Long-lost collection of US silent movies found in New Zealand

WELLINGTON - A long-lost collection of silent movies has been discovered in New Zealand and is being returned to the US, the government said Tuesday.

They include the only known copy of director John Ford’s 1927 film “Upstream” and a 1923 comedy called “Mary of the Movies”, which is said to be the oldest surviving Columbia Pictures feature film.

The collection also includes a 1923 movie called “Maytime”, starring classic flapper beauty Clara Bow.

Christopher Finlayson, minister for arts, culture and heritage, said there were no known copies of these nitrate films in existence in the US.

The movies, found in vaults of the New Zealand Film Archive, are being shipped to the US National Film Preservation Foundation.

Finlayson said they would be preserved over the next three years for access through major US silent film archives, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Explaining the find, New Zealand Film Archive spokesman Steve Russell told Wellington’s Dominion Post “the tyranny of distance has in this case been in our favour.

“We were probably, in most cases, the end of the distribution run, so by the time the films got here they had probably been forgotten about by their US distributors,” he explained.

“They would have lain around for a while then have been picked up by projectionists, gone into private collections, before making their way to the Film Archive.”

Director John Ford went on to win four Oscars and only 15 percent of his silent films are known to have survived. A trailer for his 1929 movie called “Strong Boy”, starring Victor McLaglen, is among the discovered collection.

Other significant finds are “The Woman Hater” (1910), starring silent movie stunt queen Pearl White, “Won in a Cupboard” (1914) - starring Mabel Normand, who went on to star in the Keystone comedies, and “Why Husbands Flirt” (1918), produced and directed by Al Christie.