Shawn Belson, Drums Along the Mohawk and Leave Her to Heaven

The notion that "Film is forever" is a nice one even if it's tragically untrue. Film stock decomposes, color fades, prints are scratched, torn, destroyed. Shawn Belson describes his rise to overseer of 20th Century Fox's restoration vaults and his work on two very different Technicolor masterworks: John Ford's first Technicolor movie, 1939's historical Drums Along the Mohawk with Henry Fonda and Claudette Claubert, and the lavish 1945 melodrama Leave Her to Heaven with Gene Teirney's only Oscar-nominated performance as the obsessive, murderous Ellen and which won the Oscar for its color cinematography by Leon Shamroy.

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