Unearthed Treasures – Episode #2 : La Bonté de Jacques V

Beyond Adrienne Lecouvreur—long thought lost, and featuring Sarah Bernhardt, with an excerpt available here —the batch of 35mm nitrate reels from Calais holds many more treasures.

Among them are two silent films in color.

Not merely tinted or toned, but genuinely in color.

Or, more precisely, colored using the Pathécolor process—developed in 1903 by filmmaker Segundo de Chomón for the Pathé company—which enabled film to be colorized through a stencil system, the stencils themselves cut with the aid of a pantograph.

Since neither of the two films contains any intertitles, we now face the challenge of identifying them without any clues about the characters’ names, the locations, or the plot.

Let’s start with the one that appears to be a costume drama. There are kilts. A castle. A throne. A king.

The first suspicion falls on Les Jacobites, a film made in 1912 set during the uprisings that took place in the British Isles between 1688 and 1746.

Except… Les Jacobites was not produced by Pathé, but by Le Film d’Art, and the print in our hands tells us one thing very clearly: PATHÉ FRÈRES 14 RUE FAVART PARIS, written in capital letters along the edges of the film.

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Another title emerges: it appears to be La Bonté de Jacques V, produced by Pathé in 1911. With this title in hand, the search can now be more focused.

I can find very few documents online about this film—barely more than a single newspaper announcement.

But three available documents will prove absolutely essential for the identification.

And the evidence starts to fall into place.

First, a typed synopsis from 1911 on a Pathé document, which seems to match the footage:

 » A poetic idyll unfolds between Maxwell and Dora, two young peasants from Scotland. Unfortunately, Maxwell falls into the hands of outlaws who, under threat of death, demand a ransom of 20,000 francs for their prisoner. Desperate, Dora decides to go to King James V and seek his aid and protection. However, the monarch, fearing deception, disguises himself as a beggar to test the young girl’s heart and asks her for alms. Dora passes the test, and confident in the worthiness of his protégés, the good king, after paying the ransom for the captive, unites the two lovers in marriage. »

Next, this synopsis is accompanied on the back by images, clearly taken from a paper print—35mm film copies printed frame by frame on photographic paper, submitted in the United States between 1894 and 1912 to the Library of Congress for copyright purposes.

Now, there is no doubt.

This is indeed La bonté de Jacques V, a film also long considered lost, as no archive in the world lists a copy in its collections !

On the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation website, the film has no credits—neither for direction (unlike Wikipedia and IMDb, which attribute it to Georges Denola—according to what sources?), nor for the cast. But it is noted that the film measured 770 feet, of which 660 feet were in color.

So what about this “Calais print”?

After scanning it and importing it into editing software, it runs 6 minutes and 23 seconds at 18 fps, corresponding to about 425 feet. This represents just over half of the film’s total length, and since the copy is fully colorized, about 65% of the 660 feet in color.

Finally, the “script” available online (!) provides many other pieces of documentation about this copy : it is divided into 14 tableaux and also indicates the presence of intertitles.

Our print contains no intertitles, and the sequences correspond to the first eight tableaux as well as the last one. ALL the perforations are in good condition, and the only splices present are those connecting the different sequences.

It is therefore reasonable to assume that this copy was never projected—or only very rarely—and that it was intended to be assembled with the intertitles and the rest of the film in its non-colorized version.

In short : a 115-year-old copy in virtually pristine condition!

Enough talk.

Let the images « speak »!

Head over to my YouTube channel to (re)discover La bonté de Jacques V in glorious Pathécolor !