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Above: German poster for The Strike of the Thieves. Art by Walter Riemer.In 1944, as Allied air raids intensified towards the end of World War II, Germany’s centralized state film archive, the National Socialists’ Reichsfilmarchiv, decided to protect their vast collection of film and film publicity materials by hiding them in a salt mine in Grasleben, 125 miles west of Berlin. After the Allied victory, American units entered the mine and recovered the film reels. But much of the paper material was left behind.In 1986 a treasure trove of German film posters from the first four decades of film history were found, profoundly damaged by a fire, in the mine where they had remained for forty years. Starting in 2017, the posters were recovered, restored, and digitized.Many of those posters are currently on view at the exhibition Burn Marks – Film Posters from a Salt Mine, which opened in June at...

Screwball comedy movies, rare screenings of epic box office disaster: Library of Congress’ Packard Theater in April 2014 (photo: Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in ‘The Awful Truth’) In April 2014, the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper, Virginia, will celebrate Hollywood screwball comedy movies, from the Marx Brothers’ antics to Peter Bogdanovich’s early ’70s homage What’s Up, Doc?, a box office blockbuster starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Additionally, the Packard Theater will present a couple of rarities, including an epoch-making box office disaster that led to the demise of a major studio. Among Packard’s April 2014 screwball comedies are the following: Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (Saturday, April 5) — actually more zany, wacky, and totally insane than merely "screwball" — in which Groucho Marx stars as the recently (un)elected dictator of Freedonia, abetted by siblings Harpo Marx and Chico Marx, in addition to Groucho’s perennial foil,...