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Riddle Gawne
(1918)

This William S. Hart western features a young Lon Chaney as the heavy. The five-reel film has only survived in approximately one reel’s worth of footage. With less than half of the film surviving, Silent Era lists Riddle Gawne (1918) as a lost film.

Unknown Video
2004 DVD edition

The Unseen Silents (1918-1923), black & white, 58 minutes total, not rated, including Riddle Gawne (1918), black & white, 13 minutes, not rated.

Unknown Video, no catalog number, unknown UPC number.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc; 1.20:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at ? Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to ? fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 mono sound encoded at ? Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $18.95.
Release date: 22 November 2004.
Country of origin: USA

This DVD-R edition of the surviving footage from Riddle Gawne (1918) has been mastered from a good quality but incomplete 35mm print that is flat grey. The DVD appears to have been mastered from a copy of Unknown Video’s 1999 VHS videotape release of The Unseen Silents collection. The source print may have had foreign language intertitles as all of the intertitles here are reset in English on a crude video-based system.

The presentation features a low-fidelity electric organ musical accompaniment performed by Bob Vaughn.

Also included in this collection is the surviving footage of Mabel Normand in Suzanna (1923), and a nearly-complete Harold Lloyd comedy.

UNKNOWN VIDEO has discontinued business and this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is . . .