{"id":29909,"date":"2018-12-14T08:07:06","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T13:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=29909"},"modified":"2018-12-14T08:11:45","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T13:11:45","slug":"29909-man-in-the-barn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/14\/29909-man-in-the-barn\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: The Man in the Barn"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 665:<\/strong> \u201cThe Man in the Barn\u201d (1937 short film directed by Jacques Tourneur).<\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> On YouTube.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> None.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> No commercial home entertainment release.<\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE:<\/strong> Not likely.<\/p>\n

On the evening of January 13, 1903, an elderly house painter in Enid, Oklahoma, named David E. George laid dying in a hotel room from an attempted suicide. Before he passed away, George told the few people gathered at his bedside, \u201cI killed the best man that ever lived.\u201d The man who was killed, according to George, was Abraham Lincoln \u2013 and George insisted that he was John Wilkes Booth, the president\u2019s assassin. Before he could explain how he could be someone who had been killed 38 years earlier, George slipped into a coma before dying.
\n<\/p>\n

George\u2019s story was mostly unknown to the American public until the 1907 publication of the book \u201cThe Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth\u201d by Finis L. Bates. Although the overwhelming majority of historians believed that Booth was killed in an attempt to apprehend him following the Lincoln assassination, there were enough people who kept Bates\u2019 conspiracy theory alive. Incredibly, those believers included the producers of \u201cAn Historical Mystery,\u201d a series of short docudrama films produced by Hollywood\u2019s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio. In 1937, MGM put forth the one-reel \u201cThe Man in the Barn,\u201d which recalled George\u2019s deathbed confession and wondered whether there was any truth in his bold confession. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Man in the Barn\u201d opens with narrator Carey Wilson, a writer\/producer with a somewhat harsh voice, telling the audience, \u201cWhen I went to school back in Rutherford, New Jersey, they taught me that the assassin of Abraham Lincoln \u2013 John Wilkes Booth \u2013 was killed in a barn by United States soldiers. And, no doubt, that\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then, the film switches to George\u2019s deathbed confession. The film offers no explanation on why George attempted to kill himself, but there is an unidentified woman at George\u2019s bedside who recalled how the dying man was able to recite Shakespeare with professional theatricality. Then, the film travels back to the end of the Civil War, culminating with the fatal violence at Ford\u2019s Theatre and Booth\u2019s escape from the crime scene. <\/p>\n

\u201cTwelve days after the assassination, according to my history book, John Wilkes Booth was trapped in Garrett\u2019s Barn near Bowling Green, Virginia,\u201d Wilson narrates. The viewer watches the burning barn and the badly injured Booth shooting at the soldiers surrounding him. A shot is fired while Booth is standing behind a pillar \u2013 Wilson\u2019s narration wonders if Booth was targeted by a soldier\u2019s rifle or if he killed himself. <\/p>\n

From that incident, Booth\u2019s body is taken for identification. The film offers one physician who treated Booth and claims that the corpse is not the actor-turned-assassin, even though it carries a scar from a surgery that the doctor performed some time before. Wilson\u2019s narration tells us other people were brought in to affirmatively identify the body. <\/p>\n

Wilson then begins to raise questions on some curious circumstances surrounding Booth\u2019s escape from the scene of the assassination, including how Booth was able to take the one unguarded road leading out of Washington, but gives no answers. Wilson praises Booth the actor as \u201cthe Clark Gable of his day,\u201d although we learn nothing about his career. The film offers a quick rewind back to the search for Booth by the Army, and then goes back to George\u2019s deathbed, where his resemblance to Booth is noted right down to the \u201csame satanic-type ears.\u201d But if George was Booth, Wilson wonders, then who was the man in the barn killed in 1865?<\/p>\n

Well, we never get a satisfactory answer to the questions raised in the film. Nor do we get the remarkable story of what happened to George\u2019s body after his death: it was initially put on display in a mummified state at a local funeral home \u2013 no one claimed George\u2019s remains for burial and the establishment made money showing off the body to curious onlookers. Finis L. Bates later claimed the body \u2013 he said that he knew George from years earlier, when he went by the pseudonym John St. Helen \u2013 and displayed the mummified body in fairs and carnivals around the country. After Bates\u2019 death in 1923, the body was bought and sold a few times and continued to be displayed into the 1970s. Today, its whereabouts are unknown. Of course, there is just so much that can be squeezed into a 10-minute film, and the 1977 Sunn Classics feature “The Lincoln Conspiracy” gives more time to exploring the notion of Booth’s escape.<\/p>\n

One aspect of \u201cThe Man in the Barn\u201d that deserves serious attention is the expert direction by Jacques Tourneur, the French-born filmmaker who worked as a director for short subjects at MGM in the 1930s. For what would have been considered as a toss-away filler on a film program, Tourneur\u2019s work was unusually accomplished, with smart editing and an intelligent use of extras that make the low-budget effort seem extravagant. MGM did not appreciate Tourneur\u2019s gifts, but his one-time studio colleague Val Lewton was a fan \u2013 and when Lewton set up shop at RKO, Tourneur joined him to helm the classic films \u201cCat People,\u201d \u201cI Walked with a Zombie\u201d and \u201cThe Leopard Man.\u201d Tourneur also directed the 1947 RKO masterpiece \u201cOut of the Past,\u201d which might be the greatest film noir of all time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Man in the Barn,\u201d like most of MGM\u2019s live-action short subjects, has not been made available for home entertainment release. It has played on TCM and one viewer videotaped it \u2013 literally, with a wobbly hand-held video camera \u2013 and uploaded it to YouTube<\/a>, complete with the TCM logo. Fans of conspiracy theories and movie curios may appreciate it, but anyone with a serious passion for Civil War history should give this a pass.<\/p>\n

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to \u201cThe Online Movie Show with Phil Hall<\/a>\u201d on SoundCloud, now in its third season.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 665: \u201cThe Man in the Barn\u201d (1937 short film directed by Jacques Tourneur). LAST SEEN: On YouTube. AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None. REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: No commercial home entertainment release. CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely. On the evening of January 13, 1903, an elderly house painter in Enid, Oklahoma, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":29910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1513],"tags":[205,2151,2150,1746,939],"class_list":["post-29909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bootleg-files","tag-civil-war","tag-jacques-tourneur","tag-john-wilkes-booth","tag-mgm","tag-short-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29909"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29913,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29909\/revisions\/29913"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}