This Wednesday, thanks to the good folks at the Northwest Chicago Film Society, a John Ford film that hasn't been shown in Chicago since 1927 returns to the big screen. This "lovable mutt" of a comedy, as described by the NCFS' Kyle Westphal, is called "Upstream," a late silent era Fox production. And until 2010, when it turned up in promising condition in the vaults of the New Zealand Film Archive, it was considered a lost picture, like so many thousands of cinematic fatalities done in by the dangers and vulnerabilities of nitrate film stock.
"Upstream" takes place in a theatrical boarding house in New York City. By that very description the film seems at odds with the common perception of Ford as wagon master of the Western genre. ("The Iron Horse" was released in 1924; in the sound era still to come, Ford would give the world "Stagecoach," "My Darling Clementine," "The Searchers" and many more.) Westphal, who traveled to see "Upstream" in recent screenings in Rochester, N.Y., and San Francisco, notes that Ford's affinity for the outsider is very much present. The key question for Ford, he says, was always: "How does this ramshackle collection of people become a community?"
The love triangle at the center of "Upstream" involves a John Barrymore-styled ham actor named Eric Brashingham (Earle Foxe), one half of a knife-throwing act (Nancy Nash) and the other half (Grant Withers). In its February 1927 Chicago premiere, the Tribune reviewer — working under the fake name "Mae Tinee" — called Ford's film "interesting, atmospheric and exceedingly well done." The scenario came from a Wallace Smith short story titled "The Snake's Wife."
The film itself came and went, and then it vanished until popping up as one of 75 American silents in storage at the New Zealand archive. With help from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the archive announced plans in 2010 to preserve the films with the aid of various silent film preservation groups. "Upstream" was restored at a New Zealand lab; it may yet make it to DVD or VOD or into streaming formation.
For now, it's big-screen material only. I'm know where I'm going Wednesday.
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave.; $5; northwestchicagofilmsociety.org.
