CONCORD, N.H. — In a tale celebrating the romance of movies, a contractor cleaning out an old New Hampshire barn destined for demolition found seven reels of nitrate film inside, including the only known copy of a 1913 silent film about Abraham Lincoln.
“When Lincoln Paid,” a 30-minute film about the mother of a dead Union soldier asking Lincoln to pardon a Confederate soldier whom she had initially turned in, was directed by and stars Francis Ford, the brother of John Ford, director of “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Quiet Man,” and other classics.
“I was up in the attic space, and shoved away over in a corner was the film and a silent movie projector, as well,” Peter Massie, a movie buff, said of his discovery in the western New Hampshire town of Nelson. “I thought it was really cool.”
It was the summer of 2006, and the film canisters sat in his basement for a while before Massie thought of contacting nearby Keene State College, where film professor Larry Benaquist thought it was a rare find.
After working with the George Eastman House film preservation museum in Rochester, N.Y., the college determined that the film did not exist in film archives. In fact, it was one of eight silent films starring Ford as Lincoln; there are no known surviving copies of the others.
“The vast majority of silent films, particularly from the early period — the first decade of the 20th century — are gone,” said Caroline Frick Page, curator of motion pictures at George Eastman House. “That’s what makes these stories so incredibly special.”
The college received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore it. It took a Colorado lab a year to complete the task.
Benaquist said the images themselves were well preserved, likely because they endured decades of New England winters in the barn, which also was well sheltered by trees. Nitrate film, which was phased out in Hollywood in the 1950s, is highly flammable. The 35mm film itself had shrunk and the sprocket holes were shredded.
“What the laboratory had to do was remanufacture the sprocket holes to a new dimension, make it in strips, adhere it to the image, and then run it through a printing process where they would print it, frame by frame,” Benaquist said.
Benaquist thinks the film was discovered in Nelson because the town is on Granite Lake, the site of many summer camps through the years. He said there was a boys’ camp in the area of the barn and believes the films were shown to entertain the children, then put away and forgotten.
Helping the restoration was Mark Reinhart of Columbus, Ohio, author of “Abraham Lincoln on Screen.” He had a crude video copy of the film that had been made from an 8mm copy and included a few scenes that were missing from the film found in the barn. The college combined a DVD of the restored film with a DVD taken of Reinhart’s film for its final version.
Francis Ford, who died in 1953 at age 72, is better known for small, mostly comic roles in at least 30 of his younger brother’s films, “often playing a coonskin drunk who can spit across the room,” said Tag Gallagher, author of the book “John Ford.”
Francis Ford, who introduced John Ford to the business, but when John started directing, his fame overshadowed his brother’s.
Old movie buffs might remember Francis Ford in such scenes as a drunken juror in 1939’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” and an elderly man who miraculously rises from his deathbed to see a climactic fistfight in 1952’s “The Quiet Man” starring John Wayne.
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