Long-lost 1923 silent movie turns up at Chicago Film Archives

CHICAGO - It played in Peoria, and everywhere else.

Then, the world's only remaining copy of a 1923 silent melodrama produced by Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle, presumed lost by film historians, remained stashed for decades in a box of unmarked and highly flammable nitrate film reels. The box sat perilously close to a hot-water heater in a closet, in a house, in Peoria.

Now, Chicago Film Archives has digitally transferred and restored the rarity titled "The First Degree," about a sheep farmer with a secret and the