| Lady Babbie | |
|---|---|
 Film still of Lady Babbie (Tennant) and Lieutenant Byron (Lund) | |
| Directed by | Oscar A. C. Lund |
| Screenplay by | Oscar A. C. Lund |
| Based on | Title character's name adopted from the 1897 Broadway play The Little Minister based on 1891 novel by J. M. Barrie[1][2] |
| Starring | Barbara Tennant, Oscar A. C. Lund |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Universal Film Manufacturing Company |
Release date |
|
Running time | 30–38 minutes (3 reels; approximately 3,000 feet)[3] |
| Country | United States |
| Languages | Silent, English intertitles |
Lady Babbie is a lost 1913 American silent drama film produced by the United States division of the French film company Eclair. The featurette was written and directed by Oscar A. C. Lund, a native of Sweden, who also costarred in the three-reeler opposite Barbara Tennant as Lady Babbie. That role was loosely based on a popular character originally performed by American actress Maude Adams in the 1897 Broadway production The Little Minister, a play adapted from the 1891 novel of the same title by Scottish writer J. M. Barrie.[1][4] Filming for this motion picture was done at Eclair's studio facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey and on location at Lake George, New York.[5]
No full copies or partial reels of this "photoplay" are preserved in film archives in either the United States, Canada, or Europe.[6] Lady Babbie is therefore presumed to be a lost film. All of the featurette's master negatives and undistributed print copies were most likely consumed in the fire that destroyed Eclair's negative department and the contents of its film storage vaults in Fort Lee on March 19, 1914, just a few months after this production's release.[7]
- ^ a b The character in 1891 novel simply named "Babbie"; in 1897 play Maude Adams popularized the character as "Lady Babbie". Barrie, J. M. The Little Minister. New York: Lovell, Coryell and Company, 1891. Internet Archive (San Francisco). Retrieved February 14, 2020.
- ^ "The Little Minister (1891), Novel By Barrie", Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, Illinois)), online edition. Retrieved February 13, 2020.
- ^ a b "Complete Record of Current Films / Independent / Lady Barrie", Motography (Chicago), November 15, 1913, p. 376. Internet Archive. Retrieved February 13, 2020.
- ^ "The Little Minister", 1897-1898, Internet Broadway Database (IBDB), The Broadway League, New York, N.Y. Retrieved February 14, 2020.
- ^ "Eclair Company At Lake George", The Motion Picture News (New York, N.Y.), November 22, 1913, p. 30. Internet Archive. Retrieved February 12, 2020.
- ^ No copies of the film are among the holdings of the Library of Congress, the UCLA Film Archives, the Museum of Modern Art's moving-images collection, the George Eastman Museum, the Cinémathèque québécoise, the British Film Institute (BFI), or in other European film repositories (European Film Gateway). Searches in the cited data bases were performed February 11–12, 2020.
- ^ "FILM FACTORY BURNS WITH $300,000 LOSS: Many Valuable Reels Destroyed in Eclair Company's Fort Lee Plant", The New York Times, March 20, 1914, p. 1. The modern online transcription by The New York Times of its 1914 news item cites the total fire losses at "$800,000" in the heading, which is incorrect. The loss printed in the original heading is "$300,000", a figure repeated in the body of the newspaper's own report. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (Ann Arbor, Michigan), database subscription, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.