Bride of the Regiment (partially lost Pre-Code musical film; 1930)
Official poster for the movie's theatrical release
Status: Partially lost
This article has been tagged as NSFW due to its [explicit and borderline pornographic content].
Bride of the Regiment is a 1930 Technicolor film meant to be a remake of the 1927 film known as The Lady In Ermine, starring Vivienne Segal, Walter Pidgeon, and Allan Prior as the 3 main characters. Directed by former actor John Francis Dillon and edited by future Oscar nominee LeRoy Stone, the film surrounds an Austrian colonel who's holding a rebel count as hostage, threatening to execute him unless his countess wife agrees to boink him. According to reviews of the time, the film was well recieved, with most of the praise being levied on the soundtrack and cinematogrophy. However, due to its scandilous content such as a subplot revolving around a prostitute trying to steal the colonel's love for her own personal reasons, a scene where one of the ancestors of the countess jumps out of a potrait wearing only an ermine cloak and gets the colonel drunk, as well as a dreamt sex scene, it was given a very limited run and later banned under the Hays Code. Only audio of the film exists, as well as several stills.
The audio of the film, preserved on Vitaphone records, is the most publicly available and easiest to track the origin, being posted on Youtube in 2 [1] different [2] parts by a channel dedicated to Vitaphone recordings. However, the rest of the evidence gathered is way more diverse, with concrete origins being few and far between, with a major example being many of the available stills, which randomly appeared on a website called [3] notrecinema.com with no listed sources. Newspaper evidence is no better, with brief coverage from New York [4], Montreal [5], and even Prescott, Arizona [6]. However, while extremely low-quality, a Discord user known as FuckLouisVIII has found some new stills from an episode of I've Got a Secret!, so there might be hope for an actual lead yet.