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Card if the title rang a bell. He replied that he thought they had something. We trudged
out through the snow to the nitrate vaults. Jim opened one of the vaults and we went
inside and rummaged for a while. Eventually I came across six cans labelled The
Sentimental Blonde. This sounded too much of a coincidence, so I opened the first can,
unreeled it down to the main title, and saw the credit for Raymond Longford. It was the
original negative of The Sentimental Bloke. I can’t describe how I felt in actually holding
those six cans. Every archivist treasures the moments of great finds.

How did the negative get
to Eastman House? No
one knew, but it is likely
to have landed there
with a job-lot of silent
films, perhaps the stock
of a defunct distributor.
As noted before, when
Australian producers
secured an overseas
release they had no
choice but to send over
their original negative for
release printing, and
often for re-editing as
well: there were no
Eastman House, Rochester, NY satisfactory dupe
negative stocks
available and even if there had been, Australian producers could not have afforded to
make them. The negative was seldom returned: there were no further printing demands
in the home country and the freight cost could not be justified.
Finding the negative was one thing: getting access to it quite another. Overloaded and
underfunded, film archives can be notoriously slow to deal with loans or duping requests
when there may be other priorities. Eventually, when Paolo Cherchi Usai took over as
Senior Curator of Film at Eastman House, an exchange was arranged under which
Eastman’s preservation copy – a superb fine grain positive taken off the original
negative – was loaned to the NFSA. Visually, it was far superior to the existing version
derived from the “Cinema Branch” release print. But there were differences: it was
shorter (many scenes had been trimmed and tightened), it contained a few additional
shots, and all the narrative titles were in American slang!

A major reconstruction – based mainly on the Eastman visuals and utilising the original
C J Dennis titles – was embarked on with a projected release date of September 2001 –
a story in its own right. The tints and tones will be reinstated, utilising Anthony Buckley’s
“trims” as colour reference. And we can thank a chain of players – and Providence – for
the survival of one of Australia’s cinematic treasures.

As published in This film is dangerous, compendium volume ed. Roger Smither, FIAF,
Brussels, 2002.
Reprinted in REEL DEALS by courtesy of the author
Images supplied by the publisher
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