YOU are in Connecticut happily antique-hunting with your mother. You stop off at an auction and spend $3.50 on a "mystery chest." Six men help you carry it to your Ford station wagon, and when you open it, you find 40 metal film tins marked: Greed, Reels 1-40. "What a long film to make about such an unpleasant subject," your mother says as you open one of the tins. The film wound around the rusty reels is brown and moldy: fungus-like organisms have sprouted from the innumerable folds. Overcome by a powerful smell, you sneeze on it, and the brown film crumbles into dust.

If you told this to George Stevens Jr. and Richard Kahlenberg of the American Film Institute, they would probably go off into a corner and cry quietly. As President and Archive Director respectively, Greed is of more than routine interest to them: Erich von Stroheim made it in 1924 and his first edited version was eight hours long; making concessions to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he re-edited the film, finally stopping at a four-hour cut. At that point MGM seized it, cut it to two hours and ten minutes, and the remaining six hours has been missing ever since.

Greed, as Stroheim's masterpiece and one of the highest-echelon Establishment classics, is known only in a version one-quarter the length of the original. Rumors-and-little-else have kept alive the hope of seeing the complete 40 reels someday--prints have been said to exist in secret vaults from New Mexico to Denmark. And Greed is only one of 250 films on the American Film Institute's "preliminary rescue list" of films which do not exist in America on 35mm acetate stock.

At present the best collection of American silent films resides not in the American archives at Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art, but in the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. The AFI, a private corporation based in Washington, D.C., initially endowed by the government, the Ford foundation, and the Motion Picture Association, is bringing it all back home. As archive director, Kahlenberg ferrets out American films of artistic and historical value that have disappeared for one or another reason. Some have vanished (like Hawks' Scarface, produced by the ubiquitous Howard Hughes, and all 35mm prints of Ford's Stagecoach) and the problem is one of location; others, like whatever remains of Stroheim's original cut of Greed, are in serious danger of destruction by decay. Until the last decade, film was made from a nitrate base, both flammable and subject to erosion. The film archivist works against time: the older the film, the more likely the chances of physical degeneration -- and the chance of its vanishing forever in a pile of dust.

The genesis of the dilemma lay in the industry's lack of foresight and a still-prevalent attitude where movies were regarded as commercial property, not art worth preserving. When William S. Hart didn't sell any more popcorn, Hollywood didn't care much about preserving his films. A no-longer-commercial commercial film fell subject to varying fates: films were allowed to rot in forgotten Hollywood vaults; original producers sold their distribution rights to smaller distributors; copyrights elapsed and films were turned over to family heirs; others were chopped to ribbons, sections used in the making of other films; legal problems of ownership and distribution rights mounted until films became hopelessly inaccessible (Hughes's, for example), or until studios found it convenient to forget about them.

And many simply got lost in the shuffle. A surprisingly large number of famous first films are missing in America: Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters, De Mille's The Squaw Man, Ford's first feature Straight Shooting and many of Griffith's earliest films, to name a few.

In attempting to assure the missing classics a permanent fireproof posterity, Kahlenberg's job, in his own words, resembles a miniature CIA operation; the search for a missing film can only be completely conducted in the open in rare and lucky instances. Say, for example, Kahlenberg sets his sights for a print of John Ford's Air Mail (Universal, 1930), a long-gone drama of some considerable reputation. His first move is to contact Universal Pictures, which may still have a print tucked away, or know the location of one. If they do, and Kahlenberg can convince them to contribute it, the quest comfortably ends.

But, we discover, Universal junked all its printing materials (either negatives, or prints in good condition) of their early films in the first years of the thirties, and have no clue to its whereabouts. Kahlenberg then goes to Willard van Dyke, curator of the Museum of Modern Art film Library, and James Card of Eastman House in Rochester--they may have access to a print or know of one also. But if they don't (and often even when they do know of one), Kahlenberg must go underground.

Film historian William K. Everson, for example, tells Kahlenberg that he knows a private collector with a 16mm print of Air Mail. Although Air Mail is legally owned either by Universal, or Ford and his producer, it has slipped into one of the hundreds of excellent underground collections of films throughout the country: collections which possess all of Chaplin's features, and such classics as Murnau's Tabu, Rosselini's Paisan, complete versions of Fritz Lang's first Doctor Mabuse, and early films by Jean Renoir, to name some of the most popular items in the underground market.

How these prints (and they are almost always 16mm prints, due to the expense of 35mm printing) came into the country or into existence is a question without precise answer. Many are reduction prints from 35mm, made quickly by people tangential to the distribution profession who had brief access to a print during theatrical release. Many others are known as "dupes," referring to prints made directly from other positive prints; a "dupe" print can usually be detected by its quality: contact printing positive to positive invariably results in higher grain, higher contrast, and consequent lack of image clarity and detail.

Kahlenberg goes to the private collector and begins a series of complicated negotiations for the film. The collector knows he owns something he has no right to own, and consequently must be handled with kid gloves. If he donates the print directly to the American Film Institute, a private corporation, and its owners discover its existence, they can legally claim the print and sue the collector.

Kahlenberg's sole interest is to secure a permanent copy and rest assured that the film exists and is not steadily disintegrating. He asks the collector to lend his print to the Library of Congress, which is ready and willing to make a copy of it. Funds for the copying are supplied to the Library by the AFI; once the film has been transferred to acetate, the print is returned quietly to the collector. As soon as the print enters the Library of Congress, it becomes federal property and cannot be seized, therefore protecting the owner of the black-market print to some extent, and completely protecting the permanent copy.

The pay-off may come years later: when all of Air Mail's owners are long-dead and the property comes into public domain, then, and only then, can the AFI make use of the print, make it available for study and screening. In the meantime, however, they know it does exist and that they will someday be able to make its existence known.

Kahlenberg's chief frustration is the necessity of tedious and tactful nego- tiation in bringing collectors out into the open, and convincing them to help. Like the studios, collectors sense the complex nature of the legal problems involved in film ownership and often prefer to hide their prints rather than risk legal battles and long expenditure of time. Although the AFI's cordial connection with the Library of Congress gives them an invaluable aid in negotiating for copies of rare films, they cannot legally guarantee an amnesty to collectors who admit ownership of black-market prints. Consequently, no uncertain skill is needed in making different deals for each film; the need to create an image which convinces collectors that their prints won't be impounded pulls Kahlenberg toward cloak-and-dagger tactics of secrecy. "I know where three negatives of Scarface are," he will say with a mysterious smile, or "I think I can lay my hands on most of Salvation Hunters." And that's all he can tell the world for fear of driving an owner further underground.

Although the AFI represents a rare example of America rising to meet a crisis before it reaches insane proportions, much of an archivist's dream can no longer be made into reality: many films are permanently lost, and Hollywood's history includes stories that fill a modern-day film anthropologist with disgust. Directors rarely had the right to edit their own films, and it became common practice for studios to re-cut and mangle films they thought potentially commercial.