A complete silent film believed lost for nearly 80 years has been recovered from a family collection in suburban Sydney—and its path back to the screen runs through a helicopter hangar. Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive has stabilised and digitised The Little Irish Girl, a 1926 Hollywood crime drama starring Dolores Costello, the grandmother of Drew Barrymore.
The four reels were not waiting in a studio vault. They sat inside a metal film shipper in a hangar that collector Laurie McIver had turned into a family cinema. When his son-in-law, Andrew Gainey, inherited the collection, he recognized that the silent nitrate print might be rare. He also knew projecting it could be dangerous. That decision not to run the film may be one reason it survived long enough to be rescued.
The movie had vanished from every known archive
According to the NFSA’s October 27 announcement, The Little Irish Girl had been considered lost since the late 1940s. No negative or positive print was known in a public or private film collection. The Sydney reels therefore did not add a better copy of something archivists already had; they restored an entire feature to the historical record.
The film was directed by Roy Del Ruth, written by Darryl F. Zanuck and produced by Warner Bros. Costello plays Dot Walker, a member of a criminal crew planning to swindle an elderly hotel owner. Dot is assigned to distract the woman’s grandson, but the con begins to collapse when her feelings for him become real.
That plot also gives the discovery more value than a title card and a cast list. The surviving film preserves another performance by an actor once promoted as “the Goddess of the Silent Screen” during a pivotal year in her career.
Dolores Costello connects two Hollywood eras
Costello began acting as a child and became a major silent-era star. In 1926 she also appeared in The Sea Beast, an early film adaptation of Moby-Dick, opposite John Barrymore. She married Barrymore in 1928, becoming part of the theatrical family whose later generations include John Drew Barrymore and Drew Barrymore.
The famous family connection gives the discovery an easy modern reference point, but Costello is not merely a footnote in somebody else’s biography. Recovering The Little Irish Girl fills a gap in her own work, showing audiences how she handled a character caught between a scam, shifting loyalties and genuine emotion.
The NFSA has made an official silent excerpt available on its collection page. The clip is hosted by the archive rather than an approved YouTube or Vimeo provider, so it is linked here rather than forced into unsupported embed code.
The reels were already turning into something like honey
Finding the film was only the beginning. Nitrate stock is chemically unstable, highly flammable and capable of deteriorating beyond recovery. NFSA conservator James Campbell described mould and nitrate blisters on the film pack, requiring the team to work under a fume hood with protective equipment.
The archive’s detailed preservation account says some sections had degraded into a sticky, honey-like substance. Other areas had damaged perforations or tears. The team repaired and prepared the print carefully enough to guide it through a scanner, occasionally losing a damaged frame before continuing.
Fortunately, the nitrate base remained strong and flexible in many places, and visible images survived across much of the film. The digital scan cannot reverse every faded or missing frame, but it captures what remains before the chemical breakdown advances further.
A helicopter hangar became an accidental time capsule
There is something wonderfully cinematic about the route these reels traveled. A Hollywood drama disappears from institutional memory, crosses the Pacific, rests in a private collection and eventually turns up in a hangar used as a family theater. The people holding it did the most important thing: they understood that curiosity was not a reason to thread fragile nitrate through a projector.
Gainey and the McIver family donated the print to the NFSA earlier in 2026. Their choice transformed a risky object in private storage into a film that preservation specialists could identify, stabilise and scan.
Why one recovered feature matters
The NFSA estimates that about 75% of silent-era feature films made between 1906 and 1930 are lost. For Australian productions, the figure may reach 90%. Those percentages represent more than missing entertainment. Each lost reel can erase performances, design, editing techniques and evidence of how audiences once imagined the world.
The Little Irish Girl now has another chance because a collector kept it, a family recognized the risk and an archive had the skill to rescue it. The movie’s con artists may spend the story hiding their intentions, but the film itself has finally stepped out of hiding.
Featured image: a 1926 Variety advertisement for The Little Irish Girl, published by Warner Bros. The Wikimedia Commons scan is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1931.
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