In 1926, Paramount Pictures released the first adaptation of “Beau Geste,” a rousing adventure novel by P.C. Wren that would be remade in 1939 and 1966 and parodied by comedian Marty Feldman in the 1977 comedy “The Last Remake of Beau Geste.” The 1926 incarnation was a commercial and critical success and won Photoplay magazine’s top prize — one year before the birth of the Academy Awards — at a time when that was the most prestigious recognition a movie could receive.
Despite the film‘s reputation, for decades it has been almost impossible to see, except on 16mm prints derived from mediocre dupes. That all changes this Sunday, April 27, when a gorgeous new restoration will premiere on the closing night of TCM Fest in Hollywood. The film will be presented with a new score performed live by the Mont Alto Orchestra. It’s an opportunity to see a truly awe-inspiring spectacle in the best way possible: on a huge screen (at one of Hollywood’s most beautiful movie palaces, the Egyptian Theatre) with a packed crowd.
The restoration has been years in the making and represents a heroic collaboration between Paramount, multiple archives, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which has teamed with veteran film restorers Robert A. Harris (no stranger to epic filmmaking, having supervised restorations of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Spartacus”) and James Mockoski on an initiative to bring silent classics to modern audiences. (To that end, the “Beau Geste” restoration will be released theatrically in theaters across North America by Rialto Pictures.) According to Mockoski, “Beau Geste” is the perfect gateway for viewers who want to truly appreciate the pleasures of epic cinema.
“You just can’t do that kind of filmmaking anymore,” Mockoski told IndieWire, noting that the impressive scale of “Beau Geste” is comparable to another film he worked on in his capacity as an archivist at Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, “Apocalypse Now.” Like that film, “Beau Geste” is filled with jaw-dropping set pieces staged practically, without the benefit of digital technology. “Today, the thousands of people climbing the sand dunes would be CGI. At that time, they had to build a fort in the middle of nowhere, and get a water pipeline. They had to create a whole infrastructure to shoot this film.”
Ironically, the fact that “Beau Geste” was so revered in its day left it somewhat neglected in terms of preservation, since everyone in the field assumed it was taken care of. “Everyone thought that someone else was doing something with it, but no one was,” Harris told IndieWire. “UCLA had some materials, but they were not complete. MoMA had some materials. The Library of Congress had the final print that was made in 1939 by Paramount. None of these elements had any real quality to them, so it was a bit of a mess.”
Harris and Mockoski’s job was complicated by the fact that there were three different cuts of “Beau Geste” that went into theatrical release: an initial roadshow version with an intermission, a slightly shortened edit for wider audiences, and a subsequent incarnation that was even shorter, with pieces taken out of each scene to give the movie more showtimes per day. When Harris and Mockoski began examining the existing elements to see what they had to work with, they found that each version only existed in pieces and often in extremely poor shape — UCLA’s archive, for example, had three out of 10 reels from the second version, while MoMA had a negative that was slightly out of focus due to film shrinkage. The George Eastman Museum had a 16mm version of the third version.
The most complete copy of the film was the 1939 Paramount print stored at the Library of Congress, all at one exposure with no color timing. This copy was printed after the coming of sound, which created a major problem. “The printer masked out the soundtrack area, so the entire left side of the frame was missing,” Harris said. That meant the restorers had to take imperfect left sides of other inferior prints and digitally stitch them onto the Paramount print, a process that took several years and the efforts of dozens of archivists at multiple institutions.
“Thank God we got the cooperation of Paramount, and the George Eastman Museum, and UCLA, and the Museum of Modern Art,” Mockoski said. “There were no egos — we all just wanted to save the film.” Mockoski credits the Library of Congress with coordinating all the organizations so that every possible extant print of “Beau Geste” could be utilized in the restoration. “It takes building an army to make this work happen. It’s not a profitable endeavor. It’s just good to do because these are great films.”
“Beau Geste” is part of a larger project Harris and Mockoski are currently working on as they race against time to save major films from the Paramount library. “We have been authorized by the studio to restore a number of their silent films,” Harris said. “They’ve given us access to numerous titles and we’re juggling about 40 of them at the moment, trying to find missing elements.”
One thing that keeps Mockoski and Harris going is the constant sense of discovery that accompanies their work — both men were stunned, for example, by the filmmaking sophistication and visceral thrills of “Beau Geste” and how well they held up after nearly 100 years.
“This production sometimes rivals what we’re doing today,” Mockoski said. He hopes the work he, Harris, and their peers do can inspire the next generation of filmmakers the way that Abel Gance’s 1927 epic “Napoleon” — a movie Mockoski and Harris worked on restoring several decades ago — inspired Francis Ford Coppola. “The end of the silent era was such a wonderful, incredibly dense period of creativity,” Harris said, “but time is not our friend in these matters. We can’t just think these films are being protected and preserved. We’re doing everything we can to save the surviving silents.”
The world premiere of the restored “Beau Geste” will take place at TCM Fest on Sunday, April 27.
