3. The Flying Doctor - Garbage Truck
Easily one of the luckiest, most fortuitous rescue jobs in the history of lost movies, Miles Mander's The Flying Doctor had long been thought lost until some builders clearing out a Sydney building site stumbled across a film vault. They cut through the door with a torch - and amazingly, the nitrate film did not ignite as a result - before discovering a number of film prints inside, which they promptly decided should probably be disposed of immediately... An office worker saw the truck drive past with film canisters hanging out of the back, and promptly ran to his car to flag the truck down. He rescued eight of the nine reels of the film, and in an incredible stroke of luck, another print of the film was discovered two years later which contained the single missing reel from the Sydney version. Talk about a stroke of luck...