Cinematical has been passed along these images which are making the rounds and demonstrate how Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather looks following a print restoration before its run at the New York Film Forum beginning tomorrow (the second one has been included after the jump).

Christopher Campbell made the initial mention of the plans for showing that film and Part II over the next few weeks, leading up to their Blu-Ray release on September 23rd (fans of Part III will just have to tough it out). Mind you, these comparsion shots are indicative of only the print, and not necessarily what those discs will look like.

Week after week, I focus on the good and/or bad concerning moviegoing and the movie theatre industry. But as passionate as I am about the subjects of this column, I've never really felt strongly enough to label any one person either a hero or a villain to moviegoers. Perhaps the closest I've come to calling someone a hero was when I finally had my first experience with an Alamo Drafthouse cinema. On the other hand, I've certainly wanted to call a lot of people villains, including whoever was responsible for my worst moviegoing experience in years and whoever came up with the awful idea to produce scented pre-show ads.

So, it was by some sort of coincidence that last week actually brought news of both a remarkably heroic moviegoer and a terribly villainous theatre owner. Of course, you're welcome to disagree with me as I celebrate the former and castigate the latter. The interesting thing about these two individuals is that some of you may see my hero as a villain, and vice versa. In fact the law has deemed the former a criminal, and meanwhile tons of moviegoers in the UK are championing the actions of the latter. No wonder film exhibition is in such dire straits when there's such disagreement about how to improve the moviegoing experience.

As a fresh 35mm print of Charlie Chaplin's quintessential 1947 thriller Monsieur Verdoux begins circulating through revival houses around the country, it seems like a good time to remind people that while the late actor is mainly known as a star of the silent screen, he definitely didn't die with it. Although the greatest slapstick artist of all time initially rejected the development of sound film, mocking it with hilariously exaggerated voices in City Lights, he eventually adopted it after realizing that resistance was futile. However, he refused to simply throw in a few lines of dialogue to accompany his beloved tramp shtick, choosing instead to take his career in a fresh direction. While Chaplin made many sound films over the course of several decades, only two of them really qualify as classic talkies (except for Limelight, which deserves a category of its own). Late flops like A King of New York don't really hold together, but Chaplin's initial forays into the world of sound film display his talent as a composer of distinctive prose.

His first work of this era, The Great Dictator, remains a masterpiece that broadened the potential of his tramp character with a modified Prince and the Pauper tale applied to World War II, and Chaplin doing double duty playing both a Jewish barber and an exaggerated Adolf Hitler (or "Hinkel," rather). Monsieur Verdoux, in which he plays a frustrated man whose losses during the Great Depression lead to a twisted scheme where he marries, murders and robs rich women, represented something else altogether: Chaplin's only brooding melodrama, the occasional laughs are almost incidental.

Imagine if The Dark Knight or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull initially opened in limited release, and then took a month or so to reach you in "flyover country." But on the same day that they hit those first theaters in New York and L.A., they were also available on your television, via Video on Demand. Would you wait a few weeks to see the blockbusters on the big screen or would you lack the patience and go ahead and download the movies to your cable box? Of course you would choose the VOD route. I probably would, as well.

Despite this column, I cannot claim to be a purist when it comes to theatrical film exhibition. I subscribe to Netflix and even sometimes watch old movies on the Watch Now streaming player. I now own a video iPod, and while I haven't yet tried watching a feature, I have had no problem watching shorts and television episodes on its small screen and am not totally against eventually downloading a whole movie from iTunes. And although New York's Film Forum is currently showing a ton of United Artists classics, many of which I've never seen at all and a number of which I've never seen on the big screen, I haven't been able to make my way to Manhattan to appreciate the retrospective.

The debate over Erich von Stroheim's reputation as a filmmaker exists in a state of suspended animation: it's more or less settled, but could conceivably fly open one day if the 9-hour version of his masterpiece, Greed, is ever discovered. The film was a page-for-page rendering of Frank Norris' classic American novel McTeague, about a man of limited intellect who fails at his ambition to be a dentist and winds up chained to a dead man in Death Valley. With a shooting script only ten pages shorter than the novel, it took a grueling year to shoot and ended up provoking an actual fistfight between von Stroheim and Louis B. Mayer. Upon completion, it was screened for a select few at its full length, then Mayer ordered that it be hacked down to two hours and allegedly ordered the remaining seven hours of footage to be destroyed. Unless that information is wrong, and several dusty film cans pop up in a basement somewhere in the year 2036, we're stuck with what we have.

Some movie lovers carry around actual lists of films they haven't yet seen, to remind themselves of what's to come. I don't carry any such list, but if I did, one film on it would be 1927's Children of Divorce. This standard love-triangle weepie was first shot by studio man Frank Lloyd, then shelved by Paramount Pictures for being as bland as its title. Then, a stroke of luck: the studio ordered the film to be half re-shot by its assistant director, none other than 33-year old Josef von Sternberg, who was soon to enter his most creative years. Sternberg is said to have relished the opportunity to experiment, deluging the film with his trademark light-and-shadow-play, tossing out static long-shots in favor of intrusive close-ups, and otherwise taking full advantage of the haunting, teardrop face of 22-year old Clara Bow, who played the film's heroine, Kitty. Sternberg is also said to have supervised a thrilling finale, in which Kitty learns that the plot's romantic knots can only untie with her death.

Beginning this weekend, Cinematical contributor Martha Fischer and myself will begin to bring you highlights from the long-anticipated Pre-Code festival at Manhattan's Film Forum. The festival, which runs from December 1 through December 21, will showcase a large sampling of films released prior to 1934, the year when Hollywood adopted the infamous Hays Code. The code was a strict set of industry guidelines on what could and could not be shown in an industry film, and was rigorously followed for the next 30-odd years. The code forbade such things as nudity, revenge killings, depiction of drug use, interracial coupling, crime methodology (you can't demonstrate to the audience how to crack a safe), child-birth scenes, and depiction of priests as criminals, among many other things.

While we don't yet have an exact list of what films we will be reviewing for you, a quick consultation with Martha earlier today has given me a good idea of which films are more likely than not to be written up. You can almost certainly count on us to cover 1932's Call Her Savage, staring Clara Bow as an incurable wild woman who brains her husband with a stool one day and heads down to the local gay bar. Hoopla, another Clara Bow sizzler in which she educates a dizzy farm boy about the ways of the world, is also on our list. 1933's Blood Money, a heist film condemned by the Legion of Decency for inciting "law abiding citizens to crime" will not be missed. Nor, in all likelihood, will the Joan Blondell vehicle Broadway Bad or the Spencer Tracy film Bottoms Up, about a scam involving the movie business.

Other films being screened that we hope to cover, time permitting, include The Bowery, Now I'll Tell, The Yellow Ticket, The Tria of Vivianne Ware and Sailor's Luck. Stay tuned to Cinematical for all the coverage, and if you're in the Manhattan area, check out more information about the festival on Film Forum's Web site.

Starting on December 1, Manhattan's Film Forum will begin one of its most anticipated retro-festivals to date: a three-week sleaze-a-thon of Hollywood films released just prior to the introduction of the Hays Code. The code, a detailed compendium of industry guidelines on what should and should not be seen in a Hollywood film, was laid down in 1934 and ruled the roost in tinsel town for the next thirty years. Among other things, the code expressly forbade nudity, interracial coupling, desecration of the U.S. flag, revenge killings, use of illegal drugs, crime methodology (you can't show the audience how to crack a safe), scenes of child-birth, depiction of priests as criminals, illicit bedroom decor, casual liquor use and "white slavery"!

Cinematical will hopefully be on hand to cover some of the classics being screened, including 1932's Call Her Savage, starring Clara Bow as a whip-wielding wild woman named Nasa Dynamite who brains her husband with a stool one day and then heads off to the local gay bar. (Her incurable wildness is later explained by the revelation that she is half-Indian) There's also Born to be Bad, with Loretta Young as a woman who thinks she's won the lotto when her young son is run over by a millionaire. Raoul Walsh's Yellow Ticket, with Elissa Landi trying to escape Czarist Russia by posing as a prostitute, will also be screened. Joan Blondell vehicle Broadway Bad, which ran once in 1933 before being slapped with an outright veto by the Hays office, is also on the bill.

The festival opens on Friday, December 1, with a new print of the Spencer Tracy screwball comedy Me and My Gal and runs through December 21. For more information, contact Film Forum.

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In case you're wondering why it's taken so long for American theaters to switch over to digital projection, the technology is expensive. One digital projector used to cost millions (now a bit less), and cinema chains just haven't had the dough to replace all, or most, of their equipment with the new stuff. Considering they couldn't get the studios to foot the bill, they seemed to be okay with the slow changeover. It isn't like theaters pay to develop film prints and ship them around the world, so it wasn't a loss to them. Still, they have had pressure to switch, particularly now with all the buzz about 3D versions of the Star Wars films. Finally, cinemas are eying the prospects more clearly.

The major U.S. chains, owned by Regal Entertainment Group, AMC Entertainment, Inc. and Cinemark USA, Inc. are about to borrow $1 billion in order to furnish 13,000 screens (one-third of the country) with digital projectors. A joint venture of the three companies, National CineMedia LLC is working with JP Morgan Chase & Co. to raise the money from hedge funds and private-equity firms. The money will be paid back over seven years with help from the studios (this is still being worked out).

Personally, I've been enjoying the slower process, and this coming from somebody who spent three years working with the annoyances of platter-system film projectors. I love the way film looks and I probably won't change once I do see a movie in digital (I know, it's about time I check it out). Nonetheless, I am always excited about advances in the cinema industry, and am therefore excited about this news, if it is true (it comes from anonymous sources on the fund-raising side of the deal). As long as places like Film Forum always use the old projectors, I don't mind at all if the multiplexes do their thing.

Last Thursday saw the curtain close on Film Forum's six-week long festival of bullets and broads. Some 70 film noir undercards, mostly from the genre's heyday of the 40s and 50s, were screened in all their black and white glory. Judging by the near sell-out crowds on most of the nights I attended, the fest was a huge success. (There were reportedly some die-hard noir aficionados who took in every single film) The biggest discovery of the fest was The Sleeping City, a surgically sharp little thriller about a supposedly clean and tidy city hospital that has a river of black noir sludge running beneath it. Starring noir staples Richard Conte and Coleen Gray, it proved to be a runaway audience favorite. Another winner was 1954's Pushover, with Kim Novak in her debut role as a frosty blonde moll who Fred MacMurray salivates over like sexual flubber. A little chase film called Woman on the Run that uses the streets of San Francisco to great effect also gained many new fans. I'd happily cough up for a DVD edition of any of these titles.

As a movie theater, Film Forum has positive attributes (better movie screens than the IFC, a hot chick who mans the popcorn machine) and negative ones (no drink holders on the seats, a pacifist philosophy with regards to cell-phone abusers, [Not to mention major issues with temperature control -- why is it ALWAYS freezing in there? -Ed.]) but for a festival like this, it's a perfect venue. And who says this needs to be an isolated event? There's a whole universe of B-grade film noir out there. On the other hand, if the powers that be want to continue the B-festival vibe but take it in a different direction, I suggest that a B-Western festival would hit the spot. Shalako, anyone?

For those who missed Cinematical's periodic coverage of the fest, here is your comprehensive link list to our reviews: Thunder Road; The Lineup; Murder by Contract; Phantom Lady; The Sleeping City; Woman on the Run; The Suspect; Pushover; The Brothers Rico.