The Best Restoration of ‘Beau Geste’ You'll Ever See

It’s no secret that restoring old films involves attention to detail. In some cases, it also requires old-fashioned mystery-solving.

When Lewis Milestone’s 1926 silent film The New Klondike was donated by Paramount to the Library of Congress in the 1970s, it was deemed incomplete, based on black-frame cuts in the film that typically indicate missing footage.

Yet when film archivist and the founder of The Maltese Film Works James Mockoski sat down to restore the film at his home office in Martinez, California, he saw that the frame count actually did match what was reported in 1926 – there was nothing missing.

This led to the discovery that those little black frames, which Mockoski refers to as slugs, had words like “amber” and “orange” etched into the emulsion of the film. These weren’t missing pieces. They were a set of instructions.

“Silent films were not black and white generally,” Mockoski says. “They were tinted with a color to denote if it’s sunny outside, if it’s an interior, if it’s night. The silent films were very vivid and they did have a color palette. What a person thought as being missing footage actually were a set of instructions to people in the future on how to restore the back of the original color.”

Thanks to this discovery, The New Klondike will be shown in its original presentation at the 28th San Francisco Silent Film Festival taking place Nov. 12-16 at the Orinda Theatre. Throughout the course of five days, 22 programs will be shown with a variety of genres. From beloved classics like Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (celebrating its 100th year anniversary) to the kid-oriented animated program “Koko!,” each film will be accompanied by a live musical performance.

Alongside The New Klondike, Mockoski restored two other films for this festival: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol and, notably, Herbert Brenon’s Beau Geste, a film about three brothers who each take the blame for stealing a valuable family sapphire to protect their aunt.

Almost 99 years after the film was made, the festival will debut what’s now the most complete version of Beau Geste. Efforts toward its restoration included pulling from the archives of UCLA, the George Eastman Museum and the Museum of Modern art.

If that sounds like a lot of work, well, it is. “It’s a labor of love to restore these films,” Mockoski says.

With restoration work underway, the festival also needed to find a new venue for this year’s event. San Francisco’s Castro Theatre had housed the film festival for nearly three decades, but it closed for renovations in 2024 and won’t reopen until next year.

Last year’s festival took place at the Palace of Fine Arts, which East Bay resident and film festival artistic director Anita Monga described as a “schlep” to get to. This year’s search for a new theater had three main checklist items: a venue large enough to fit an audience and live music, an auditorium with their own projection, and accessibility to public transportation.

The Orinda Theatre hit all these marks — and is just a three- to four-minute walk from BART.

“It just seems so perfect,” Monga said.

Monga emphasizes that the spirit of the festival and art of silent films is very much alive, as three films celebrate their 100th anniversary. Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Carl Dreyer’s Master of the House and Buster Keaton’s Go West could have been made yesterday, Monga said, with their humor, emotion and craft still as sharp as ever.

“We are really a general audience festival,” Monga said. “We’re really geared toward just film lovers. You don’t need to know anything about the silent era at all to come to our festival, but these films will convert anyone to silent film fans because they’re just so modern in their aspect and their acting. They’re brilliant.”

After this year, the film festival will return to the Castro Theatre after its grand reopening. That’ll include a special screening in March, as well as the 29th annual Silent Film Festival, to run May 6-10.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs Nov. 12-16 at the Orinda Theatre (Orinda Theatre Square, Orinda). Tickets and more information here.