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It’s a well-known fact that about three-fourths of all Silent Era films no longer exist, their prints having been lost due to decay, neglect, or accidents over time. In some of the more shockingly shortsighted examples, studios actually trashed their film negatives in order to extract silver from the remains. Whatever the reason, movie buffs and students today must rely on still photos and contemporary reviews for such vanished pictures as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle, a 1926 melodrama set in the Kentucky hills; Theda Bara playing the Queen of the Nile in 1917’s Cleopatra; or the 1921 comedy short Humor Risk, the first screen appearance of the Four Marx Brothers. Other countries weren’t immune, either; no prints exist of Wasei Kingu Kongu, a 1933 Japanese version of King Kong featuring an actor in an ape set running amok on miniature sets (predating Godzilla by two decades).
One of the most famous of these missing movies is the 1927 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gothic thriller London After Midnight, directed by Tod Browning of Dracula fame and starring Lon Chaney as one of the silver screen’s first vampires. It would have been possible, however, for a film scholar to see it up until 60 years ago. This weekend, in fact, marks the 60th anniversary of a catastrophic fire on the M-G-M lot that claimed not only London After Midnight, but many more silent works as well.
At around 10 p.m. on August 10, 1965, an electrical short occurred in Vault 7, a film storage facility located on Lot 3 of the sprawling M-G-M Studios in Culver City, California. While the company had been pioneers in motion picture preservation and was working to transfer its titles to safety stock, many of the older movies were still on highly flammable nitrate reels. The fire started by the short ignited the cellulose nitrate stock, and the resultant explosion caused Vault 7’s walls and ceiling to collapse. The building didn’t have a sprinkler system. It’s said that the explosion could be heard throughout the other studio lots as well.
While there fortunately were no fatalities (originally studio manager Roger Mayer erroneously reported one death), dozens of silent and early sound Metro productions were lost to the ages. 1916’s The Black Butterfly starred Olga Petrova (a purportedly Russian vamp who turned out to be English-born Muriel Harding) as an alluring opera diva. The Glorious Adventure was a 1918 melodrama about a young woman (Mae Marsh) falling for a cold-hearted mill owner (Wyndham Standing) and trying to make him change his inhumane business practices.
Along with London After Midnight, the only extant copies of three other Chaney films were destroyed. 1922’s A Blind Bargain was a horror outing with Lon playing both a mad doctor who experiments on humans and one of his subjects, a distorted “ape man.” He was a Swedish farmer driven mad upon learning that his daughter turned to prostitution in the big city to pay off his debts in 1925’s Tower of Lies. And Browning’s 1928 early gangster drama The Big City finds shady nightclub owner Chaney using his girlfriend’s dress shop as a cover for his robbery scheme. Not-So-Fun Fact: Of the 157 films Lon Chaney made in his career, only 34 are currently available to view in their entirety.
Consumed by the fire as well was the 1928 romance The Divine Woman, starring Greta Garbo as an 1860s French farm girl who becomes a famous actress. Inspired by the life of Sarah Bernhardt, all that remains of the film is a nine-minute excerpt found in a Russian cinema archive in 1993. The Actress, also from 1928, featured Norma Shearer as a 19th-century British stage performer who retires after marrying a well-to-do suitor. It was Shearer’s final silent picture.
Five of producer Hal Roach’s Our Gang short subjects–Yale vs. Harvard and The Old Wallop from 1927 and 1928’s Edison, Marconi & Co., Growing Pains, and School Begins–were completely or partially lost. Gone, too, was 1934’s Jail Birds of Paradise, a two-reel comedy notable for featuring Three Stooges siblings Moe and Curly Howard, sans porcupine-coiffed partner Larry Fine, as prison inmates.
There was a happy ending for at least one movie feared lost to the disaster. In 1968 a print of Buster Keaton’s first M-G-M feature, The Cameraman, was found in France. Nearly 25 years later another copy in better condition was recovered and restored. Whether or not any more of the early cinematic works that fell victim to the flames six decades ago will turn up remains to be seen.