A long-lost silent movie turned up in a storage closet and got its first screening in almost a century. Next stop: Turner Classic Movies

CHICAGO — Last week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, before a near-capacity crowd, director Edward Sedgwick’s five-reel silent film “The First Degree” said hello again in first public appearance in 97 years.

Cinephiles, it was a great night. After so much lockdown/laptop/living room viewing these past 19 months — and I’ve been getting out to see movies in theaters and at drive-ins, in varying degrees of confidence, more than most — this event delivered, and everybody was vaccinated and/or recently COVID-19-tested, and the pleasure belonged to everybody. As Film Center programming director Rebecca Fons put it prior to the screening: “I’m so excited to see so many smiling-behind-masks faces here!”

The long-lost movie’s rediscovery in a storage closet in Peoria, and its more recent preservation and digital cleanup operation conducted by Chicago Film Archives, added crucial chapters to its second life. Film historian and University of Chicago professor emeritus Tom Gunning introduced the film at the Sept. 29 screening, calling it “a resurrection.” There’s more to come for “The First Degree,” too — notably a screening in late 2021 or 2022 on Turner Classic Movies, featuring the original score by Chicago-based band Quasar Wut-Wut. That’s what the Film Center audience heard, live, on Sept. 29.

Told in a ream of flashbacks somewhat unusual for the era, “The First Degree” concerns a banker turned wrongly imprisoned ex-con turned sheep farmer (Frank Mayo), hounded and blackmailed at every turn by his half brother (Philo McCullough, oozing subtle sadism). They’re both in love with Mary, a paragon of Victorian-molded sweetness and light. She’s played by Sylvia Breamer, who really knows how to pop her eyes at eye-popping revelations.

The music, co-composer and performer Matt Schwarz told me after the show, strove to capture “the unceasing devilishness” of the villain, and the psychological torment of the beleaguered hero. Onstage, beneath the larger of the Film Center’s two screens, a baby grand piano lined the lip of the stage area, alongside various keyboards (including a ‘70s-era Casio synthesizer), guitar, bass and drums. The five musicians cast an intriguing spell of contrasts, eerie electronic loops interwoven with more traditional melodic waltz-time themes played on piano.

The Quasar Wut-Wut score already has been recorded, and will accompany the forthcoming TCM premiere, which likely will air in late 2021 or early 2022 as part of the “Silent Sundays” programming hosted by Jacqueline Stewart. Also, Schwarz said, “I want to do it live again somewhere! You never quite hit it the first time.“

The Chicago Film Archives staffer who made the actual, out-of-the-donation-box discovery last year, Olivia Babler, was there last week, too. “After a year of only hearing my co-workers’ reactions to the film,” she said, “it was so exciting to share it with a whole bunch of people. Hopefully one day we can get it photochemically preserved and show it on 35 millimeter. But it turned out pretty well with the digital scan.”

“I mean, it’s just chance. What does or doesn’t get found after all those years? Pure serendipity,” Nancy Watrous, Chicago Film Archives executive director, told me afterward. “Olivia did a fantastic job with the digital scan. But the fact that (nearly) the entire film was discovered in such good condition — amazing.” In his intro, Gunning recalled one early 20th century film director likening the precarious physical properties of nitrate film to “being in the ice business. Part of the value of your product disappears every day.”

To once again encounter an ordinary 1923 movie, no classic but a prime example of what audiences wanted, and got, to satiate their moviegoing habit, after a disappearing act of nearly a century … well, Gunning said, that’s enough “to send a shiver down your spine.”

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“The First Degree” next screens Oct. 24 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cinematheque, with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin. The film is scheduled to air on Turner Classic Movies, with the Chicago Film Archives-commissioned score written and performed by Quasar Wut-Wut, sometime before mid-2022.

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