Fifty-year-old film is found under lock and key.

Larry Cantwell was the man who, greatly to his own relief, found the missing 300th-anniversary movie.

"We had moved our office three times in the past four years," the Village Administrator said on Monday, explaining how the film came to be lost, "from Main Street [in the old Osborne Bank building] to Cedar Street [temporary quarters in the Emergency Services Building] to Main Street [in the renovated Beecher House]."

"We had two metal film canisters - everyone remembered those - that had been in storage ever since I came 15 years ago. [Former Village Clerk] Don Halsey had told me it was an old film and we should hang on to it. When Averill [Geus, a vice chairwoman of the anniversary committee] told me they were looking, I said, 'I'm sure we have it.' "

"But I didn't find it in our new building, although everyone remembered the film cases and knew it was somewhere. We went through every space at the Beecher House looking for it, and finally thought, perhaps it got left behind at the police station?"

Mr. Cantwell checked out the basement storage room in the Cedar Street building. The film, he said, "to my chagrin," was nowhere to be found.

"As soon as you really want or need something, it's not there," lamented Mr. Cantwell. "You know you have it, you search and search, then you have that sinking feeling. . . ."

In the end, it was Chief Glen Stonemetz of the East Hampton Village Police who suggested the film might be in his department's Lost and Found, under lock and key.

There, on a shelf, were the two missing canisters. "I felt much relieved," said Mr. Cantwell feelingly. "I'd felt personally responsible for them."