The Portuguese Film Archive has announced that “The Scarlet Drop,” a western directed by John Ford in 1918, will be screened on October 20 as part of World Audiovisual Heritage Day celebrations, held on October 27 by the members of the International Federation of Film Archives.
“The Scarlet Drop” is distinguished by themes uncommon to westerns of the period, such as social inequality, class struggle, and marginalization, the Cinemateca Portuguesa noted.
Featuring Harry Carey, the film “already showcases what would later be known as the Fordian universe: rituals, melancholic situations, social differences, anti-heroes, and extraordinary photography,” according to a press release from the Cinemateca.
Believed lost for over a century, “The Scarlet Drop” was discovered in 2024 among old films in a warehouse in Santiago, Chile.
Chilean academic Jaime Córdova, from the University of Viña del Mar, bought a collection of films from a former collector in the Providencia neighborhood of the capital. The collector, unaware of their contents and eager to dispose of them, had stored the films for over four decades.
“I don’t think something as significant as finding a lost John Ford film will happen again in my life. Ford’s work has always been admired, but to find a lost film? It’s like finding a Holy Grail,” Jaime Córdova stated in an interview last December with Efe news agency.
The John Ford film set to be shown at the Portuguese Film Archive, alongside Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho Dayu” (1954), underwent digital restoration by the National Film Archive of Chile.
“I wouldn’t call it restoration. While there was repair to the film’s support, the image itself wasn’t altered. If you watch the trailer, the quality of the nitrate image is extraordinary,” Córdova emphasized in the 2024 interview.
“Nitrate spontaneously combusts at 40 degrees, as if decomposing, yet when I opened the cans, the film was perfect. It’s twists of fate that allow some films to survive while others don’t,” remarked the proud discoverer.
Ford, among the most influential filmmakers in history and creator of classics like “How Green Was My Valley” (1941) and “The Searchers” (1956), retains the original color hues of 1918 in the film, with pink, blue, and ochre tones characteristic of the era’s coloring technique, countering the monochrome of black and white.
