Pathé Exchange

The crowing rooster of Pathé was one of the first great emblems of the movies, and its American branch carried that emblem to enormous reach. Pathé's U.S. operation had been distributing films since 1904; incorporated as Pathé Exchange near the end of 1914, it was spun off as an independent American entity in 1921, with Wall Street money soon taking a controlling interest.

In its prime, Pathé Exchange was a colossus. It commanded a vast share of the American distribution market and became synonymous with the serial, the weekly cliffhanger that sent audiences back for more. *The Perils of Pauline* made Pearl White a national sensation and defined a whole genre. Pathé's shorts and comedies, including the early Hal Roach product that gave the world *Our Gang* and helped launch Harold Lloyd, filled programs from coast to coast. And in 1922, it released Robert Flaherty's *Nanook of the North*, a landmark that all but invented the feature documentary. Overseeing it all was Pathé News, the newsreel that for decades was how ordinary Americans saw the events of their age.

Control shifted repeatedly in the 1920s. In 1927, Cecil B. DeMille's Producers Distributing Corporation was absorbed into Pathé, and by 1928, the ubiquitous Joseph P. Kennedy had been brought in to manage the company, aligning it with the Keith-Albee and Orpheum theater chains.

That alignment sealed its fate. The same financial machinery assembling RKO reached for Pathé, and on January 31, 1931, the larger company swallowed it whole. Pathé's production assets, contracts, and exchanges passed into RKO; only the newsreel operation lived on under the familiar name. The rooster that had once crowed over half of American moviegoing had been folded into a rival barely three years old.