When, as a young person in the mid-1960s, I first developed a fascination for horror films, a fascination that persisted till, well, it still persists, I was particularly taken with an image that would show up in various books on the subject depicting Charles Ogle, the first actor to play Frankenstein’s monster, in a 1910 one-reeler produced by the Edison film studio. (Probably I didn’t appreciate then the difference between Edison Studios and Thomas Alva Edison himself, and envisioned the Wizard of Menlo Park cranking away at the camera.) I suppose that I was particularly taken because, aside from this one photograph of a disheveled-looking big-haired heavy-clawed goblin wearing rope-bound rags, the film had been declared lost. So unlike whatever spooky movies I might hope to catch on TV’s Creature Features or Million Dollar Movie broadcasts, this one would only ever be a picture in a book.
Surprise of surprises, it turned out that an amateur film collector in Wisconsin had more or less unknowingly had a print of the film stashed away in his collection since the 1950s, and it was this print, eventually rediscovered, preserved, and restored over the decades, that you can now view simply by popping over to YouTube and clicking on it.
It’s no found masterpiece, I must admit. Kicking off with a title card reading FRANKENSTEIN LEAVES FOR COLLEGE, which conjures up a subpar Universal Studios musical sequel starring Abbott & Costello, John Payne, Ginny Simms, and Glenn Strange, the film poses and parks and barks (metaphorically speaking; it’s silent, of course) for its loooooong twelve-minute duration like an elementary school pageant, and though it’s pleasant enough to watch Ogle stalking around the Frankenstein manse, at one point coyly hiding behind some convenient drapes as if he’s suddenly Dolores Moran hiding from Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance,1 it’s ultimately simply stagey and stolid, particularly disappointing given that it was made in an era when Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith, in America alone, were already bringing a lot of ingenious and vivacious oomph to the medium.
Still, there’s something poignant about being able to see something you thought you’d never see, whether it’s this little horror ditty, or James Whale’s The Old Dark House, another I-once-was-lost-and-now-I’m-found thriller (though this one, at least, is superb), or Fritz Lang’s sci-fi epic Metropolis, or George Cukor’s A Star Is Born, or or or . . .
And perhaps that softens the sadness of knowing with reasonable certainty that one’s never going to see all nine hours of Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed, the bulk of which Irving Thalberg seems to have done a masterly job of destroying for good (one envisions Irving and dear Norma Shearer burning the unwanted reels in a vast fireplace while sipping martinis), no matter the legend of the one surviving print, which, as I recall, is owned by a South American billionaire who screens it every year on New Year’s Eve.
In Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, the adolescent genius Thomasina Coverly bemoans to her tutor, Septimus, all the ancient masterpieces she will never know: “Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by [Cleopatra’s] ancestors. How can we sleep for grief?”
To which Septimus replies: “By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we should be at a loss for a corkscrew?”
The least we can do is treasure the treasures that have been restored to us, and appreciate the legends left behind by the permanently vanished—and make good use of the corkscrew.
[Author’s postscript: No copyediting today, not even to tell you not to call Frankenstein’s monster “Frankenstein.” Maybe next time.]
Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis): Deirdre, come out from behind that screen. [Silence.] Deirdre, come out, or do you want me to come back there and drag you out?
Deirdre Drake (Dolores Moran): How did you know I was there?
Kit Marlowe: My dear, I was hiding behind screens before you were born.
I watched a 4 hour restoration of Greed, that made me reach for the corkscrew.
Forrest J. Ackerman excited our imaginations with stills from lost films in his "Famous Monsters of Filmland." I remember that "Frankenstein" image too and the disappointment upon seeing the movie. "The Old Dark House" lived up to our hopes. The great photos of Lon Chaney in 'London After Midnight" continue to intrigue but most of the reviews upon its 1927 release were pretty bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_After_Midnight_(film)