Even perfectly scripted Hollywood love stories can, literally, turn toxic with time.
What happened leading up to Tuesday night's showing of the long-lost silent film Beyond the Rocks, starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, arguably the silver screen's first male sex symbol, is a case in point.
Film fanatics, historians and Swanson herself had feared the only motion picture to feature two of the biggest stars of the 1920s -- a romantic melodrama in which love triumphs over money -- was gone forever.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"Does anyone know of a print anywhere of Beyond the Rocks, the film Rudy Valentino made with me in 1921?" Swanson asked in her 1980 autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, lamenting its disappearance. "That, after all, was supposed to be the great virtue of pictures -- that they would last forever."
Just another Hollywood illusion, as it turns out.
Silent movies like Beyond the Rocks were recorded on flammable nitrate film that can dissolve and emit toxic gases. Some studies indicate that about 80 percent of all silent films made in the US have either been destroyed or have disintegrated into potential health hazards.
That is why archivists at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam donned gas masks and protective garments before sifting through an eccentric Dutch collector's donation of 2,000 or so rusty film canisters, which ultimately yielded Beyond the Rocks, a 1922 release.
"Since we were the first ones to open these cans, we didn't know what was really in there," said Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, a Filmmuseum archivist. "That's why we had to wear gas masks."
Decked out in their protective gear, she and her colleagues watched in delight as snippets of pent-up glamour flickered before them: There was Swanson in lavish beaded gowns and a fortune in jewelry; and Valentino, once again oozing his legendary sex appeal as the other man in a classic love triangle.
"He is very charming, nobody can deny this," Rongen-Kaynakci said with a giggle. "Seeing him move in the film, he's charming, he's sweet, he's just great."
Over a three-year period, the Filmmuseum's archivists waded through a virtual hazardous waste site of decaying film before they discovered all seven reels of Beyond the Rocks. Researchers say they believe that the 80-minute film they have reconstructed is nearly complete, based on comparisons with the script, with only about seven minutes missing. The Filmmuseum restored its sepia tint, stabilized some images, repaired scratches and tears as best it could.
Swanson plays Theodora Fitzgerald, a young woman who marries a rich, older man for the sake of her family, which has fallen on hard times. However, fate (which is to say the screenwriter Elinor Glyn) throws her into the arms of Valentino as the English aristocrat Lord Hector Bracondale.
He plucks her from two perilous situations -- an overturned boat and a tumble down a mountainside -- before pursuing her to the ends of the earth, which in those days were filmed in the Rocky Mountains and greater Los Angeles area.
Milestone Film and Video Company, a New Jersey distributor, hopes to rerelease Beyond the Rocks this fall at film festivals and in theaters around the US. The film was not a huge success at its premiere in 1922. The New York Times panned it as a tale of two clotheshorses. But its discovery is considered significant today because so many silent films have vanished.
"Outright destruction, neglect and basic deterioration" is to blame, lamented Patrick Loughney, curator of motion pictures at the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the largest film archives in the United States. In the 1920s, many studios considered their movies to be mere products that could be discarded once they had earned money.
Loughney applauded the discovery of Beyond the Rocks because it gives "context to one of the least understood eras of American film history."
As the director Martin Scorsese says in a videotaped introduction to Tuesday night's showing, it was one of the first movies to feature two major stars. "That alone makes the discovery of Beyond the Rocks a noteworthy event," he says.
The film's unlikely savior was the collector Joop van Liempd, himself something of a legendary figure in his home city of Haarlem.
Van Liempd was a loner who has remained as much of a mystery to curators as many of the crumbling films he collected. By the time of his death in 2000 at the age of 87, he had amassed an enormous collection of film canisters that, fearing for their safety, he spread out over at least five locations, friends said.
But few of the canisters were labeled and many, archivists say, had never been opened. Some -- surprisingly given their flammability -- were stored next to a gas heater, museum officials said.
Jan van den Brink, a Filmmuseum curator, suspects that van Liempd might never have seen Beyond the Rocks, at least not the copy in his collection.
"With 2,000 cans of film, you can't see them all," van den Brink said. "It would have taken a lifetime."
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