The story of this rip is a long one: I got a hint from a Lorre authority about the Berthold Brecht Archive in Berlin holding a copy of this rare footage. Countless telephone calls to a large number of people and a year of begging and being polite later the permission for one copy was given, with no further reproduction rights whatsoever. Anyway, here we go...
The original play by Berthold Brecht, "Mann ist Mann", premiered in Darmstast in 1927. On February 6, 1931, this revised version of the play opened for just 6 performances - Lorre took a one week leave of absence from the set of "M" - at the Staatstheater in Berlin. A 35mm film role of about 50 meter in length - showing parts of the play from different perspectives - is what´s left of Carl Koch´s filmed material, although the original was shot in 16mm. It was transferred to Betacam SP and from there to DVD, from which I made this copy. No rezising was necessary, but due to interlacing artifacts (Beta SP!) I had to deinterlace the source. I blurred a logo in the upper left corner, cropped a little off the sides and encoded it whith a reasonable bitrate.
Note: Screens are taken with VLC, which means you see the original height of 576, but the width is blown up to 733 pixel!
Did I mention that there is no sound at all? Or that you just get one new frame for about every second, so this looks more like a blurry slideshow than an actual movie? And that the overall quality is - and here we go again: Beta SP! - rather poor, in other words: Pretty shitty?
Anyway: This is the only copy available worldwide, a true gem for you and me Lorre lovers out there.