He Preserves Films--and History

Murray Glass’ is a life in film.

Not the glamorous life of an actor or a director, but a life in film nonetheless. The 70-year-old former chemist collects historic movies and distributes them.

You want to see “Legends of the Fall”? Go to Blockbuster. But if you want a rare film such as the first screen version of “Ben-Hur,” made in 1907, contact Glass. His Em Gee Film Library--consisting of Glass, a clerk and more than 6,000 movies--is tucked into a nondescript commercial mall in Reseda. It is, at once, a small business and a treasure trove.

Glass’ best customers are teachers of film history who turn to him for hard-to-find films. This fall, Glass is dipping into his collection to teach his own course, “Portraying the Jew in American Cinema: From Caricature to Hero” for UCLA Extension. But as he is quick to clarify, he collects historic films of all kinds, not just those with Jewish themes.

As a young man in New York City, he explains, he took his first and only formal course in the history of cinema from Hans Richter, one of the pioneering avant-garde directors. “He stirred my interest in film as art,” Glass recalls. “I began going to the Museum of Modern Art, and I became a film junkie.”

Glass has been collecting movies since he bought his first Charlie Chaplin short at age 13 (Chaplin is his favorite filmmaker, and Glass has one of the most nearly complete collections of his work). This is cultural rescue work. As Glass points out, most films made before 1940 have been lost forever, neglected by studios that didn’t realize their cultural value. In some cases, old films were burned to recover the silver in them.

Glass finds old movies wherever he can, then has them restored. “I’ve found nitrate films in chicken coops, basements, garrets and auctions,” he says.

Take the 1907 version of “Ben-Hur,” made by the Kalem Co. Glass found a 35-millimeter nitrate print of the 15-minute rarity at an auction. The original film is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Glass kept a copy for himself.

As Glass tells his students, that “Ben-Hur” represents a milestone in the history of cinema. The estate of Lew Wallace, who wrote the pious bestseller on which it is based, successfully sued the Kalem Co. for copyright infringement. The huge settlement Kalem was forced to pay threw cold water on the fledgling film industry’s practice of stealing stories wherever it found them.

“Ben-Hur” is also an important film in the history of how Jews have been depicted on screen, Glass says. In many early films, Jews are shown only in negative stereotypes, such as that found in another rare movie in Glass’ collection, “The Almighty Dollar” (1910). In that five-minute film, the Jewish character is a money-grubber with a stooped walk and big nose--a classic anti-Semitic caricature. (The silent comedy is an equal-opportunity offender, with a stereotypically effeminate gay character as well.)

“Ben-Hur,” on the other hand, is one of the first movies to show a Jew as a hero, Glass says. Yes, Hur converts to Christianity at the end. But as Glass says with a laugh: “At the time he won the chariot race, he was still Jewish.”

For his course on Jewish characters in film, Glass plans to screen everything from documentary footage of Jewish dancers in Jerusalem shot by the Edison Co. in 1903 to “Schindler’s List,” released in 1993.

But it is Glass’ vast collection of rare films that makes the course so rich.

With Steven Spielberg’s modern classic, Glass will show a horrifying documentary called “How Nice It Was in Terezin” (1964). The film tells how the Nazis forced Jewish filmmakers imprisoned in Terezinstadt, the so-called model ghetto in Czechoslovakia, to make a movie in 1944 in hopes of tricking observers into thinking the Jews were being treated well. As soon as it was finished, most of the filmmakers were shipped to death camps.

Glass got into the film-distribution business almost 40 years ago. Shortly after he quit his day job, he was asked by a film professor friend if director Fritz Lang could come to Glass’ Van Nuys home to see Glass’ print of Lang’s own classic thriller, “M” (1931). Glass screened the movie for the director, who was then almost blind, and subsequently received an invitation from Lang for lunch.

“It was one of the thrills of my life,” Glass recalls. “Only a few weeks before I had quit my job as a chemist to do this full time, and here was this famous director in my house. I took it as a sign. I felt like a million dollars. More than a million dollars--a million and a half.”

Glass points out that several powerful films were made on Jewish themes during the silent era. Among his favorites is “His People” (1925), directed by Edward Sloman. Set on the Lower East Side of New York, the film lovingly chronicles the life of a Jewish immigrant family. The movie deals with the tumultuous process of assimilation that millions of Jews newly arrived from Eastern Europe were going through, and with intergenerational conflict.

But in the 1930s and ‘40s, Jewish characters and stories all but disappeared from the movies. Despite the fact that most of the studio heads were Jewish, they kept a low ethnic profile, both for personal reasons and in what appears to have been an effort not to offend anti-Semites.

Films about Nazi anti-Semitism were shamefully few, Glass says. World War II was practically over before the major studios began exploring the subject. Glass’ beloved Charlie Chaplin was the exception.

As Glass says: “He made ‘The Great Dictator’ in 1940, when you had to have some guts to do it!”

In the fearless comedy, Chaplin plays both a Jewish barber and the Hitler-like dictator. Had he known the true horror of what was happening to Europe’s Jews, Chaplin said later, he would never have had the heart to make the film.