Sadly, most ofTheda Bara’s starring roles have been lost.
Beau Sabreur. Not technically a sequel to Beau Geste, but it was another French Foreign Legion movie starring Gary Cooper, based on another French Foreign Legion novel by P.C. Wren.
I would like to see the early episodes of The Avengers, back when John Steed was the sidekick.
And, of course, Greed and London After Midnight, already mentioned.
Dammit… I did a search for “Pancho” and when nothing turned up, figured I was in the clear. Evidently not.
Edison’s first “talky” film. I only saw a few seconds of it-the sound track was on an Edison wax cylinder. The film and cylinder were found in the archives of the Swedish National Radio system. Does the full length version exist?
If you mean the Dickinson Sound Film, the one with one guy [playing a violin into an oversized bell microphone while two guys dance*,it exists in its centirety, and the sound cylinder has been synched to it:
- Because it’s one of the first films, and shows two guys dancing, it was used as the opening image for the film The Celluloid Closet, the history of gays in movies. It’s a pretty shaky premise, based on the idea that two guys dancing connotes gayness – the kind of stereotype you’d think the film would deplore. But it’s undoubtedly a striking image, and film thrives on those, so I can’t complain.
Are you talking about the Dickson Experimental Sound Film? (Youtube)
eta: ninja’d
No. The film clip I saw was of men wearing American Civil War Union Army uniforms, with a firing squad. The Voice said something like “are you dead”. I saw this on TV many years ago.
Never heard of anything like this. Do you have any further details?
the Wikipedia site on the Dickson film calls it the only surviving example of a Edison film with sound. This site talks about Edison’s efforts to market a kinetoscope with bsynchronized sound, and says a lot of them were “march and dance films”. It doesn’t mention any Civil War dramas:
If such a film does, it seems the authors of both these sites don’t know about it. Perhaps it has only recently been found.
Is it possible that what you saw was a film where somebody added voices to the score? I’ve seen a few silents where this was done, for what reason I truly can’t fathom.
This site claims the first Civil War film was D.W,. Griffith’s *The House with Closed Shutters". No Edison involvement, or sound.
There were films of Civil War reunions, including one reportedly made by Edison’s studio. Did you see one of these? (I know there’s a silent film of one such re-union) This article covers some of these:
The Goldstone recordings of the moon landings.
Quick synopsis: it turns out that the lousy picture quality of the images of Apollo 11 on the moon was an artifact of translating the signal sent from space to a format and frequency compatible with broadcast television, and the picture received at the Goldstone sites was MUCH clearer.
As each site received the broadcast, it recorded it as well as converting it for rebroadcast. Recordings of the rebroadcast version were recognized as historically significant and were preserved, the originals were not.
A few years back, some enthusiasts noted that in photos of celebration at Goldstone facilities, the images on the monitors were much clearer than the recordings of the landings, and this prompted discussions where many Goldstone veterans commented that the video they had watched live on the monitors was much clearer than what went out on television. So folks started to try to find what had become of those recordings.
NASA has no record of what happened to those tapes.
The fear is that they were recorded over, as they were not regarded as important. The hope is that some former NASA employee has them in his garage somewhere, having taken them home because they were cluttering up his office.
Just in case, NASA is preserving the last machine that could play those tapes, which originally was to be sold for scrap.
I want ALL lost movies to be recovered, but if I had to pick one not already mentioned, that would be it.
What-cha do? And then what did the world get to see? 
Thanks for the thread, it’s fun reading all of these and thinking “oh yeah, there’s another I really want to see!” Getting a clearer picture of Metropolis was really cool, and seeing anything with a live orchestra is always such a kick. My SO makes fun of me, because for some reason it always makes me tear up right at the start. But there is something so overwhelming to the senses about seeing beautiful film with a live orchestra. So if I have to pick something it’s anything discovered with the original score so that we can have the live music with the screening.
Sorry-I just remember seeing this on TV , around 1986. As I remember, the film was in the Swedish National Radio Archives..and a researcher found a wax cylinder that matched the film-played together, they were of a Union Army firing squad-yo saw and heard the rifles discharge, then the commander spoke..“are you dead”.
that’s all I remember seeing.
My personal lost film- in the late '50s or early '60s I went to an airshow and someone was playing old movies, one of which (iirc) was a silent film of a bunch of stuntmen forming a human chain under a bi-plane. One slipped and the chain fell. That image has stayed with me since, but now that I think about it, it could have just been a Keystone comedy scene with dummys. I guess I’ll never know…
I haven’t seen that, the last version I had the misfortune to see was the 1984 version. Which was marred by being projected at the wrong frame rate. There seems to be some uncertainty about the original frame rate, but to my untutored eye the 1984 version looked like they’d simply taken an 18 fps film and projected at 24 fps, as was common in the 1980’s. Whatever they did, it had the effect of turning the trudging workers into a quick-step dance troup, and made a farce of the worker struggling to keep up with the ‘clock’ hands.
If I really had to pick, I’d join the London After Midnight crowd, but that throng is thick already. Ergo, I’ll put in a good word for Der Januskopf. Conrad Veidt as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Murnau, with Bela Lugosi in a small part. Oh yeah, baby.
This was the first one that came to mind for me as well. One of the stories as to why it was cut was that in the original test screening it was so horrifying to audiences that ended up on the cutting room floor permanently.
That, and Cooper claimed it “stopped the story dead”. Cooper didn’t mind cutting things out if necessary. The Spider Pit sequence isn’t the old stop-motion footage to be snipped from the vfimal film. Just the most famous.
I’m also on board with this as my first choice.
I haven’t seen tons of older stuff and am worried that I wouldn’t like them because they were pioneers and I have seen the copiers work and enjoy how it was improved. Having said that, there are some older films that I enjoy but I would still worry I wouldn’t like some.
But the Dr Who stuff? Yeah, I would love to see the all of the first and second Doctor!
vislor