Pretty much. the print discovered in South America contains not only the remaining lost scenes, but has them in the correct order – something even the prrevious resstoration , masterful as it was, didn’t fully succeed in doing. One of the revelations of this restored version was the structure of the film, like a musical number. I hadn’t realized that before.
About the only missing scene was a brief scene showing the priest preaching in the cathedral. It was at the beginning of a reel, and was too damaged to restore.
The 1925 silent version of The Lost World is now virtually complete, as well. In fact, there are two versions – the Eastman House version (which, inexplicable, you can get as an “extra” on the DVD of the 1960 version of The Lost World) and the film buff-restored version. Virtually every site seems to prefer the Eastman House version. Why, I don’t know – the other restoration seems incomparably superior to me.
No such luck, but the long-missing 35 minutes or so was found in 16mm in South America a few years ago and restores all but one short scene (which is duplicated by another actor in a repeat), and several dozen frames here and there. The 16mm material is fairly poor in quality but enough to restore the complete original cut and give us the sweep and grandeur of the original vision.
I was privileged to see it on the big screen with the Alloy Orchestra performing a modern score. Simply magnificent.
Elysium. It was a short (30-minute) super-8 film we made shortly after high school. It had been edited, and just needed some post-production stuff to be done. My friend (the writer and director) had it in a backpack. He went to his apartment, which has gates; but they’re not locked, and left the bag by his open door as he rushed into the toilet to attend to an urgent physiological imperative. When he came out, the backpack had been stolen.
Mark me down also for “London After Midnight.” There are several others, like “The Wizard” starring Gustav Von Seyferitz (spelling?) and Hitchcock’s second film called “The Mountain Eagle.”
I’m sure there are several silent ones that I would enjoy watching. Is “The Monster” starring Lon Chaney Sr. available? Here is one problem to think about: with all the high expectations, would we be disappointed once we finally DID sit through it?
I’ve always heard rumours of a movie Jerry Lewis made, The Day The Clown Cried. I don’t think it was ever released due to legal stuff or sheer badness…and didn’t he also appear in a movie based on a Kurt Vonnegut book which also was not released?
Any of the lost John Ford silent westerns, especially the ones with Harry Carey. All but a handful of Ford’s silent films are lost, but given the quality of the surviving ones I’ve seen, especially The Iron Horse, and his later masterpieces, I’d be amazed if there aren’t many lost gems.
The Apostle: An Argentinian film from 1917. An important piece of film history because it was the first feature-length animated movie. A studio fire in 1926 destroyed the only known copies.
Yes specifically and sometimes generally. DVDtalk has a review of The Monster here. And although a print of Convention City is still awaiting rediscovery, its script and photos from it exist. The book Sin in Soft Focus has a detailed description of it.
Various other 1933 Warner Bros. movies are all readily available. Havana Widows, released a month earlier, has several of the same players. So you can get a taste of what CC is like. I’d like to see Paramount’s 1926 The American Venus, if only to see more of the young Louise Brooks. (And thank goodness we can depend on sites like IMDb, so that its users can rate the lost films for us.)
Great minds gape alike? Mary Astor was also in CC, 4th billed per IMDb and per the teaser linked below, in the days (and nights and early mornings) when the studios were taking full advantage of their employees. In her book A Life on Film, written about 38 years after CC was released, she mentions
The Magnificent Ambersons would be nice, if the – whatever the movie equivalent of “masters” in music is – still exist.
Queen Kelly in the big monster cut.
And I think The Lady From Shanghai probably has some stuff lying around that would be good.
It’s a shame Welles got a posthumous deluxe treatment for Mr. Arkadin (there’s a disc set with like three separate cuts of the film, all restored) but nothing for those two much better movies (not that Mr. Arkadin isn’t a riot – Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave stand out as superb little charcters/caricatures).
D W Griffith’s “The Greatest Thing in Life”, a WWI film that features an interracial kiss when a black soldier is dying, cries out for his mother and a white officer substitutes kissing him. This from the director who a few years earlier gave us “Birth of a Nation”
