The film:

Maciste, for the first time, suddenly discovers to be in love. The object of his love is Ada, the daughter of Thompson, an enlightened industrialist persecuted by Bethel,  a competitor without scruples. He first makes use of a small group of agitators in order to foment the workers, then he tries to affect his loved ones, kidnapping his daughter. But he hasn’t squared things up with Maciste. In Maciste innamorato private and politic life interlace and condition each other. Maciste, a new popular hero, acts in advance of his time and sees himself as a media idol: after punishing the instigators, the crowd will recognize him as a movie star and promptly forget their claims carrying him shoulder-high. A hero, though, doomed to an unhappy love. 

The film restoration:

The restoration of Maciste innamorato was carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna based on a tinted and toned nitrate positive print with English intertitles, which is conserved at the British Film Institute of London, and on a dupe negative work print without intertitles, belonging to the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.

The work print was composed of a series of blocks of shots with notes and work codes (colorization, scene number, intertitles) on their leaders.

Thanks to the copies’ collation, it was possible to reconstruct various passages that otherwise would have been incomplete; the color codes enabled the reconstruction of the colorization of the scenes printed from the negative and the verification of the colorization in the scenes printed from the positive print. The censorship certificate and the list of intertitles conserved at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino permitted the reconstruction of the Italian texts. The graphics of the intertitles were based on an analysis of the graphics used in other Itala productions from the same era. A comparison with documents revealed editing errors in an entire narrative section in the positive print; it was re-edited correctly. As opposed to the English version, the re-introduction of the Italian intertitles intensifies the anti-union and paternalistic tone of the film.

The gaps, that were pinointed, were marked with ten black frames. Documents of the era that are conserved in the Museum in Torino permitted the partial reconstruction of the story of the original negative of the film, which had been sent to France and seriously damaged. A dupe negative and a positive print colored with the Desmet method were printed.

The restoration was conducted in 2006 at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna.

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