Director: Lynn Reynolds
Cast: Tom Mix, J. Farrell MacDonald, Eva Novak, Sid Jordan
Have I Seen It Before: Never
Did I Like It: I’m not entirely sure where the line of demarcation is between a nearly lost film, a well-preserved film, and a lost film. The Last Trail (1927), the silent movie I took in for last year’s Tom Mix day, barely exists anymore beyond a rudimentary sense that there might be some difference between light and shadow. Something like City Lights (1931) looks as good today as it did all of those years ago. And then there’s this film, which purportedly was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, but parts of the film look mostly fine, and others look like the best version of the footage exists from a cheap VHS. Might just be the copy we watched, but the practically fried in watermark for the first few minutes couldn’t help but take me out of the proceedings for a little bit. The big appeal of seeing these movies in a theater is to hope that for brief moments I can feel like I’m watching the movie at the time of release. It didn’t happen here, and for once it had nothing to do with someone’s cell phone going off.
And yet, there’s something in this film that probably should be seen to be believed. Yes, there is something to the first motion picture footage shot at the Grand Canyon, but beyond that there is an honest-to-god shot where a stuntman dangles from a rope tied to a biplane high above the said Canyon. That’s the kind of thing you can’t even see Tom Cruise do now. Usually when I glance at information about these kind of things, the magic goes away a bit. Here, the fac that the guy nearly died trying to pull this off somehow makes it even better.