Lake Placid Take Two — 1920

Heavy snowfall forced Famous Players Motion Picture Company of New York to abandon filming of scenes at the Lake Placid Club for “His Wife’s Mother,” starring Eugene O’Brien and Zena Keefe.

“It spoiled the part taken at Lake Placid and the whole thing will have to be done over again,” most likely in North Carolina, The Adirondack Record reported on Nov. 14, 1919.

Director Ralph Ince remained bullish on Lake Placid, and returned in February 1920 to film “Out of the Snows,” which started out with the working title Smiling Holliday” and also was known during production as “The Law Bringers,” a five-reel silent film action drama.

The $75,000 budget — the equivalent of just under $1 million in 2019 dollars — included constructing a 65-foot whaling ship on Lake Placid, by one account, or Mirror Lake, by another account, that was exploded and destroyed during filming.

“The story has to do with fur and rum smuggling in northwestern Canada and Alaska, “ the Essex County Republican reported on March 1, 1920.

Ince returned with the same leading lady — Zena Keefe.

This time Ince directed himself in the lead male role of Robert Holliday.

It was a return to acting for Ince, a former stage actor who had taken up film directing.

“The story opens with Holliday meeting the girl of his dreams at a carnival at Quebec and then runs the gamut of the regular melodrama with its ghastly deaths, brutal killings, tilts with matchless Northwest Mounted Police and resourceful smugglers,” the Plattsburgh Sentinel reported on Feb. 10, 1920.

The film featured the sled dog team of Jacques Suzanne of Fort Montgomery in Clinton County.

Quebec carnival scenes and exterior scenes of an Alaskan village were filmed on a temporary set at the Lake Placid Club.

Interior scenes were filmed at Selznick Studios at Fort Lee, N.J.

Sources: The Adirondack Record, Nov. 14, 1919; Ticonderoga Sentinel, Feb. 12, 1920; Plattsburgh Daily Republican, Feb. 9, 1920; The Plattsburgh Sentinel, Feb. 10, 1920; imdb.com.