The Scarlet Drop

In 2023, the day before a scheduled demolition of a disused warehouse in Providencia, Chile, the building’s proprietor came upon a private collection of film prints that had lain undisturbed for more than four decades. Indeed, providence itself seemed to bless the world’s cinephiles, as this unnamed hero, perhaps a movie buff himself—if not merely a person uncommonly scrupulous in their actions—decided to reach out to the Festival Internacional de Cine Recobrado (Recovered Cinema) in Valparaíso, which has been showing restored films and vintage prints since 1997.

Jaime Cordova, the journalist, professor, and researcher who runs the festival, made it to the warehouse in time to inspect the prints. People in his position surely put much stock in fateful phone calls like these—which, if they do yield discoveries, are mostly of the modest kind. Rare are the marquee cases, like the 1981 rediscovery of the long-lost uncensored version of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), found by a janitor in an Oslo mental asylum. It’s more common that lost silent films are rediscovered only upon closer cataloguing and inspection of existing archives: major catches from the ocean of obliviated silent films are more likely to be trawled out of an incorrectly marked container deep in an existing archive, than stowed away in a broom closet.

Yet the cannisters that awaited Cordova proved a considerable discovery, a notable missing puzzle-piece from the oeuvre of one of the greatest of all filmmakers. Notably, the archivist was able to distinguish the familiar stylistic and narrative contours of a film by John Ford from what he saw, including an early appearance by Abraham Lincoln that echoed the great filmmaker’s many near-mythic portrayals of the American president (as would be seen again, hagiographically, in Ford’s first significant commercial success, The Iron Horse (1924)). Further comparison of the characters mentioned in the extant title cards confirmed its identity: The Scarlet Drop (1918), a popular Harry Carey western that otherwise only survived in fragments held by the Getty Museum. This Chilean warehouse had yielded four of the film’s five total reels, equalling 40 minutes of screen time, in a good state of preservation despite their shabby home of more than 100 years. Cordova has said that “some films simply want to live.”

Made when Ford was only 24 years old, The Scarlet Drop is part of a flurry of short westerns the director made during his early apprenticeship at Universal Studios under Carl Laemmle (look out for the wonderfully crude iteration of the company’s pre-roll at the beginning), a prolific period in which he directed 36 films, of which only a few now survive. Bringing his customary physical grace and melancholic tenderness to the role, Harry Carey, with whom Ford often collaborated, plays “Kaintuck” Harry Ridge, a man denied permission to fight for the Union in the Civil War. Faced with this rejection, he casts off the yoke of normal society, becomes an outlaw, and moves west. Sometime later, he robs a stagecoach while still at large; on board is Calvert, the man who kept him from the army, and his adult daughter Molly, whom Harry falls in love with by merely looking at her. Acting with a tenderness common to even the gruffiest of Ford's heroes, this first contact is a moment of disarming sweetness on Carey’s part, amplified through the suggestive, wordless gesture of slowly removing his hat. Kaintuck Harry is another of those small men in John Ford films who watch as the huge events of history march by, as progress does battle with barbarism as it embarks on its slow crawl into the future, and who are forced—whether by fate, by contrition, or merely by the human condition—to cast off their community for a rugged life outside civilisation. When Harry meets the Calverts in that moment of chance, the nature of his transformation into a social outcast—a bandit, a renegade—has, we sense, finally dawned on him.

As is also obvious from his even earlier surviving westerns, Straight Shooting and Bucking Broadway (both 1917), Ford’s awesome pictorial sense was intact even at that impossibly early age. In The Scarlet Drop, the prelude to the stagecoach robbery sees Harry weave on horseback through the rocky highlands above the desert, circling along dirt paths in anticipation of the arrival of the slow-moving stagecoach, visible in the distance. Such images have an enormity that imbues the story with an almost primal power. Most memorably, there’s an extraordinary chase sequence on horses in the marshes at night, illuminated only by torchlight, with the blobs of flickering flame dyed an effervescent orange on this last existing print (fortunately, the original colouring was well preserved in the discovered reels). As Harry sees the horsemen approach, he hurriedly extinguishes the fire he and Molly had been warming themselves by, and the effect is like that of a sorcerer vanishing: the two bodies—fugitive lovers—are consumed by the billowing smoke and disappear into blackness. Even with all the wonders around it, sometimes an image like that is all you need.