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11 Th~ Wild Goos~ Chas~ Produced by the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company for Paramount release. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Scenario: William C. deMille, from his play. Art director: Wilfred Buckland. Photography: Alvin Wyckoff Picture started: March I5, I9 I5. Pictured finished: March 25, I9 I5. Length: 4,286 feet (five reels). Cost: $10,61 1.85. Released: May 27, 1915. Gross: $60,630.68 Cast: Ina Claire (Betty Wright), Tom Forman (Bob Randall), Lucien Littlefield (Grind), Helen Marlborough (Betty's mother), Raymond Hatton (Betty's father ), Theodore Roberts (Horatio Brutus Bangs), Ernest Joy (Bob's father), and Florence Smith (Bob's mother) The Wild Goose Chase brought stage favorite Ina Claire to the screen 1 in a quickly and cheaply made production that the star later chose to ignore-to the point offorgetting she evermade it, according to DeMille.I Today, no print ofThe Wild Goose Chase is known to exist in any archive or private collection, and it is a pity. Ina Claire was a delightful theatrical personality, and from contemporary reviews it seems that DeMille was able to capture much of her stage presence on film. Claire made only two other silent films, The Puppet Crown (Lasky Feature Play Company , 1915) and Polly with a Past (Metro, 1920), and a mere handful of talkies-most notably The Royal Family of Broadway (Paramount, 1930), The Greeks Had a Word for Them (Goldwyn-United Artists, 1932), and the long-unseen first sound version of The Awful Truth (Path6, 1929). During his early career, Cecil B. DeMille made no effort to keep prints of his films. When he left Famous Players-Lasky to form his own company in 1925, he made an agreement with Jesse Lasky to strike prints of his earlier productions for his personal use.2 DeMille received prints of all but seven of his first forty-eight films, and in the early 1960s his family made arrangements to give the 35mm nitrate prints to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New Yark, for preservation. The majority of his work survives because of DeMille's foresight. While The Squaw 47 Man (1914), The Cheat (1915), The Little American (1917), The Affairs ofAnatol(1921), Manslaughter (1922), The Ten Commandments (1923), and a handful ofhis other Paramount silents have surfaced elsewhere, the bulk of DeMille's pre-I925 output would have been lost to the ravages of nitrate decomposition and studio neglect if he had not kept his own prints in a concrete vault at his Hollywood home. By contrast, William deMille, who was an equally prolific silent-screen director, left his celluloid posterity in the hands ofParamount, and his surviving films can be counted on the pitching hand of "Three-Finger" Brown. When Cecil B. DeMille received the Screen Producers Guild Milestone Award on January 22, 1956, he said in his acceptance address: I cannot stand here surrounded by so many friends ... without thinking also of the others who did so much to make our industry great and are now gone out of this world of shadows and images into the Light. I cannot think of them and their work without wishing again, as I have wished many times, that we and the public were more aware of the dramatic riches we have stored in our vaults-the classics of the screen. Of course, we have occasional reissues, if one must use that detestable word. We do not say that someone reissues Hamlet or Lohengrin-or that, the next time you go to the Louvre, you can see a reissue of the Mona Lisa. You might as well say that God reissues the sunset every evening. When we think in terms of "reissues," we automatically condemn the picture to second-rate treatment by the publicity and advertising departments, by the exhibitors-and by the public. The great classics of the screen deserve better treatment than that-for they remain not second-rate, but first-rate specimens of the dramatic art. And I include among them a number of the old silent pictures-which, for pure motion picture art, have not been surpassed by sound-and which should be presented to the public on special projecting machines running at 60 feet a minute, instead of the present 90 feet a minute, that makes great artists jump about like Woody Woodpecker.3 The [motion picture] industry will not come of age until it makes a determined effort to keep its own great classics [3.149.252.37] Project MUSE (2024...

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