Danger Lights
Danger Lights is a 1930 American Pre-Code drama film, directed by George B. Seitz, from a screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman. It stars Louis Wolheim, Robert Armstrong, and Jean Arthur. The plot concerns railroading on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (Milwaukee Road), and the movie was largely filmed along that railroad's lines in Montana. The railway yard in Miles City, Montana, was a primary setting, while rural scenes were shot along the railway line through Sixteen Mile Canyon, Montana. Additional footage was shot in Chicago, Illinois (where the Milwaukee Road was headquartered until  1986, when it went out of business). The film was the first ever shot in the new Spoor-Berggren Natural Vision Process. In 1958, the film entered the public domain in the United States because the claimants did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication. Plot. Louis Wolheim plays Dan Thorn, the boss of the railroad yard in Miles City, Montana. The film opens with a landslide across the tracks in Montana and a repair crew being dispatched to clear the tracks. Several hobos are lounging nearby and are put to work helping the repair crew . One of the hobos, Larry Doyle (played by Robert Armstrong), is discovered to have been a former railroad engineer who lost his job owing to insubordination. Doyle is given a new job for the railroad by Thorn, but quickly falls in love with Thorn's fiancée, Mary Ryan (played by Jean Arthur). Jealousy grows between the two men, with both of them attempting to win Mary in marriage. Things come to a head during a fight in the railroad yard between Thorn and Doyle during which Thorn is hit by a train and injured. To save his life, Doyle must  transport him in record time to Chicago for surgery. Notes. "Danger Lights" was filmed during a period when some movie studios were experimenting with various widescreen film formats. As part of this trend, two versions of the film were created. One used standard 35mm film and Academy ratio, and the other used an experimental 65mm widescreen format at a 2:1 aspect ratio. This latter process was called "Natural Vision" and was invented by film pioneers George Kirke Spoor and P. John Berggren. The Natural Vision print of the film was reportedly screened at only two theaters (the only  two with the equipment necessary to show the film), the State Lake Theater in Chicago and the Mayfair Theater in New York, and no copies of it are known to exist today. "Danger Lights" is the only film created using this process, and the entire effort to move to wide-screen was shelved for several decades because of the increased costs of both production and presentation. The film was taken two years after the Milwaukee Road exited bankruptcy and five years before it re-entered bankruptcy and placed under trusteeship. Ten years after the second bankruptcy, the Milwaukee Road emerged  from bankruptcy until it fell into bankruptcy the third time in 1977 and sold to the Soo Line Railroad in 1986. Historically significant footage. "Danger Lights" features rare footage of a tug of war between two steam locomotives, actual documentary footage of the activities in the Miles City yard, and what is believed to be the only motion picture footage of a dynamometer car from the steam railroad era in the USA. Similar footage may have existed in MGM's "Thunder" (1929), with Lon Chaney, but that film now exists only in fragments, making it partly a lost film. In  1958, the film entered the public domain in the United States because the claimants did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication. "Danger Lights" was edited down to 55 minutes for television broadcast; this version is freely available for download. In 2009 Alpha Video released the original 74-minute version on DVD.