The First Degree
1923 silent film
The First Degree is a silent film from 1923 directed by Edward Sedgwick. The film is a rural melodrama starring Frank Mayo, Sylvia Breamer, and Philo McCullough. A Universal Pictures production, it is one of the Carl Laemmle-endorsed “The Laemmle Nine,” nine films released from Christmas 1922 to February 19, 1923. The screenplay by George Randolph Chester is based on the short story “The Summons” by George Pattullo (published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914). The cinematography is by Benjamin H. Kline.
Long thought to be a lost film, a complete, partially-tinted 35mm domestic distribution print of the film was discovered at Chicago Film Archives in June 2020 in the Charles E. Krosse Collection, a collection of mostly agricultural and sponsored films produced and distributed by C.L. Venard Productions of Peoria, Illinois. CFA has since digitally preserved the film.
Plot
Sam Bass receives a call from the grand jury of Lincoln County. He is wanted to give testimony in a case involving the theft of his sheep, but before he learns this, he makes a confession regarding the murder of his half-brother Will the previous night. The jury learns the myriad ways his brother has wronged him over the last several years, motivated out of a mutual affection for a woman named Mary.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The First Degree” is 1923 silent film. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through First, Degree and silent, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1923 silent film” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q101245008. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1922, 1914 and 2020.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The First Degree”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The First Degree primary sources, The First Degree archive and First research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “The First Degree” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.