PRESERVED FILMS

The Sergeant (1910)
Production Company: Selig Polyscope Co. Producer/Director: Francis Boggs. Writer: Hobart Bosworth. Photographer: John Dored. Cast: Hobart Bosworth (Sergeant Adams), Iva Shepard (Colonel Gordon’s daughter), Art Acord (Indian scout), Tom Santschi (soldier), Frank Clark (soldier). Transfer Note: Copied at 16 frames per second from a 35mm negative preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the New Zealand Film Archive, with video tinting reproducing the original print colors. New Music: Michael D. Mortilla. Running Time: 16 minutes.

The Sergeant was lost for a century, until a single print turned up in New Zealand and was returned to the United States in 2010. With its rediscovery, it becomes the first surviving narrative film shot in Yosemite—and a spectacular hybrid it turns out to be. As with The Tourists, the opening film in this program, it tells its story within something of a travelogue. The full title is The Sergeant: Told in the Yosemite Valley, and the distinctive intertitles often inform us of both the narrative and the shooting location. (One title reads “In looking for their horses they lose their way. Illilloutte Falls”—if the characters are lost, viewers aren’t.)

At the film’s release in September 1910, Variety raved, “Worth the price of several admissions. If one doesn’t care a rap about the plot, he can find ample entertainment in viewing the picturesque natural scenery which the camera has caught with fine effect.” As that review implies, the story—written by the film’s lead, Hobart Bosworth—is less surprising than the setting and staging. An army sergeant, stationed near Yosemite Valley in the 1880s (a historical period clear only from the film’s publicity material), is in love with his commander’s daughter. While the two are distracted exploring Cascade Creek, an “Indian renegade” steals their horses, and because of the night the couple spend together lost, the sergeant is busted down to private (as again only the film’s publicity makes clear). He’ll need to prove himself heroic…

The army’s Fourth Cavalry was Yosemite’s police force at the time The Sergeant was made, although its presence might be anticipatory for a story set in the 1880s. The army was officially responsible for Yosemite from just after its designation as a national park in 1890 until 1914, shortly before the National Park Act, which established park rangers. Well into the twentieth century the army was still rousting Native Americans from the park, if mainly Mono Paiute shepherds and without the gun battles imagined in The Sergeant.

The film’s production company, Selig Polyscope, had made its first excursion into the park in the summer of 1909, returning with A Trip to Yosemite and presumably other films—although none from that foray is known to survive. Based in Chicago, Selig began farther west than the other major companies and had shot in Colorado as early as 1901. The 1910 return of Selig personnel to Yosemite in May (when waterfalls and creeks are near their fullest) was of sufficient note to be recorded in the valley’s souvenir newspaper, the Yosemite Pioneer, which reported that “Mr. Francis Boggs (producer), Hobart Bosworth,…Mr. Dored,” and others “are here making educational as well as story pictures. They will spend a week or ten days here,…after which they will go to Portland,…then up the Columbia River.”

Although famous Yosemite waterfalls provide backdrops for the action of The Sergeant, the river scenes were possibly shot during the Oregon leg of Selig’s trip, along the Clackamas River, a Columbia tributary that would have been less bone-shatteringly frigid for Hobart Bosworth’s diving and swimming stunts than would the snowmelt of Yosemite’s Merced River. Age 42 at the time, Bosworth had contracted a decade earlier the tuberculosis that forced him from the Shakespearean stage and sent him west to Arizona and Southern California. In his youth Bosworth had worked as a stevedore, a whaler, and a professional boxer—and whatever his subsequent health problems, he’s physically imposing in the river action scenes here. He didn’t claim to have been the first major legitimate stage actor to enter the movies—awarding that to Vitagraph’s Charles Kent—but rightly credits himself as the first major actor to commit to the “physical stunts that were then so necessary in putting on reel dramas.” As Bosworth put it archly in 1915 about his demanding location work in early one-reelers, “I feel a particular personal interest in California because I have fallen down most of it, either from the top of a cliff or from a horse.”

The “Mr. Dored” mentioned in the Yosemite Pioneer is The Sergeant’s cinematographer, John Dored, then 29, for whom the challenges of location shooting across the West in 1910 (including a trip to the Tonto Cliff Dwellings in Arizona) were just one phase in his globe-crossing career. Born in Latvia, he had learned cinematography with Pathé in Paris. His surreptitious filming of Lenin’s Moscow funeral led to a Soviet death sentence until American friends pressed for his release, after which his career with Paramount News included films at the North Pole in the 1920s, in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and at the meeting of U.S. and Soviet armies at the end of World War II. He commented late in life, “I’ve always felt limited by scripts and staging,” although his feel for the land is evident in The Sergeant.

Key to the film is Francis Boggs, arguably the most inventive American producer-director in the first years of story films—although for two sad reasons it is impossible to say more. Boggs had established for Selig Polyscope the first permanent film studio in the West—in Los Angeles in the spring of 1909—but was murdered there in 1911 by a deranged propman and gardener (who in the same incident wounded visiting company owner William Selig). But Boggs’s place in film history remains uncertain now because only 9 of the nearly 200 films he wrote or directed are known to survive. More than any other early director-and-company team, Boggs and Selig Polyscope took pains to explore—and promote—the full variety of Western landscapes, from the Rockies through southwestern deserts, Sierra mountains, and northwestern rivers. This ambition ended for the Selig company with Boggs’s death, and more’s the tragedy that so little of his work survives. Still, the recent find of The Sergeant gives hope.—Scott Simmon

About the Preservation
The Sergeant is among the first of the long-lost U.S. films returned from New Zealand through a collaboration of the New Zealand Film Archive, the American archival community, and the National Film Preservation Foundation. Two other of the films to be preserved and made available through the project are included in the Treasures 5: The West DVD set: The Better Man and Sunset Limited, Southern Pacific Railroad. Funding for preservation of The Sergeant was contributed through “For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon,” held in February 2010.

Further Viewing
Another rare 1910 Selig Polyscope one-reeler, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is in the More Treasures from American Film Archives DVD set.