“The Scarlet Drop,” a work of legendary six-time Oscar-winning American filmmaker John Ford, has been found nearly in its entirety after being lost for over a century reports The National News.
The 1918 film follows Harry ‘Kaintuck’ Ridge (Harry Carey) who skips out on the American Civil War to join a gang of marauders and at the end of the war finds himself a fugitive.
Going west, he becomes a bandit and ends up winning the love of a woman he has taken captive after holding up a stage coach.
It was one of 26 westerns Ford made with Carey, the most prolific partnership of Ford’s career even as his work with John Wayne remains his most famous partnership. Ford’s career ultimately spanned over 130 films and more than 50 years from 1917-1970.
Until this discovery, only about 30 minutes of footage from the film existed in the Getty Archive with no full cut thought to remain intact.
The movie was rediscovered by the owner of a warehouse in Santiago, Chile just one day before it was set to be demolished. Going through the building’s contents, the owner discovered a trove of films once owned by a local collector and left untouched for forty years after his death.
The owner contacted a film academic and film festival director who rescued the films from being discarded. It was digitised but is still in need of a full restoration and there are still some “missing partial aspects of the film”.
Plans for a wider release of the film have not been announced.