Ince/Paramount-Artcraft, 1920. Director: Irvin Willat. Scenario: E. Magnus Ingleton, based on a story by Luther Reed. Camera: J.O. Taylor. Cast: Hobart Bosworth, Grace Darmond, Lloyd Hughes, George Webb, Gladys George.
One of the things I love about writing this column is the opportunity to call attention to the heroic work of today’s film preservation community. The survival rate of silent and early sound films is notoriously low, but in recent decades a surprising number of rescues have occurred: supposedly “lost” films rediscovered in unsuspected locations and miraculously restored to their full pictorial glory, or something close to it, by an increasingly proficient culture of film-restoration wizards. Some of those wizards work behind the scenes at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which both restores and exhibits classic silents, and which is now allied with a new entity, the San Francisco Film Preserve. In the past I’ve highlighted some of their work in this space, and this month I have the pleasure of reporting their exciting new project that is being made available to film enthusiasts everywhere.
Eight years ago, the distinguished DVD/Blu-Ray label Flicker Alley released the San Francisco group’s restoration of the 1919 silent feature Behind the Door on disc. Some readers of this column may recognize Behind the Door; Kevin Brownlow has written eloquently of its making and of the film itself. Produced shortly after the end of World War I, the film reignited wartime passions with a story of German atrocities, and of an act of vengeance that climaxed in a scene of shocking brutality. Directed by Irvin Willat and starring Hobart Bosworth, Behind the Door remains an important document of the silent era, and we were already in debt to the SFSFF and to Flicker Alley for making it widely available.
Now they have built even further upon that foundation. This month the label is releasing a new Blu-Ray, not only featuring a fresh transfer of that classic, but supplementing it with a complete additional feature. Behind the Door was a sensation in 1919, and legendary producer Thomas Ince wasted no time in mounting a followup production. The result was Below the Surface, another cinematic gem, now beautifully restored and included on the same disc. Below the Surface is not a sequel to the earlier film—it features a new story, new characters, and no wartime content—but it reunites the same director, the same star, the same writer, the same cameraman, and the same nautical setting, and supplies its own share of solid action scenes.
In this film Hobart Bosworth and Lloyd Hughes appear as a father-and-son team of New England deep-sea divers. When Bosworth performs a dangerous and difficult dive and rescues the crew of a submarine trapped on the ocean floor, his act of heroism is widely celebrated. The publicity attracts the attention of an unscrupulous promoter (George Webb), who approaches Bosworth with an offer. If he will perform a similar dive in nearby waters to retrieve part of a fabled sunken treasure, Webb will use the coins as bait to lure unwary investors into a fraudulent scheme, and split the profits with him. Bosworth, a man of integrity, rejects the offer outright.
But Hughes, his son, is more easily swayed, and when the promoter’s accomplice (Grace Darmond) turns her beguiling charms on Hughes, he defies his father and agrees to undertake the dive himself. This sets in motion a chain of events which I will not detail here, but they lead to a powerful climax—as powerful, in its own way, as that of Behind the Door.
Like its predecessor, this film was produced by the Ince studio for release by Paramount, and benefits from topnotch production values. Hobart Bosworth, as the lead in both films, is ideally cast; his screen persona exudes an air of rugged nobility that lends added authority to the character and the story. By the late 1910s, Bosworth was no stranger to red-blooded action films. Earlier in the decade, as the head of his own studio, he had contracted with Jack London to produce a series of film adaptations of the author’s works. Maddeningly, not one of those Bosworth/London productions is known to survive intact today. For that reason, we can be doubly thankful for the preservation of these two features made by Ince and Irvin Willat; they are the best record we have of Bosworth in his most characteristic element. And while Bosworth dominates the story, the performances of the other cast members are uniformly excellent as well. The classic film enthusiast who knows Gladys George from her sound films of later decades will be intrigued to see her appearance here, in one of her first films, in a minor role as Hughes’ long-suffering sweetheart.
And, of course, our enjoyment of the film is immeasurably enhanced by the San Francisco group’s careful restoration. Working with original 35mm elements, the restorers have expertly recaptured the original beauty of the image, complete with art titles, and have recreated the authentic tinting scheme that theatrical audiences saw in 1920. Both films on this disc feature evocative musical scores by Stephen Horne, and Flicker Alley has packed the disc with its customarily rich selection of bonus features. All in all, this amounts to a generous gift to the classic film community—and, happily, we’re informed that there are many more to come.
