This print comes from the same source (discovered by a cinefile from Trento) as the Italian version used for the restoration of Malombra. It was found in the basement of a cinema that had been completely flooded and was one of the few cans that had remained above the water level. The print consists of only the last reel, tinted and toned with Italian intertitles. Il Tredicesimo Commensale is a good example of the difficulties that a film archive faces. The film came to the Cineteca of Bologna incomplete and without any title by which to identify it. Just the same, even in this incomplete state, it was of extraordinary interest.
It’s identification confirmed the importance of the film fragment made by Brignone, who at the time was at the height of his long career, and the Rodolfi Film Company, perhaps the only production company that in the period around 1920 attempted a real narrative and linguistic renaissance of the Italian diva film.
Guido Brignone attempts, rather curiously, the traditionally English whodunit (the overall plot, deduced from the news reports of the period, further highlights this aspect: the guests that have been invited to the lunch at which the solution is to be revealed are all possible suspects). But, above all, the mystery formula as a guarantee to melodramatic functioning, otherwise close to being worn-out, seems to have been one of the marks of the Torino company (e.g. Il quadro di Osvaldo Mars). The result, at least in this final reel, is truely interesting. Flash-backs, subjective takes, alternate editing, all seems to be used without dispersion and beyond that practice of contemplative lingering on the framing that characterizes much of the Italian cinema up to 1920.
(Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n. 7).