York City, rather than at the Hollywood studio, which was still being built. According to Lillian Gish, The Battle of the Sexes was shot in only five days. Although the film was complete by February, its release was delayed for two further months. Several reasons have been advanced for the impasse, but scholar Paul Spehr has suggested that both Reliance-Majestic and its distributor, Mutual, were having difficulty developing an effective distribution strategy for longer, multi-reel films in a market still dominated by one- and two-reel subjects. The Battle of the Sexes was premiered at Weber's Theater in New York City on April 12, 1914, and was a considerable success, the first Griffith enjoyed with his name over the title. Although the film is routinely listed as "lost", Iris Barry mentioned the existence of a short fragment of it in her 1940 monograph on Griffith. The surviving scene takes place in a restaurant, where Mrs. Andrews and the children take a booth, and the children note that Mr. Andrews and Cleo are seated at the booth next to them; Mrs. Andrews has not noticed this, and the children find an excuse to get her out of there just before the scene ends. Were there a minute or two more of this fragment extant, it might be possible to see Rudolph Valentino's alleged screen debut in the bit part of a taxi dancer; he is known to have played as an extra in an early Griffith feature, and a shadowy figure tentatively identified in one of the stills for The Battle of the Sexes may be him. While the familiar, and now popular, 1928 remake of The Battle of the Sexes plays largely as a comedy, the 1914 original was a melodrama. See also List of lost films References External links AFI entry 1914 films 1914 drama films 1914 lost films Silent American drama films American silent feature films American black-and-white films 1910s English-language films Films based on short fiction Films directed by D. W. Griffith Lost American films Lost drama films 1910s American films