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The Scarlet Drop was thought lost forever. Six-time Oscar-winning American filmmaker John Ford made the movie in 1918 but only 30 minutes of the movie was thought to remain, stored in the Getty archive.
Now, more than 100 years later, Dark Horizons has reported on a story in The National News saying that it has been rediscovered.
The movie tells the story of Harry ‘Kaintuck’ Ridge (Harry Carey) who skips out on the American Civil War to join a gang of marauders. At the end of the war, he finds himself a fugitive, becomes a bandit, and ends up winning the love of a woman he has taken captive in a stagecoach hold-up.
The report highlights how Ford made 26 Westerns with Carey, more than with John Wayne. Ford produced or directed more than 130 films. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers during the Golden Age of Hollywood and was one of the first American directors to be recognized as an auteur.
His six Academy Awards including a record four wins for Best Director for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952).
A copy of the movie was found by the owner of a warehouse in Santiago, Chile just one day before it was set to be demolished. The owner was clearing out the last of the contents when he discovered a set of films once owned by a collector who had passed away forty years previously.
He roped in a film academic and film festival director who took the films and digitized them to discover what was on them. One of them was an almost complete copy of The Scarlet Drop, estimated to only be missing some small portions of the released version. A full restoration will now be carried out.
The post John Ford’s THE SCARLET DROP Rediscovered appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
