944. I
described to them in considerable detail an apartment, a stairway,
stuffed birds — the lair occupied by the gangster (Bancroft).
I described this repeatedly for five or six years until Henri Langlois
discovered a print of
Underworld for the Cinémathèque
Française. As soon as possible I had it projected at IDHEC. But
the apartment in the film bore no relation to that in my memory
— which I had, I suppose, recalled from
The Drag Net, an
exactly contemporary film of Sternberg's in which Bancroft also
appeared.
-- Georges Sadoul. Dictionary of Films.
Preface (p. v)