Review of London After Midnight (1927) by Edith N — 21 Apr 2011

London after midnight - 6.

Only a Shadow.

This is not, cannot be, a review of actual [i]London After Midnight[/i]. The film is no longer extant. Or anyway if it is, it's like one of those boxes you hear about as appearing every now and again, like the one full of previously unknown Ansel Adams photos. Or the lost [i]Metropolis[/i] footage found in Argentina. The last known copy of this movie was lost in the MGM studio fire in 1967, along with Gods alone know how many other films. The idea of being able to spend one hour hauling things out before the fire is the film buff equivalent of being able to ransack the shelves of the Great Library at Alexandria, saving the lost for history. Of course, it's not time enough to be sure that everything missing is the lost, but it's enough so that there's always a chance. I'm not so fussed about lost Three Stooges or Tom & Jerry, but I'm sure a lot of people don't much care about lost Tod Browning and Lon Chaney. Film history is at least in part a battle against destruction. None of this was helped by the belief that there was no value to silent films once talkies had come in.

This is the recompiled version of the film, pieced together from production stills and the script. Roger Balfour (Claude King) is found dead; a note found next to him is agreed to be a suicide note. One Edward C. Burke (Chaney) is on the case, and he closes it. Five years later, a terrifying mystery man rents Balfour's home. Lucille Balfour (Marceline Day) is among those who think possibly her father has returned. There is also speculation that the mystery man is a vampire, be it her father or someone else. Honestly, I kind of lost the thread of things. I'm reasonably sure the title cards are original, but with the film really just production stills intercut and scanned along, it's a little harder to get into. I even had a bit of a hard time working out who some of these people were and why various of the characters believed or didn't believe in vampires. I'm not even a hundred percent sure how things ended. To be fair, I don't know if this is a failing of the reconstruction or the original film.

Really, the film is to me more a stepping-off point for a discussion of the loss of a medium's own history than a film in and of itself. It's probably wrong to call it generic horror. It's Tod Browning and Lon Chaney, and neither man was quite inclined toward the generic. It's borrowed from a lot over the decades since--even, at second or third remove, the decades since the last known copy was destroyed. Unfortunately, in a case like that, a modern eye can't separate what was with what is. All you see is that you've seen it before. It takes a special leap of mind to realize that it's because it started here first. There are several movies where I've had to wrap my brain around that, and the problem here is that there's no original source to use as a starting block. There's nothing here to weight us in the right time and place. The music was composed for the reconstruction. Everyone is credited, even on the IMDB page, as "archival footage." Mere black and white photos of this level of quality can be from anywhere within about a century.

Nitrocellulose decays and burns. Many old films have crumbled into dust on the shelves. Others, like this one, burned in fires like the MGM Studio Fire, an electrical fire which raced through the warehouse where they were stored. Many old Harold Lloyd films were destroyed in the '40s in a similar fire, leading Lloyd to be one of the early champions of preservation. However, fires and decay were only part of the problem. The actual filmstock itself was recycled for the silver when the studio believed the things recorded on it were worthless. Some eighty percent of silent movies are believed lost, largely because the film itself was considered valuable but, with the coming of talkies, the finished product wasn't. The negatives of the parts of [i]The Magnificent Ambersons[/i] cut by the studio were disposed of to save space. While these are considered priceless to researchers now, and while there is now an A&E production following his original notes in an attempt to show what might have been, movies weren't even legally considered art at the time. Keeping the books was more important.

Lost films are found. [i]The Celluloid Closet[/i] lists both [i]Different From the Others[/i] and [i]Mädchen in Uniform[/i] as lost films, though it's true that [i]Different From the Others[/i] doesn't exist in a complete form and has been somewhat pieced together as well. There is, again, that found footage from [i]Metropolis[/i]. But there are a lot of films out there which are not so lucky. Wikipedia lists this as about the single most sought-after lost film. The list of found films also on Wikipedia, however, is short and tends to include films later discovered in the private collections of those involved in making them. Sometimes, they were kept back by projectionists. Sometimes, they are found in film archives. At least one lost movie was later found in a box of movies which hadn't been labeled--or watched for years to discover what was on them. However, hoping to stumble across [i]The Life of General Villa[/i], the film actually starring Pancho Villa, at a yard sale is not something I'd rely on.