Sometimes the cinema can deliver extraordinary stories even far from the sets. This is what happened with The Little Irish Girl, a 1926 silent film produced by Warner Bros., directed by Roy Del Ruth, written by Darryl F. Zanuck and starring Dolores Costello, which for about eighty years was considered lost. The film resurfaced in Australia, where it had been kept in the private collection of a cinema enthusiast, Laurie McIver.
The old reels were indeed inside a metal container kept in a helicopter hangar, a space the collector used also as a private cinema. The person who identified the material was his son-in-law, Andrew Gainey, who then helped bring it to the Australian National Film and Sound Archive. The discovery holds a special value for Hollywood history as well. The lead actress Dolores Costello (1903 – 1979), a hugely popular figure during the silent era, married in 1928 John Barrymore, who also belonged to a famous dynasty of theatrical actors. From their marriage came John Drew Barrymore, father of the actress Drew Barrymore.
Recovering the film, however, was not easy. The reels were made of cellulose nitrate, a material frequently used in the early decades of cinema, but extremely unstable and flammable. Archive specialists had to work to secure the film, restore it and make it viewable again.
A video excerpt of the film has been published on the Australian National Film and Sound Archive’s social channels, and you can see it below.
In the images from a century ago, we can once again admire the bright eyes of Dolores Costello, whom her contemporaries called “the goddess of silent cinema,” and we can also glimpse a certain resemblance to her niece Drew Barrymore. In the film Costello played Dot Walker, a member of a gang plotting to deceitfully steal the estate consisting of a hotel from an elderly lady. Tasked with acting as bait, Dot finds herself torn between loyalty to her accomplices and the increasingly intense feelings she develops for the victim’s grandson.
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