Much of silent cinema is lost to us forever. In an illuminating report from 2013 titled “The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,” historian and archivist David Pierce revealed that approximately 75 percent of American silent-era feature films are considered lost. But that’s no longer the case for Edward Sedgwick’s The First Degree (1923), one film included in the exhaustive database of lost U.S. silent features maintained by the Library of Congress. Last month Chicago Film Archives, which houses upwards of 30,000 films, announced that they had found among their collections a complete, partially tinted, nitrate distribution print of The First Degree that, according to them, suffers only minor mechanical damage and has deteriorated very little in the decades since it was struck. The news was met with excitement in both local and far-reaching archival film communities.
Cautious for good reason but ultimately correct. While The First Degree, which was produced by Universal Pictures, isn’t a fabled lost film—like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle (1926) or Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927)—this compact five-reeler is of note for having been directed by Sedgwick, who later codirected most of Buster Keaton’s features for MGM with Keaton, including The Cameraman (1928; Sedgwick had sole onscreen credit).
