Rescuing The Gunfighter: A Lost Film Reconstructed from an Ancient Home Movie Edition

Approximately 73 percent of American silent feature films are believed lost forever.¹ David Pierce's 2013 report on the survival status of the American silent cinema, commissioned by the National Film Preservation Foundation, adds some interesting detail. Early home movie releases have played a significant role in preserving some otherwise lost films, as 365 American silent features only exist in 16mm versions.² Of the 129 American features released on 9.5mm, 56 survive only in this form.

Pathé introduced the 9.5mm format as the first practical home movie gauge in 1922, a year before Kodak's 16mm.³ It was aimed more at home showmanship than at amateur filmmaking, shown by the fact that the projector was on the market a year before the camera (Figure 2).⁴ Pathé had pioneered an earlier nontheatrical film format in 1912, 28mm, but this was expensive and in practice was in use more in schools and church halls than domestically.⁵ 9.5mm made it possible for people to enjoy films in their own homes, epitomized by Pathé's advertising slogan "Le cinéma chez soi."⁶

Figure 1.

The opening shot of The Gunfighter, from a 9.5mm print. Christopher Bird Collection.

The 9.5mm format gave a surprisingly high-quality picture: thanks to the sprocket holes being placed on the frame line, the full width of the film was used for the picture area, giving an image very similar to 16mm.⁷ However, there was a significant limitation with these 9.5mm versions: Pathé cut down the original content brutally, especially with some of their first releases.⁸ The early 9.5mm projectors were hand cranked, and shorter releases made the films more affordable.⁹ Both of these factors led to films being reduced to two or three little cassettes each holding sixty feet of film, equating to around ten minutes pulled from an original feature (Figure 3).¹⁰

Archives have tended to shun 9.5mm perhaps because of this limitation, even though the format led to the most famous film restoration of all: Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927), which

Figure 2.

An early French advertisement for a Pathé Baby 9.5mm projector, from Easter 1923. Christopher Bird Collection.

began as a 9.5mm reconstruction by a teenaged Kevin Brownlow.

The catalog of films in the Pathé Baby format, as it was known, was wide ranging.¹¹ In addition to epics from Gance and Raymond Bernard, there were comedies, from Max Linder to René Clair. But there was plenty of American product as well, including a range of films from the Triangle Corporation, with several Douglas Fairbanks films and two from William S. Hart. Some Triangle films only survive at all today thanks to the abbreviated 9.5mm versions issued in the late 1920s.¹²

Figure 3.

The three small cassettes that make up one of the 9.5mm prints of The Gunfighter. Christopher Bird Collection.

THE GUNFIGHTER

William S. Hart directed and starred in The Gunfighter (1917), set in Arizona in the 1880s. He plays the leader of a group of outlaws, with several kills to his name, who is reformed by the local seamstress, Margery Wilson, and ends up saving the town from the local bandit. Future stars John Gilbert and Alice Terry are rumored to be among the extras. However, the film has been regarded as lost for decades.

Kevin Brownlow unearthed a 9.5mm print of The Gunfighter in the mid-1950s and reviewed it in his monthly column in Amateur Cine World: "The Gunfighter is the best possible example of Hart's technique, and is a real collector's item."¹³ Pathé's 9.5mm versions were sold across the world, from South America to Japan. This 9.5mm reissue was created in 1927, a decade after its original production, and released in Britain as The Outlaw and in America as The Border Sheriff (Figure 4). These...