The Black Pirate. 1926. USA. Directed by Albert Parker. Screenplay by Jack Cunningham. With Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Tempe Pigott, Donald Crisp. North American premiere. Silent, with a new score composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Robert Israel commissioned by MoMA. 100 min.
To Save and Project kicks off on January 11 with the North American premiere of Albert Parker’s The Black Pirate, introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne (The Holdovers, Election). As MoMA curator Dave Kehr, who helped oversee the painstaking and complicated restoration, observes, “Douglas Fairbanks didn’t get to be the King of Hollywood by doing anything small, and when he decided to make a pirate movie—at the urging, in Hollywood legend, of the child star Jackie Coogan—he wanted color to reflect the famous children’s book illustrations by N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. And so, The Black Pirate became only the third (but by far the most prestigious) feature to be shot in Technicolor’s Process Two, a complex and finicky technology that involved prisms and filters to produce two separate red- and green-tinted filmstrips, which were then cemented together to produce show prints.
Dave Kehr continues: “Keeping the story deliberately simple, Fairbanks and his director, Albert Parker, assembled an archetypal, ur-pirate tale with Doug as an aristocrat who infiltrates a pirate band to avenge his father and rescue a kidnapped princess (Billie Dove). The spectacular stunts set a high mark for Hollywood acrobatics, including one scene—in which Fairbanks slides with a knife down the length of a sail, slicing it in half—that every subsequent pirate movie worth its salt was required to recreate.
“The restoration of The Black Pirate required returning to the original camera negatives for the first time in 50 years. Fairbanks shot the film with five cameras simultaneously, creating four color negatives and one black-and-white. The restoration process required the painstaking review of hundreds of film cans containing unedited raw footage from the B, C, and D negatives. Additionally, three edited reels of the long-lost A negative—the preferred source—were rediscovered in the process and became central to the restoration.
“Modern digital restoration techniques were used to faithfully reconstruct the film’s original color scheme. The red and green color records were precisely realigned, and missing shots were culled from across the different negatives. Although no original color prints of The Black Pirate are known to survive, an early test reel printed in Technicolor’s dye-transfer process, combined with documentation in the Technicolor archive, allowed the original look to be recreated. With its rich browns and greens, the results look quite a bit different from the thin, gray colors of the previous photochemical restoration.”
New 4K digital restoration of the image by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Golden Globe Foundation. Special thanks to Alexander Payne and the British Film Institute.