Unearthed Treasures – episode #7 : The Doctor’s Blind Child

Sarah Bernhardt, Prince Rigadin, Jean Durand, Berthe Dagmar, Al Christie, Betty Compson, Lois Weber, Anita Stewart, Jack Holt… Since the beginning of this series of articles about the films recovered from the ‘Calais collection,’ there has been no shortage of famous and prestigious names.

With this new discovery, titled The Doctor’s Blind Child, it’s quite the opposite. Our research on the film has yielded very few results : no director’s name, and only one obscure, long-forgotten actress.

Even so, this little gem is well worth a look, and we are proud to bring it back to life.

1 – Searching Blind

Unlike the other films we’ve identified so far, this one could only be recognized after the reel was scanned and the moving images could be viewed. We had taken several photos of the 35mm print beforehand and shared them here and there with specialists, but despite some fairly tight shots of the actors and clearly visible sets, nothing concrete came of it. It was suspected to be a film from the early 1910s, and Vitagraph was mentioned as a possible lead, due to the bourgeois interiors and the use of ‘knee-shots.’

For several months, the film was identified under the working title Incendie (‘Fire’), in reference to a sequence in which a blaze breaks out in a house, followed by the firefighters’ intervention. Incendie was therefore set aside for a while, but its beautiful red and blue tinting, along with its fairly substantial length, convinced us to have it scanned.

A few months later, the 4,200 digitized frames were opened in the editing software, and the images sprang to life before our eyes. There was indeed a bourgeois interior, some knee-shots, and a fire. But above all, we realized from the actress’s performance that the young girl who causes the fire is blind. With this key word in hand, our research could resume.

Of course, the single word ‘blind’ opened up far too many possibilities, with tens of thousands of search results.

All right.

Let’s keep things simple, basic.

You never know…

So let’s try ‘blind child,’ since that is, after all, what the film is about.

By luck, this search brings up only 130 results. It suddenly becomes much more manageable to dig through this hundred or so online documents in the hope of finding some leads.

We don’t even have to look very far. One title comes up repeatedly : The Doctor’s Blind Child, dated around 1912–1913. And indeed, in addition to the young blind girl, another detail had escaped us when we photographed the print : a sign on a door reading ‘Doctor Dorr.’

An article in Moving Picture World, accompanied by a still, immediately caught our attention.

And there it was.

Simple. Basic.

Fortunately, the article consists mostly of a long, detailed synopsis of the film, leaving no room for doubt : « Dr. William Tilford, a successful surgeon, has for his paramount desire the happiness of his little girl, who is blind. The demand upon his time is so great that he can give her little of his company. To offset this laxity he makes her many presents, the latest a valuable necklace. […] During his absence his daughter accidentally overturns a lamp, setting the house on fire. She manages to escape and wanders aimlessly down the street. »

Thanks to the ‘little blind girl,’ we can finally see things more clearly — at least, partly…

2 – The Blind Gnome

Produced by Pathé‘s American branch and released on January 4, 1913, in the United States, The Doctor’s Blind Child is a two-reel film. The Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation owns a complete 1,000-foot negative in four reels, and an article in The Bioscope published in December 1913 also announces a length of 1,050 feet, or approximately 15 minutes at a projection speed of 18 frames per second.

We found no mention of a director, and the only identified actress in the film is the one who plays the young blind girl, Mildred Hutchinson. After spending a few years on stage—most notably appearing in a 1909 adaptation of the best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—the young girl set out to conquer the Seventh Art in 1910. Or rather, the young girl was set out on this path, for it was her father, James C. Hutchinson, who founded The Gnome Motion Picture Company that same year in New York City, together with Fred Kalmbach and H. Meredith Jones. The company’s purpose was to produce films featuring children.

 

With a capital of $30,000, « a well equipped factory, electric lighted studio together with newly devised machinery and an able staff of directors, scenic artists, carpenters and a company of miniature actors »¹ was established at the corner of Park Avenue and Tremont in the Bronx. The company intended to produce a series of films about gnomes, those « imaginary characters who are supposed to inhabit the earth and guard its treasures and pleasures »² with young Mildred Hutchinson as its headliner.

The first of these films was The Birth of the Gnomes, released as early as December 1910, followed by Alice’s New Year’s Party and Alice in Funnyland.

But success does not seem to have followed, and The Gnome Motion Picture Company vanished as quickly as it had appeared. After this, Mildred Hutchinson worked for the Edison Company, then joined Pathé Exchange, where she notably appeared alongside Crane Wilbur in In the Days of War and The President’s Pardon in 1913.

Her last film appears to have been Eleven to One, a drama directed by Frank Lloyd for Universal in 1919, and the last traces we found of Mildred Hutchinson are her participation in a stage play titled Line Busy, as well as the mention of a copyright for the lyrics of a song called Somewhere in France.

After that, Mildred Hutchinson seems to have disappeared from the record, just as The Doctor’s Blind Child itself did for decades.

The 35mm print found in April 2025 in Calais is fully tinted, without intertitles, and in very good condition. It runs 3 minutes and 53 seconds at 18 fps, which corresponds to roughly 260 feet. We therefore have about one quarter of the film. 

While we do not know much more about The Doctor’s Blind Child, described upon release as an « original idea »³ and an « elaborate production and a drama of unusual worth »⁴, we do have access to a very detailed synopsis of its plot. This allowed us to reconstruct this « strong dramatic subject produced by the Pathé Co. in a most excellent manner »⁵.

We hope that this restoration by @ClassicinemaVault will « satisfy the most discriminating audience »⁶ in 2025 just as it apparently did more than a century ago.

To discover the film, head over to my YouTube channel.

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Special thanks to Carole Fodor from the Jérôme-Seydoux-Pathé Fondation !

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