Long Lost Film Starring King Baggot Discovered by Movie Geek

The King Baggot Tribute will take place Wednesday September 28th at 7pm at Lee Auditorium inside the Missouri History Museum (Lindell and DeBaliviere in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri). The 1913 silent film IVANHOE will be accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra and there will be a 40-minute illustrated lecture on the life and career of King Baggot by We Are Movie Geeks’ Tom Stockman. A Facebook invite for the event can be found HERE

Okay, technically I didn’t ‘discover’ it. I actually bought it off eBay and I guess it wasn’t really lost…but I thought it was so that counts for something!

King Baggot was a silent film star from St. Louis. He was a major player in the early days of silent film, known as the first ‘King of the Movies’ He was the first actor to have his name above a movie’s title and the first actor that people went to see a movie because a certain actor was in it. Between 1909 and 1916, he was known as “The Most Photographed Man in the World” and “The Man Whose Face Is As Familiar As The Man In The Moon” He’s the only actor from St. Louis to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but not the St. Louis Walk of Fame yet, one hundred years later, almost nobody in his hometown has heard of him. This is because almost all of his films are lost. In 2014, I teamed up with my friend Steve DeBellis, publisher of the St. Louis Globe Democrat nostalgia newspaper, on a project to help make St. Louis more aware that this major silent star was from here. I collected King Baggot photos, trivia, articles, movie stills, youtube clips, and vintage newspaper ads and put them up on my King Baggot Tribute Facebook page (which can be found HERE). I then convinced Cliff Froehlich, Executive Director of Cinema St. Louis, to let me host a King Baggot Tribute night as part of 2014’s St. Louis International Film Festival. We showed a 35mm print, loaned to us by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, of the 1913 version of IVANHOE starring Baggot with live music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra. This was followed by an  illustrated lecture by me on the life and career of King Baggot and a screening of TUMBLEWEEDS, a western starring William S. Hart that Baggot directed in 1925. The event was well-attended and we’re doing it again September 28th at The Missouri History Museum, though this time we will be showing a digital print of IVANHOE (again with accompaniment by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra), but will not be showing TUMBLEWEEDS. The third leg of the King Baggot Tribute stool in 2014 was to be an all-King Baggot issue of the St. Louis Globe Democrat, a publication in the vein of what Steve DeBellis and I did in 2011 to celebrate Vincentennial, the 100^th birthday of Vincent Price (an article about that publication can be found HERE). I wrote several articles about Baggot and Steve wrote a couple as well. Sadly, the all-Baggot St. Louis Globe Democrat was not meant to be. Steve DeBellis died suddenly August 1st, 2014 at age 59 and his beloved newspaper died with him.

I collect films in the old Super-8 sound format, specifically the condensed versions of movies that were sold for home consumption in the days before VHS tapes, and have over 500 of them. A couple of weeks after the  2014 King Baggot Tribute event that was part of St. Louis International Film Festival, I was scouring eBay to see what vintage super-8 films had popped up for auction. A seller had just posted a standard 8mm film called KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS. I looked at the item details and sure enough, what the seller had was one of the five King the Detective movie that King Baggot had written, directed, and starred in between 1911 and 1914. I was shocked to see it, as I had assumed, and even stated in my lecture, that all of the King the Detective films were lost. Silent Era.com, which has a most comprehensive list of silent films even states that KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS is ‘presumed lost’.

I was not the only person to notice this rarity. The film started getting bids on eBay almost immediately. I was pretty excited but played it cool for almost a week. I didn’t bid until the last minute – the final seconds actually! With 4 seconds left to go in the auction, I bid a ridiculously high amount – I wasn’t going to get outbid and I didn’t! When the smoke settled, I was the winner – and $54 poorer – but not bad, really.

Some background on KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS : By 1911, King Baggot became the above-the-credits star of comedies, dramas, thrillers, and romances. As Baggot’s position and degree of control over his films at New York-based IMP studios increased, so did his need to do more creative and interesting work. Baggot turns to a type of character that had interested him for some time and which would continue to do so on and off for the rest of his career as an actor – the Detective. He was especially fascinated with crime detection and the use of scientific principles to catch criminals. His first attempt in this direction was KING THE DETECTIVE released in November of 1911. Although uncredited as either director or writer, Baggot probably did have considerable artistic leeway. As the title indicates, he played a skillful detective who solves the crime by collecting fingerprints of the murderer from the victim’s celluloid collar. The critics weren’t kind to Baggot’s directorial debut. The New York Dramatic Mirror said:

“….a two-reel detective drama, Mr. Baggot takes the lead with distinction in the early part of the offering with a considerable amount of mystery attached to it. Some of the mystification, however, comes from the fact that there is insufficient explanation to make it understandable. Baggot has allowed his sense of the ridiculous to get the best of him and the film turns abruptly into a farce”

Undiscouraged, Baggot wrote, directed, and starred in four more in this series for IMP studios, all one-reelers; KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE OPIUM SMUGGLERS (aka KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS), KING THE DETECTIVE IN THE JARVIS CASE, KING THE DETECTIVE IN FORMULA 879, and KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE MARINE MYSTERY.

So I though all of the King the Detective films were lost, but they’re not.  When I was collecting images of Baggot for my Facebook page, I could find not  a single still or ad from any of the King the Detective films. My friend Rick Squires from Rochester, NY unearthed this article from a 1913 issue of Universal Weekly about an incident on the set of one of the King the Detective films:

The KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS 8mm film arrived in the mail from Suffolk, Virginia about a week later. It was on the Blackhawk label, mounted on a 200-ft reel and runs about 14 minutes at 18 frames per second (a typically 1-reeler in 1912 ran anywhere from 14 to 17 minutes). What surprised me were the titles cards tacked onto the beginning of the film. The first card says simply ‘Blackhawk Films presents KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS starring King Baggot.’

Then there are three more titles cards telling a brief history of Baggot’s career. They read: “Leaving the Broadway stage in 1909 to join Carl Laemmle’s’ IMP, King Baggot began a motion picture career that lasted until a few months before his death in 1948. One of the more talented actors of the early screen, Baggot quickly rose high in the public favor. While a hit in early versions of THE SCARLET LETTER, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, and IVANHOE, Baggot’s specialty was adventure stories which allowed him to play two or more rolls in makeup. His characterization of King the Detective was a more or less continuing one during 1911–13. As Baggot arrived on the scene too late to continue leading roles more than a decade, he turned to directing during the ‘20s and worked steadily. His best known megaphone effort was William S. Hart’s final western TUMBLEWEEDS in 1925. When directing jobs became scars he picked up a pencil and became a script writer. Released October 24, 1912 KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS is a choice of representation of the art of an early start who’s famous faded as he progressed from the screen idol to director to writer, but who contributed many enjoyable moments to the cinema in a career spending almost 40 years” This scroll is incorrect in that Baggot did not become a screenwriter after his directorial career ended but spent the ‘30s and ‘40s acting in bit parts when he wasn’t gambling and drinking. Since it referenced his death, the film had to have been transferred to 8mm at some point in the 1950s, which makes sense since that’s when Blackhawk Films began marketing 8mm films to home audiences. Blackhawk catered to dyed-in-the-wool silent-film enthusiasts; Art Acord, Theda Bara, Charles Hutchinson, Lige Conley, Lloyd Hamilton, Alice Howell, and Richard Talmadge were just some of the silent-era personalities whose work had almost totally vanished until Blackhawk brought some representative reels to light in the ‘50s. In those days, the company issued a tabloid-sized catalog, the “Blackhawk Bulletin,” which heralded the latest releases and sales promotions each month.

Though it’s over 100 years, the quality of the 8mm transfer of KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS is remarkable and it includes the original IMP studio intertitles. I’ve illustrated this article with screenshots, but they were made with my camcorder shooting off a screen and hardy do the film justice.

Plot synopsis of KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS: King is sent to capture some opium smugglers operating in a seaport town. Posing as  fisherman, he mingles with the townspeople. One day while walking on the beach, he sees a brother and sister fighting. He separates them and meets their older sister. He accompanies them home and meets their old father and the bully who is in love with the girl. The bully is jealous of King at once and also suspects that he is a spy. When they meet at a dance hall that evening, the bully starts a fight which his friends break up. Later, the bully attacks King and knocks him down. The gang ties him up and puts him in a shed while they smuggle the opium. The little brother sees this and he and his sister go to the shed where they untie King and help him escape in a rowboat. The gang discovers that King is free and the bully goes after the boat where King is weak and exhausted. The bully chops a hole in the boat and leaves King for dead, but the girl and her siblings discover what has happened. They get a motorboat and rescue King just in time. The smugglers are arrested and King and the girl fall in love.

KING THE DETECTIVE AND THE SMUGGLERS is a fascinating relic and one of the few films starring King Baggot that have survived.

Don’t miss The King Baggot Tribute e Wednesday September 28th at 7pm at Lee Auditorium inside the Missouri History Museum.