Forgotten Treasure (1943)

[music] [music and bell] >> Out of the passing parade, we take again some of the rarest moving picture film in existence. Moving pictures with a mighty story to tell. Ever since man learned how to make shadows move, we have been shooting hundreds of millions of feet of film. Nearly every great event of modern history has gone on to celluloid. Yet, only recently it was realized pictures fade, that celluloid wears out, shrinks, and in a dozen years or so, most of the priceless films have been lost to us for all time. In New York City, however, the wide-awake Museum of Modern Art began one of the greatest salvage hunts of our time. Find and rescue what remained of this rare film, so that long years from now, our grandchildren can actually see some of the things that are already becoming memories to us, perhaps understand us better, and in new and wonderful moving picture history classes, learn the triumphs and heartbreaks which you and I must go through today. On the afternoon of September 4th, 1901, for example, a cameraman was allowed to take these pictures of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. With him on that trip was a fiery political figure who had been made vice president in order to bury him in a job that would ruin his career, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. And no one within the focus of this old camera realizes that these are the last pictures that will ever be taken of McKinley alive. For within 24 hours of this moment, he will be shot by an assassin, and in 10 days will die of his wounds. While in William McKinley's funeral procession will walk the man they put on the shelf, a new president of the United States. Five years later, on an April morning in 1906, the nation was plastered with headlines proclaiming the destruction of San Francisco. While at that very moment, some forgotten cameraman was recording it all on this recently discovered film. >> [music] [music] [music] [bell] >> Considering that four decades have passed since these pictures were taken, their quality is considered remarkable, and 35 years later, MGM was able to base its sets for the fiction story San Francisco upon the scenes here. After a century of lost fortunes and fever death, the Yankees were at last making good in digging the Panama Canal. This may have been the first moving picture of the work when the canal was just a muddy ditch in the tropics in 1910. Plump, ever genial President Taft comes down to take a look for himself. These were happier days when America was friends with the whole world. Later on, the president inspected a nice new battleship, painted bright, clean white, and he also appears to have changed his Prince Albert for something cooler. And, of course, before getting back onto the train, the whole party lines up proudly to be photographed by the wonderful new moving picture camera in a nice formal portrait with the president. And the president was quite as pleased as anyone else. And here is one of the greatest and saddest moving picture histories in existence, the funeral of Edward the VII. Edward the Peacemaker, they called [music] him, kindly, beloved king of England. It is 1910, and behind the body of this English emperor walks the last great gathering of the world's kings. Each one of the men walking here will, within a few years, know war, revolution, a lost throne, abdication, or sudden death. The new king, George V. The Duke of York. Then William II, Kaiser of Germany, who in four years will declare bloody war on the man who walks beside him. And the slender little boy is Edward, Prince of Wales, one day to be king of England, and on another day to be the Duke of Windsor. And there is King Alfonso of Spain, who will madly drive a big automobile out of Spain one night in the future to save his own life. The King of Portugal. And near him, Albert of Belgium, the heroic warrior king, who will soon win the love of all the world when he stands up and resists the German armies. And one of these royal marchers is the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. In four years, he will fall dead with an assassin's bullet in his body [music] at a place called Sarajevo, and the world will flame with war. But here, they're still friends. Almost all of them are blood relations, and no camera will ever again record such a meeting of kings, for the world is about to pass into the darkness as Europe becomes the land of terror that it is today. For as long as there are schools and museums, men will treasure these scenes of the Wright brothers' airplane. The exact origin of this film has been lost, and we're not sure of the date when these pictures were taken, but this may have been the film requested by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 when he suddenly realized that perhaps the government had overlooked the Wright brothers' achievement too long. As a matter of fact, the nation roared with laughter at these early airplanes, just as we often can't help laughing today at these weird homemade efforts that we see in the newsreels. And for years, we'll probably be laughing at these rocket ships, unsuccessful now, but which one day may soar out to touch the stars. But whatever the future will hold for us, one thing at least is certain, that if we can preserve the film we have, or even discover an indestructible film, in 1999, the boys and girls now unborn will see the crushing struggle of our lives in this day as the ancient history of theirs. Even this war will be to them just another lesson in history. The event now showing is an early use of the airplane in war at a part in the Pacific which was called Pearl Harbor. Thus, the struggle for freedom of the air became a main issue in the world peace conference leading to the air laws of which we're so familiar today. These new international air laws will be discussed as we continue with lesson five, chapter 27, at the next meeting of the class. Please march out quietly. Yeah, history. I never can remember if Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1944 or 1956. Just think, they used to study out of books. How primitive. >> [music]