[REQ] The Blue Lagoon (1923)

[ghost]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210575/

In the Victorian period, two children are shipwrecked on a tropical island in the South Pacific. With no adults to guide them, the two make a simple life together, unaware that sexual maturity will eventually intervene.

Well, I knew that this movie was done in 1949, but in 1923!?!

Seems very hard to find.
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[Night457]

I had heard of this version but I don't think I ever found anything ... It was hard enough to get the 1949 version!

[David32441]

Crazy to think that if still alive the child actors would be about 111 years old! Am assuming they're not.

[pillowbaker]

All information I found about this film is that it is considered "lost", though apparently because original the only surviving prints were lost in a fire. But there are reports and reviews from when it was first shown that still exist.

[deadman]

Crazy to think that if still alive the child actors would be about 111 years old! Am assuming they're not.

Ah, the early hundreds. I remember those days. Back then I could still recall what the world looked like in daylight.

A little surprised that they made a version of this back in 1923. The book it's based on came out in 1908, so this was a little closer to the source date and probably the first version ever shot for the screen (unless there's one from 1909 too!). The older Emmeline was played by Molly Adair, who would've been either 16 or 17 during filming (I can't find exact dates). Single credit child actress Doreen Wonfor played young Emmeline. No information seems to exist about her, although she looks 9 or 10 on the basis of those few pictures.

A dumbass director named Herbert Wilcox who wanted to produce his own version bought up every existing print and the rights to the 1923 version, to bury it. Paving the way for the last surviving print to be destroyed when the British and Dominions Imperial Studios burned to the ground in 1936. And he never did contribute his own version, when the Great Depression hit he abandoned the project. So this movie is likely gone forever. Unless by some miracle a print they lost track of turns up and isn't too badly degraded to restore (don't hold your breath).