Dave Tolliver, tower signalman on a mountain railroad, takes in his relief man, Joe Standish, as a boarder. For a time, Joe seems like an entertaining guest, but during a storm, he becomes drunk and makes advances to Dave’s wife, Sally. Although little Sonny Tolliver warns his father of Sally’s predicament, Dave is compelled to stay on the job when a runaway freight endangers a passenger train. He ditches the runaway and saves the express, while Sally successfully defends herself by shooting Standish. (AFI Catalog)
Only two 16mm copies of The Signal Tower survive: a tinted copy created in 1928 in the collection of Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury’s Photoplay Productions and a preservation duplicate of a 16mm copy at the Packard Humanities Institute. These two sources were scanned at 4K resolution then digitally repaired in accordance with the ethicial guidelines of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Then, two new 35mm black-and-white negatives were made, and from those, two new 35mm prints, which were then dye-tinted by specialist chemists in Prague to identically reproduce the colors of the original dye-tinted 16mm source.
