The Post gets action! Nearly five years after I wrote that a neglected western from 1933 with a pre-stardom Randolph Scott and Shirley Temple was in dire need of rescue, the Museum of Modern Art is debuting a brand-new restoration of "To the Last Man'' next week.
It's part of an enormous group of older films that are referred to as "orphans'' because their copyrights have expired — because nobody owns them, they've circulated for decades in poor-quality, often incomplete, public-domain prints, frequently derived from 16 mm dupes many generations distant from the 35 mm originals shown in theaters.
Organizations like MoMA, the Library of Congress, the UCLA Film and Television Archives and the Motion Picture Academy have rescued many of these movies, often with funding from groups like the National Film Preservation Foundation and Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation.
But others, like "To the Last Man,'' have slipped through the cracks — even though it was part of a B-movie series that launched Scott as one of the most iconic western stars of Hollywood's Golden Age — and provided a showy, unbilled part for Temple just before she became an international child superstar.
It's also a fairly racy and very violent (at one point, the head gets shot off Shirley's doll) western variation on "Romeo and Juliet,'' made a year before Hollywood censors cracked down and began enforcing the Production Code, which strongly discouraged explicit depiction of sexual situations and violence, among other things.
I wrote about this forgotten gem — directed by Henry Hathaway, who became a major director (his credits include the 1969 flick "True Grit,'' for which John Wayne won a Best Actor Oscar) — as part of a January 2010 film preservation blogathon co-organized by my friend (and eventual colleague at The Post) Farran Smith Nehme.
Henry Hathaway, who directed "To the Last Man," later became a major director whose credits include the 1969 flick "True Grit' starring John Wayne (above).Photo: Everett Collection
Writers always hope their work gets noticed, but I wasn't expecting an e-mail the next day from David Stenn, a film historian I know who's on the preservation board at MoMA. He'd never heard of "To the Last Man,'' but was intrigued by my description of its historical significance — and further impressed when he tracked down one of the murky copies circulating on DVD (the best I've seen is the Roan Group's 2006 release, for which I provided an introduction).
Stenn began making the first of many calls about the film, a quest that lasted for years. Paramount Pictures, which produced the film, didn't have any materials in its vaults. Nor did Universal Pictures, which owns hundreds of pre-1948 Paramount films.
In a series of e-mails and phone calls, Stenn told me how his research revealed that "To the Last Man'' and around 20 other talkies in a series that Paramount based on Zane Grey novels got left out of the sale to Universal's former owner, MCA, in the mid-1950. That's because they were under license from Paramount at the time to a firm handling theatrical reissues, Favorite Films, which had given most of them new titles (seven had been remade in the 1940s at RKO, only adding to the confusion).
Copyrights had to be renewed after 28 years under laws in effect until 1976 — but Paramount, which had gotten their rights well before that time, didn't bother renewing the copyright on "To the Last Man'' and the others because their literary rights to Grey's novel (which was still in copyright) had expired. Even with two big stars, somebody decided "To the Last Man'' wasn't worth renegotiating for literary rights for a film the studio no longer owned.
Shirley Temple is seen here at home around 1933, when she appeared in the film "To the Last Man."Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"Nobody was paying attention, and it began circulating in these really atrocious prints,'' says Stenn. "It's a really interesting film with a great cast and an important director, as well as a fascinating example of its genre.''
The Library of Congress, which warehouses many highly-perishable Paramount nitrate negatives from this era, didn't have this one. David was very surprised, though, to discover that further research revealed that a negative had been donated by Paramount in 1990 — to MoMA!
Nothing had ever been done with it, probably at least partly because the second reel was missing. Stenn launched a new search for 35 mm materials on the missing reel — I knew the DVD I had introduced was derived from a 35 mm print, but it had been sold, and the current owner couldn't be found. None of the many other collectors that Stenn contacted seemed to have a 35 mm copy, either.
Finally deciding to fill in the missing reel with the best 16 mm print he could find, Stenn then had to convince MoMA that "To the Last Man'' deserved dipping into its Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation to strike a new print over many other worthy projects.
Thanks in part to the enthusiasm of adjunct curator Dave Kehr, a green light was finally given and I got a preview of the results last week.
Except for the 10 minutes in 16 mm, which are more than passable — and a bit of dupe-y stock footage recycled from a silent 1923 version — the film looks amazingly clear and sharp, even including a couple of brief scenes that were missing from versions I'd seen (like bad guy Noah Beery beginning to whip his daughter Esther Ralston, who also has a skinny-dipping scene that probably hasn't been seen this clearly since 1933).
"This restoration of 'To the Last Man' is such a testament to what MoMA is doing right now,'' says Stenn. "Restoration is really painstaking work, and it's great that they're finally making it available in such great form. And it probably wouldn't have happened if you hadn't written about it!''
"To the Last Man'' will be shown Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. and on Nov. 2 at 3 p.m. (I will introduce the second screening) as part of To Save and Project: the 12th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.
The festival opens Friday at 7 p.m. with the premiere of MoMA's stunning new restoration of Allan Dwan's "The Iron Mask'' starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr., with all of its talking sequences, and the original score, heard for the first time since 1929 thanks to the recent rediscovery of long-missing soundtrack discs.
Other highlights of the series, which runs through Nov. 22, include such recently rediscovered super-rarities as the first New York screening of sequences that Orson Welles filmed (but never used) in the 1938 Mercury Theater production of "Too Much Johnson'' — as well as the first-ever showing of an uncompleted 1913 feature with the only surviving footage of legendary African-American comedian Bert Williams.
The complete schedule is at moma.com.
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