Posted on 12/21/2013 5:54:21 AM PST by NYer
American film historians recently came across a fascinating discovery when they found the Czech National Film Archive has the only surviving print of the 1929 US movie, the Mysterious Island. The archive in Prague stores around 500 films from Hollywood’s early days, proof that the global dominance of American cinema goes all the way back to the birth of the film industry.
The epic American movie The Mysterious Island, loosely based on the French writer Jules Verne’s adventurous novel, was released in 1929. The Technicolor film starred, among others, the Oscar-winning actor Lionel Barrymore. But it became a financial and critical disaster, according to the IMDb; one reviewer wrote it was uncomfortably poised between silence and sound, suffering the drawbacks of both eras while retaining the virtues of neither.
Film historians long believed no complete print of the film had survived – until experts in the US discovered that the movie had been preserved in the Czech National Archive. Deborah Stoiber from the George Eastman House film archive recently visited Prague to present a film from their own collection – and to examine the sole existing copy of The Mysterious Island.
“I decided to take advantage of my trip here to visit the archive and to take a look at this wonderful feature film, to see quality of the image and the quality of the print, and take that information with me to the US so that we can hopefully find funding to do full preservation on this material.”
Deborah Stoiber is in charge of the nitrate film collection at George Eastman House. The year 2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of Technicolor, a colour movie process, and research into Technicolor films has led the archivists to Prague.
“We are discovering there is a huge amount of information that has never been released to the public. We are working on a book on the history of Technicolor, and we have decided to focus our attentions on Technicolor films, and we are finding that archives around the world have so much of this material in very good conditions.”
After the First World War, American movies flooded European cinemas including those in the newly established Czechoslovakia. Many of them were eventually acquired by the archive – to the surprise of American film historians.
Ping!
I wonder if the archive holds any other lost films?
Maybe they’ll find the lost Doctor Who episodes.
Ironically this week Technicolor closed its last plant in Simi Valley, CA (and probably anywhere) since the digital age is here. Two people I know just lost their jobs along with all the others.
...the only surviving print of the 1929 US movie, the Mysterious Island... The epic American movie The Mysterious Island, loosely based on the French writer Jules Verne’s adventurous novel, was released in 1929. The Technicolor film starred, among others, the Oscar-winning actor Lionel Barrymore.
Any sign of Lon Cheney’s “London After Midnight,” or missing scenes from “Greed”?
As an aside, Lionel Barrymore later played the villainous Mr. Potter in Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.
A brilliant actor, for a few films he had played a saccharine, jovial, grandfatherly type individual, and was sick of it. So he decided to play the Mr. Potter role as a real villain. It worked. He is still rated as in the top 50 most villainous characters in screen history.
Now that’s acting.
I have a 1929 Ford that runs just fine. That proves that Fords last longer than film...;^)
(starts a little slow)
Ping!
I wonder if they have the lost ending of It’s A Wonderful Life.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/81249131/
Old nitrate film from the silent era and afterwards was highly flammable. So unless you drive a Pinto, your car probably would be safer and more durable than old movies.
And the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film is still around, while Kodak has gone bottom up. Not sure what lesson to draw from that.
A lot of old films were rediscovered in the Yukon. It was the last stop in their distribution and the film companies decided it was cheaper to throw them out than to have them shipped back to Hollywood. The cold preserved them (to some extent) even after they'd been in a landfill for decades.
...the only surviving print of the 1929 US movie, the Mysterious Island... The epic American movie The Mysterious Island, loosely based on the French writer Jules Verne’s adventurous novel, was released in 1929. The Technicolor film starred, among others, the Oscar-winning actor Lionel Barrymore.
Not sure what that’s all about, but it is interesting.
Here's hoping they do manage to restore and re-release the movie.
It certainly couldn't be more of an abomination than the absurdly SFX-bloated, (3) movie(s) Peter Jackson has fluffed-up from Tolkien's one, simple little book, "The Hobbit"!
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