‘Fox Movietone Follies of 1929’–sometimes referred to as ” Movietone Follies of 1929 and The William Fox Movietone Follies of 1929–is a lost film. Or is it? Wildly successful upon its release in the spring of 1929–a year of true American madness, peaking that summer and soon to collapse in the fall–the film was lavishly produced and featured color sequences in the Multicolor process in some of the revue scenes. Alas,  all prints known to exist were destroyed in fires at the Fox storage facility in New Jersey in 1937. For early talkie enthusiasts, the movie has long been a sort of holy grail of goofy, period entertainment, a ‘lost city’ never to be regained.

But wait a minute. A few months ago on Facebook, I went to the ‘Vitaphone Project’ page and found the above reel of fragments from the film posted. There are seven chunks in all–none of them complete, all of them random snippets of scenes or production numbers. The picture quality is amazing. And now, the reel has turned up on YouTube. It turns out the fragments are from an original 35mm nitrate print of the film. Thus the excellence of the black-and-white image–nitrate film contained an abundance of silver giving the image a special richness and sparkle that no other black-and-white film could duplicate. The mystery here, though, is where did these fragments come from? Why were they so well preserved? Why did they suddenly appear and why won’t whoever’s responsible for unearthing this beyond-rare find answer any of these questions on either the Facebook page or the YouTube comments section? The world of the film collector has long been a mysterious one–collectors are known to be secret, uncommunicative hoarders who don’t like to share their rarest items. Don’t ask me why–I would think it would be a delight to find these things and expose them to others. Anyway, whoever is responsible for mysteriously releasing this footage to The Vitaphone Project is to be commended. As far as the movie fragments go, they’re remarkably silly as all of these early pre-Warner Brothers musicals are. In some ways, perhaps this amount of the film is all we really need to experience. Take a trip back to the ‘lost city’–now partially excavated–known as ‘Fox Movietone Follies of 1929’…or ‘Movietone 1929 Fox Follies’…or ‘Follies Fox Movies’…or whatever.