An update on Dawson City

Back in September, TCM ran the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, which was new to me. Well, the movie itself, not the subject material, since I had a passing familiarity with the fact that a bunch of old movie reels were found there.

The movie is on DVD, but I recorded TCM's airing and finally sat down to watch it. I'm sorry to say that it's a movie about an interesting subject that has terrible presentation. It starts off well enough with footage of how they found the reels, and then some vintage footage of the first time they were presented after being found. From there, it goes into a history of Dawson City, which should also be interesting, having been founded in a gold rush and having gone through a boom and a bust.

But the filmmakers decided that since the movie was about the finding of a bunch of silent movies, the movie itself should be more or less silent, using subtitles instead of narration. And the titles are small, making them difficult to read.

The other problem is that, in order to use more of the found footage, the movie talks about news of the day that doesn't really refer to Dawson City The footage itself is interesting, but the presentation doesn't really fit with the rest of the story. Notable for me was the 1919 World Series (the "Black Sox" series thrown by players from the Chicago White Sox), which the director tries to handwave away by suggesting the players weren't paid enough and the first Commissioner of baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, was evil for not supporting organized labor enough.

The found footage that does get shown is interesting. There are a lot of clips of the little bit of surviving footage from each movie; as I understand it there weren't any features found fully intact. There are also a lot of newsreels, which are equally as interesting.

The other interesting thing was learning just how many famous people had a relationship to the early days of the gold rush: Sid Grauman of Chinese Theater fame; Donald Trump's grandfather Fred; Fatty Arbuckle who performed in the area; and others.

It's too bad the material is all presented in such a mish-mash. It deserves a better documentary than Dawson City: Frozen Time.