Way out south east… Tumbleweeds (1925)/The Gunfighter (1917), with Dr Ilya Poletaev and John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

Women ain't reliable - cows are…

 

That’s what you cowboys call yourselves, isn’t it, tumbleweeds?

 

See also:

 

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks

Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such…

 

That was Wayland Jennings advice but at this stage it’s way too late for those of us keen to ride alongside William S Hart as he blazed his trails across South East London in an evening celebrating this most accomplished of silent actors and a genre that seemed to emerge fully formed from the start. Recently we’ve been watching The English in which Emily Blunt’s mannered aristocrat forms an unlikely alliance with a native American and shows the kind of resilience and toughness required to survive and exert yourself in these primal united states. William S Hart was, if not the first to embody this spirit, certainly the first to comprehensively show the cinema audience the brutal realities only just passed.

 

William S Hart makes his point to young Jack Murphy

Tonight, we had two films from different stages of Harts’ career The Gunfighter (1917) and Tumbleweeds (1925), including an introduction he performed in a 1939 release of the latter which featured the former Shakespearean setting out almost his own eulogy not to mention that of the cowboy. Tumbleweeds was, at 61, Hart’s last film and, here he talks of the many injuries that stopped him continuing as an action hero, with his anguished cry about “the thrill of it all”.

 

Produced by Hart, Tumbleweeds is based on the last major events of the opening up of the West, the Cherokee Strip land rush of 1893. when a huge swathe of land owned by native Americans and used for grazing cattle, was made available for claim from a new wave of “homesteaders” from the East. This provides the film with a huge cinematic moment when the army gun fires at noon, setting off a race featuring thousands of horses, wagons and one man on a penny farthing. Director King Baggot tracks the whole event and you feel almost as much a part of the conflagration as you do in Napoleon’s charges or those of The Chess Player. It sends a chill when you consider this event was just thirty years earlier, as close to 1924 as the collapse of the old Soviet Union is to now. Time flies comrade… and the pictures below show how clearly audiences may have been able to imagine the actuality as it was reported.

For this sequence alone you can understand why some have called this his best film, although reviews were fairly mixed in 1925 and understandably so given a narrative that is slightly assumptive and coded with expectation; as if all of the other characters know exactly what will happen with Hart’s character, Don Carver and there’s not the fierce dynamic uncertainty of say Hell’s Hinges (1915). Hart is of course excellent as the principled foreman of the Box K Ranch, and there’s a humble wistfulness to his performance here as he looks out at the thousands of cattle taking his hat off with his men to declare the “end of the West”.

 

William S. Hart and Barbara Beford

All of the elements of the Western are here, faithful sidekick Kentucky Rose (Lucien Littlefield in what will become The Slim Pickens role), goofing but always coming up trumps, love interest, Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) initially appalled but gradually warming and then the unacceptable faces of progress, men with capitalist intent who try to cheat their way to the money… honestly, America, you should have watched more of your own movies. The baddies here are Molly’s useless brother Noll (J. Gordon Russell) and his mate Bill Freel (Richard Neill), as cowardly as they are unscrupulous… emblems of the essential unfairness underpinning the dash for land something that could only be overcome by the decency and fight of men like Don and women like Molly. The good guys won or at least they did on screen.

 

It’s an engaging spectacle with the romance and resignation of Hart’s character at the centre as the whirlwind of history carries the hopes and schemes of the good, the bad and the greedy.

 

Accompaniment was provided by guest pianist Dr Ilya Poletaev, Associate Professor of Piano at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, who graced the narrative with magnificent lines to accompany the epic sweep and the emotional minutia. Tumbleweeds is the precursor of other films based on the 1893 land rush, including Wesley Ruggles' Cimarron (1931), The New Frontier (1935) and Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992) and the spirit of the 1890’s all the way to Emily Blunt. The end of the old West and Hart’s career, until that final introduction in 1939.

 

The Gunfighter (1917), Mr Hart requests that you raise both hands in the air.

The Gunfighter (1917), with John Sweeney

 

The KB’s Christopher Bird provided two excellent introductions to these films but it was this one that he had the most personal stake in, helping to construct not one but two restorations based on two slightly different 9.5mm home-movie condensed versions from the late 20’s and the recent discovery of one and a half reels of 35mm nitrate. This part of the picture had French intertitles but luckily his colleague at Photoplay, Kevin Brownlow, had a copy of the script, producer Thomas H. Ince being one of the few to insist in a thorough script in a time of so much improvisation.

 

The script was invaluable in reconstructing the narrative and the sense of the film but there was no way of matching the font used at the time. At this point enter Fritzi Kramer, graphic designer by day and runner of the esteemed Movies Silently blog by night. Fritzi went full method on the typeface volunteering to recreate the extinct font by analysing the title cards of two of Hart’s other films. She also mocked up a wanted poster for Hart’s character and lovingly created and aesthetic that, combined with Chris’ painstaking work, has helped to restore just over half of what was once considered a lost film.

 

The Gunfighter was screened at the Hart retrospective at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2019 and tonight was presented with even more improvements from Mr Bird. The sense of this movie is entirely there and it’s a fine example of his output in the teens, with Hart playing an anti-hero rescued by the love of a good, and much younger, woman, here played by Margery Wilson (20 at the time, Hart was 53, plus ca change).

 

Old Bill and Margery Wilson 

Wild Bill Hart plays Cliff “Killer” Hudspeth, leader of a band of outlaws who have achieved supremacy in the local area through his despatch of notorious gun-bullies. His reign is threatened by the mixed-race El Salvador (Roy Laidlaw) who wants to muscle into the territory using less principled means of extortion. Cliff meets Norma Wright (Wilson) a milliner on the door of her shop, as he is in the middle of a gunfight with one of El Salvador’s senior henchmen, 'Cactus' Fuller (Milton Ross) and even though the later cheats, turning, shooting, missing and being shot dead on the count of eight… she is appalled, calling Cliff a murderer.

 

Cliff disagrees and promptly carries Norma off to his gang’s base in the Gila Mountains of Arizona, although this does seem to reflect an almost charming naivete on the gunslinger’s behalf. That said, Norma can see there’s more to him than meets the eye… Cliff is fully aware of his inner conflict though and spends the night drinking whiskey and seeing visions of all of those he has killed. In the morning he agrees with Norma not to kill again… he has seen the light. Choices are not always this simple in the West and the town make Cliff their sheriff on the grounds he eliminates El Salvador using ultimate force if necessary and then the Mexican attacks the town and kidnaps Norma…

 

I love the artwork for this promotional ad

There’s a harder edge to this film than Tumbleweeds and a more fearsome protagonist. Hart himself is playing a more faceted character and not the first nor last outlaw pardoned in exchange for enforcing law in the USA.

 

John Sweeney rode along adding much dramatic accompaniment to further restore the film’s intent. The Western genre is so endlessly fascinating, with questions of morality, loyalty and bravery that never truly grow old, much like William S Hart who one hopes, died with his cinematic boots on.

 

Another special Bioscope evening, you just don’t see these films anywhere else, certainly not on 16mm from private collections. Still London’s Silent Speakeasy as Pamela Hutchinson said way back on Silent London, and full of passionate souls who pay all due respect and reverence to these wonderful films and their history.

Photographs from the actual landrush in 1893...