First up, from July 1909, a quick but very detailed article about Lillian Nordica's third marriage to New York financier George Young. Nordica and Young were separated when she embarked on her South Pacific tour. YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT NORDICA AT THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE HERE.
It was produced by Famous Players-Lasky, distributed by Paramount Pictures, and starred Gloria Swanson and Ian Keith. It was based on a short story by Mary Roberts Rinehart, often called the American Agatha Christie. You can read more about her here. The 1924 film is unfortunately, considered lost.
Swanson's
co-star, American actor Ian Keith, was a veteran character actor of
the legitimate theater, and appeared in a variety of colorful roles in
silent features of the 1920s. His stage training made him a natural
choice for the new "talking pictures" but he enjoyed a long and varied
career. YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT HIM HERE.Next up, more Swanson in the 1924 film, THE WAGES OF VIRTUE.
p.s. Allan Dwan was a pioneering Canadian-born American motion picture director, producer and screenwriter. He also had his own "Croton"/Hudson Valley connection; read more here
SEE THE LAST EDITION OF MORE RECENTLY UNEARTHED BITS & PIECES ABOUT CROTON NOTABLES LILLIAN NORDICA, MABLE DODGE LUHAN, SOPHIE IRENE LOEB, and HOWARD DA SILVA HERE
AND IN CASE YOU MISSED THE 1972 POST ON KATHLEEN BELLER, CLICK HERE
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It's really shame so many of these films were lost. Wiki has a whole section on lost films and what happened.
ReplyDeleteMany other early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film used for nearly all 35 mm negatives and prints made before 1952 is highly flammable. When in very badly deteriorated condition and improperly stored (e.g., in a sun-baked shed), nitrate film can and will spontaneously combust. Fires have destroyed entire archives of films. For example, a storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 films.[10] The 1965 MGM vault fire resulted in the loss of hundreds more silent films and early talkies.
Nitrate film is chemically unstable and over time can decay into a sticky mass or a powder akin to gunpowder. This process can be very unpredictable: some nitrate film from the 1890s is still in good condition today, while some much later nitrate had to be scrapped as unsalvageable when it was barely 20 years old. Much depends on the environment in which it is stored. Ideal conditions of low temperature, low humidity, and adequate ventilation can preserve nitrate film for centuries, but in practice, the storage conditions were usually far from ideal. When a film on nitrate base is said to have been "preserved", this almost always means simply that it has been copied onto safety film or, more recently, digitized; both methods result in some loss of quality.
Eastman Kodak introduced a nonflammable 35 mm film stock in spring 1909. However, the plasticizers used to make the film flexible evaporated too quickly, making the film dry and brittle, causing splices to part and perforations to tear. By 1911, the major American film studios were back to using nitrate stock.[11] "Safety film" was relegated to sub-35 mm formats such as 16 mm and 8 mm until improvements were made in the late 1940s.