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“Who?”

“A couple of years later, Seitz did
The Last of the Mohicans
. Matter of fact, some of these actors were in that movie.”

“You continue to amaze me.”

“In this case, it’s not so amazing.”

The clerk pointed toward a row of film posters above the shelves of videos on the opposite side of the long room. One of them, tinted orange, faded, announced
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
— STARRING RANDOLPH SCOTT. Scott, incredibly young, was seen in profile. He held a flintlock rifle and wore a buckskin jacket as well as a coonskin cap. Two Indians fought each other in the background. At the bottom, bold letters proclaimed DIRECTED BY GEORGE B.SEITZ.

“A friend of mine’s a George B. Seitz fanatic. He gave me that poster to put up. Personally, I don’t get what’s so special about Seitz’s work. He’s sure not Orson Welles. But my friend’s an expert. He’s the guy to ask.”

THE FRAIL, distinguished-looking, white-haired, elderly gentleman had a Vandyke beard and a cane. Bundled in a thick brown cardigan sweater, he was waiting at the metal gate of his home in Sherman Oaks when Coltrane parked in front. The expansive Tudor house was high in the hills, the glinting lights of the valley spread out below.

“I didn’t realize how late it was,” Coltrane said after he shook hands and introduced himself. A cool breeze tugged at his hair. “If I’d thought about it, I never would have let the guy in the video store call you.”

The elderly man made a “think nothing of it” gesture. His voice was reedy. “Sidney knows I don’t go to bed until two or three in the morning. Anybody who wants to talk about the work of George B. Seitz is welcome anytime.”

“Actually, Seitz isn’t why I’m here.”

The elderly man looked confused.

“What I’m really interested in is an actress he directed in
The Trailblazer
.”

“Which actress?”

“Rebecca Chance.”

The elderly man nodded.

“You
know
about her?” Coltrane asked.

“
About
her? Not in the least.”

Coltrane felt something deflate inside him. “I guess I’ve bothered you for nothing. I’m sorry. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“But I’ve seen her work.”

Coltrane froze in the act of turning toward his car.

“You came to talk to me about
The Trailblazer
. Don’t you think it would be more satisfying if you watched it?”

“
Watched
it?”

“I don’t have every picture Seitz made. Many of the silents were on film stock that disintegrated before they could be preserved, although I do have copies of the most famous ones, such as
The Perils of Pauline
, which he wrote before he became a director. The sound pictures he directed are another matter. From
Black Magic
in ’29 to
Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble
in ’44, the year Seitz died, I’ve managed to track down a print of every film Seitz made.”

The dignified gentleman, who introduced himself as Vincent Toler, escorted Coltrane into his house, the living room of which had a screen behind retractable oak panels at one end and a projection room adjacent to the opposite end, the two rooms linked via a space behind an Andrew Wyeth painting that slid to the side.

Toler, Coltrane learned, was a widower, a retired neurosurgeon who lived alone. He had hated being a neurosurgeon, he explained. “I never wanted to enter medicine, but my father, who was a doctor, bullied me into doing so. What I really wanted was to work in the movies. In what capacity, I had no idea. I just knew that was what I loved, but my father wouldn’t hear of it, and I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to him.” After Toler retired, he had happened to see an Andy Hardy movie on the American Movie Classics channel, had remembered the delight with which he had watched it as a boy, had reexperienced the same delight, and had noticed when viewing the movie on its next AMC showing that the director was George B. Seitz.

That name had meant nothing to him, but when he asked the clerk at a video store he frequented (the same video store to which Coltrane had gone) to find other movies that Seitz had directed, Toler had been delighted to discover that Seitz had directed almost all the Andy Hardy movies and many other movies that Toler recalled fondly from his youth. “I started collecting videos, but some of Seitz’s movies weren’t available on video, so the next step was . . .” Toler indicated the reel of film that he was attaching to the projector. “It’s been an interesting hobby. You could say that I’m collecting my youth.”

As he finished setting up, Toler explained that Seitz had invented the cliffhanger serial in 1914 and had eventually switched to feature films in 1925, making westerns, mysteries, crime melodramas, and comedies. “He was a professional. His pictures were on schedule and underbudget. More important, he knew how to entertain.”

Settling into a plush chair, Coltrane was surprised that his anticipation of seeing Rebecca Chance move and speak was making him uneasy. After Toler turned off the lights and then turned on the projector, tinny epical music, evocative of rivers, plains, and mountains, obscured the projector’s whir. Simultaneously, a beam of light hit the screen, showing a brilliant black-and-white image of a hand that opened a book and revealed the title,
The Trailblazer
, with Seitz’s “directed by” credit below the title. Coltrane gripped the upholstered arms of his chair as the cast list appeared. There wasn’t any separate card for the star; rather, all the actors’ names appeared together on a list, with the star’s name at the top. Rebecca Chance’s was the sixth name down. Seeing it made Coltrane lean forward.

Writers. Cameraman. As the hand continued to turn pages, the music built to a dramatic peak, and all at once, Coltrane was startled by the last of the credits.

“Produced by Winston Case?” Coltrane said in shock.

“You recognize the name?” Toler asked from the darkness behind Coltrane.

Good Lord, Coltrane thought. Rebecca Chance hadn’t only bought Case’s house, she had worked with him. They were connected. “Do you know anything about him?”

“Not a lot. This is the only picture he produced for Seitz.”

“What about Rebecca Chance? Was she in any other of Seitz’s movies?”

“No.”

While they spoke, the screen showed a wagon train making its way across a prairie. A lean, tall man in buckskin, Bruce Cabot, was leading the pioneers. The vista was impressive, as was the multilayered sound track — the creak of wagon wheels, the plod of hooves, the jangle of harnesses. The dramatic use of sound was amazing, given the limitations of recording devices then in use. But Coltrane didn’t care about that. All he did care about as he watched intently, scanning the crowd of pioneers, was a glimpse of . . .

“I did a little research on Case,” Toler’s disembodied voice said. “He started producing in 1928, just as sound was coming in. Except for
The Trailblazer
and one other film, he wasn’t associated with anything I’ve heard of.”

“That other picture wouldn’t be
Jamaica Wind
, would it?”

“How did you know?”

“That’s the other picture I’m looking for. Rebecca Chance is in that one also.”’

Coltrane kept staring at the wagon train. It entered a canyon, where Cabot frowned toward smoke rising from a hollow. He told the wagon train to wait while he and one of the pioneers investigated.

“But you’ve never seen her act?” Toler asked.

“I’ve only seen stills.”

“What made you interested in her?”

Avoiding the question, Coltrane asked, “When does she appear?”

“Soon.”

In the hollow, Cabot galloped to the burning wreckage of a Conestoga wagon. He found a dead dog with an arrow through it, dismounted next to a middle-aged man and woman who were sprawled on the ground, and checked to see if they were still alive. His scowl toward their heads, which were discreetly out of camera view, made clear that they had been scalped. The pioneer who had come with him heard a noise, pulled out his handgun, crept toward a stream, and shouted for Cabot to come running.

Movement behind reeds against the bank of the stream revealed a terrified figure emerging from a hiding place. The figure was a woman, and Coltrane became even more attentive, trying to identify Rebecca Chance’s features. But despite her disheveled hair and grimy face, it was instantly clear that she wasn’t Rebecca.

“I keep forgetting she’s only a supporting player.”

“But she has an important part,” Toler said.

After the woman had been helped to the wagon train and cared for, introducing herself as Mary Beecham, Coltrane understood. There had been someone else in their party, she told Cabot, sobbing — her sister, Amy. The Indians who had attacked their wagon had taken her with them.

Because the attack had happened only a few hours earlier, there was still a chance to get Amy back if a rescue party set out immediately, but that would leave the wagon train undermanned and vulnerable. The pioneers had to make a moral choice — whether to forget about Amy, look after themselves, and keep going, or whether to jeopardize the good of the many for the possible good of one person. Cabot’s doe-eyed looks at Mary made clear that he had fallen instantly in love with her. He told the pioneers that they could do what they wanted but that
he
was going to rescue Mary’s sister. Coltrane had the strong suspicion that Cabot was motivated less by wanting to rescue Amy than he was by wanting to impress Mary. In a dramatically staged scene, Cabot galloped off with six men, following the raiding party’s tracks, while the wagon train proceeded in a different direction.

Coltrane felt light-headed as the scene shifted and he saw Rebecca secured by a rope, stumbling next to the raiding party, who jeered at her from their horses. She, too, had disheveled hair and grimy features, but nothing could obscure her riveting beauty. Her blouse had been torn, revealing more of her right shoulder, almost to her upper breast, than he had realized was permitted by censors back then. Similarly, her skirt was torn up to her knees, exposing her stockings, the tantalizing sight of which seemed more sensual than bare flesh would have been. The animal quality suggested by her lush, tangled hair, the insolence in her dark eyes, the defiance in her full lips made for as erotic a combination as he had ever seen.

“My God,” he whispered.

“Yes,” Toler said, “she could have been a star. But I never saw her in another movie.”

“This was her last. She disappeared.”

Coltrane watched, awestruck as a member of the raiding party tugged the rope and made her stumble, a movement that she accomplished with the grace of a dancer while still making it look like a stumble. In fact, all of her actions had similar grace. Her body had a sensual fluidness that caused every gesture, no matter how trivial, to be impossible to look away from. When she spoke, Coltrane wasn’t prepared for how wonderfully full-throated and sonorous her voice was. Whatever Hispanic accent she had brought to Hollywood, she had worked hard to eliminate. She had re-created herself, and yet there remained the slightest hint of the origins she was trying to disguise.

Coltrane was so enthralled that he had trouble concentrating when other actors were featured in the story. Bruce Cabot pursued the raiding party, overcoming brush fires, thunderstorms, swollen rivers, buffalo stampedes, avalanches, and ambushes in his determined effort to save the sister of the woman he loved (the structure of the film was obviously indebted to the cliffhanger serials that Seitz had directed in his youth). Meanwhile, the wagon train overcame similar obstacles. A young man had taken over Bruce Cabot’s role as expedition leader and was proving himself to be such a hero that Mary, praying for Cabot to come back with her sister, had fallen in love with Cabot’s substitute. Seitz crosscut between the two sets of adventures. To build suspense as to whether Rebecca’s character was still alive, her screen time was reduced after an Indian, angered by her insolence, grabbed her long black hair and wielded a knife to cut it off.

Watching Cabot scale a cliff and race through a forest, Coltrane waited with mounting frustration for Rebecca to reappear, and when she finally did, the Indian was hurling her off a cliff into a river. The fight between Cabot and the Indian was suspenseful, but all Coltrane cared about was another glimpse of Rebecca, who made him inhale sharply when he saw her wading from the river, her wet clothes sticking to her, her soaked dark hair slicked back against her head and hanging down her back. Every curve of her body was emphasized. It was as if she were one with the water, her body gathering substance as she emerged from it, retaining the fluid grace of the waves. She was Venus rising from the water. With her head tilted back, every magnificent detail of her face was pronounced, and if it had earlier seemed questionable that Bruce Cabot would instantly fall in love with Mary Beecham, there was no strain of credulity at all when he triumphed over the Indian and hurried to help Rebecca, only to see her wading from the sensuous waters and to be overcome with attraction.

In the end, he brought Rebecca back to the wagon train, where he announced that he and Rebecca were going to be married. But Rebecca’s sister had a surprise of her own —
she
was going to be married to the man who had taken Bruce Cabot’s place. Hugs and kisses. A good laugh all around, no hint whatsoever of the sexual complexities embedded in the story. As the camera panned to the snowcapped mountains, the music reached a crescendo.
The End
appeared. The screen went black.

In the darkness, Coltrane heard the camera whirring. He heard a chair creak as Vincent stood in the darkness, presumably to go into the projection room and shut off the machine.

“You said Rebecca Chance disappeared after making this movie?” Vincent’s disembodied voice asked.

Coltrane was so enraptured by what he had seen that he had to force himself to speak. “That’s right.”

“When I told you I didn’t know much about Winston Case, I neglected to tell you all of what I
did
know,” Vincent said.