COPIES OF FILMS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 207, 29 May 1936, Page 16

COPIES OF FILMS

Plea For Preservation “COVERED WAGON” LOST T MAY be a sentimentalist, but I read .something about moving pictures the other day that really shocked me, writes Campbell Dixon, in the London “Daily Telegraph.” The new Museum of Fiiin Art in New York was looking for a copy of “The Covered Wagon.” You reinember —who doesn’t? —that epic of the West, the embodiment of all that was best and most heroic and picturesque in the American pioneer's conquest of savage nature and hostile man. 1 can see now the wonderful sequences of the wagon train, toiling painfully over desert and mountain, threatened by thirst anil Hood and Indians, but always going on. The actors, too—what performances those were! J. Warren Kerrigan as Will Banion; Tully Marshall as the famous scout; Jim Bridger (a characterisation that gave deep offence to Bridger’s descendants) ; Alan Hale as Sam Woodhull, and. perhaps most memorable of all, the Jackson of Ernest Torrence, that kindly giant whose fate it. was to make his reputation as a menace. Here, then, is a film that told and, in a film sense made, history. It is to the cinema what "Rob Roy” or “The Three Musketeers” is to fiction—with this difference: that there arc hundreds of fine historical novels, but only two or three Westerns worth preserving. (Offhand I can think of only “The Virginian” and “Three Bad Men.”) Imagine the surprise of the New York Museum of Film Art on learning that, so far as is known, not one copy of “The Covered Wagon” exists. The popular masterpiece that caused a sensation, that enthralled millions all over the world, that has power still to produce a reminiscent glow in every genuine picture-lover’s breast, hag vanished utterly: every copy has been burned to avoid copyright infringements after 10 years, or for the sake of the chemicals in the celluloid. Collections All Over the World. Now I think that is sad, and rather scandalous. All over the world libraries and private bibliophiles have been collecting books and manuscripts for centuries, collating editions, noting minute variations of text, even (as in the case of “The Scarlet Letter”) a broken letter. And quite rightly. The gifted bibliographer is not only an invaluable preserver of the work of others, but may be himself a creative artist. The cinema, on tiie other hand, has just been celebrating its -10th anniversary; and it has only just been realised that some at least among its works are worth saving for posterity. Its birth among nickelodeons run by clever cheapjacks is still so recent, its scandals and ridiculous exuberances have been so flaunted, that the one really vital fact has been overlooked: I mean the rise of a new art form whose terrific possibilities have in part been realised, whose frequent blunders and banalities must not be allowed to obscure some of the most brilliant creative work of the early 20th century. When the social historian of the year 2500 wants to know how neo-Georgian man looked and ate, worked and played, his first storehouse will be the screen. In the work of men like Lubitsch and Korda, Capra and Clair, lie will find suitable companion pieces to the satirical studies of dramatists like Shaw, Maugham and George S. Kaufmann. In the ordinary way celuloid perishes in 15 or 20 years. Captain John G. Bradley, the export in charge of the film archives at Washington—America was the first country to recognise the rise of a new art worth preserving—has evolved, a process whereby the life of a picture can lie lengthened, it is hoped, by 50 or 100 years, and finally, by duplication, maintained indefinitely. Film Institute’s Start. Assuming that this can be done, how recklessly wasteful, how appallingly unimaginative it is that we should be allowing the destruction of works that may one day be sought as eagerly as Italian Primitives are now. A start has been made by the Film Institute Library. but the work of searching out and acquiring old prints requires more resources than arc available. Would it not be a graceful gesture if leading film producers, distributors and exhibitors proved that they took their business seriously by aiding this collection, either by gifts of money or prints? Alternatively, it might be made compulsory to deposit a copv of every new film just as it is now compulsory to deposit a copy of a new book at the British Museum. Sad. irreparable damage has already been done. Prompt action is essential if many of the greatest achievements of the screen arc not to vanish utterly from the earth.

William Powell, Carole Lombard and Allee Brady are starred together in “My Man Godfrey,” which is at present in production at Universal Studios. Eric Hatch is the American author of this story, which, under the original title, ‘‘lrene, the Stubborn Girl,” was published serially in the U.S.A.