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... 

When Buddy met Mary … My Best Girl (1927)

This was Mary Pickford’s last silent film and was produced at the technical high point of the form with Sam Taylor directing and Charles Rosher’s camera generating those smooth “european trick shots” Hollywood had come to love. Like all films of the late period, they feel more modern than they should do given our exposure to the dulled ice age of early talkies which left events stuck in studio, actors huddled around immobile microphones… But here, the camera swoops, travels on speeding motorcars and, most importantly, shows us two people falling in love.

Whether or not the two stars began their relationship with this film is open to debate and it would be a full ten years before they tied the knot to begin their 42-year marriage, but it feels like it.

The future Mrs and Mr Pickford...

Now, for the sums… Mary Pickford was 35 – just a little older than Zooey Dechannel and a little younger than Amy Adams – and still able to carry off the shop girl ingénue. Charles “Buddy” Rogers was just 22… considerably younger than Mary’s hubby Douglas Fairbanks who was 44 at the time.

Regardless of the events off-set, the film stands as one of Pickford’s best and most enduring: a thousand rom-coms have followed in its footsteps including those still featuring Zooey and Amy.

Pots and pans

Pickford produced and it’s hard not to imagine that she also co-directed parts of the film. Our first glimpse of her is of her feet as she attempts to carry too numerous a collection of pots and pans in the department store in which she works. As one pan is picked up another falls to the floor until she has to resort to sticking her feet in them to lift them along – it’s inventively daft and shows us all we need to know about the brave and gutsy shop girl, Maggie Johnson.

Maggie works in Merril’s Department Store – I have a penchant for films set in 1920s department stores: think of Clara Bow in It! or Brent and Brooks in Love ‘em and Leave ‘em… places where society mixes almost on a level and where there’s always the possibility of unexpected dalliances across the class divide.

Are you being served?

A young man sidles up to Maggie’s counter and starts to ask her flirty questions about the various items for sale… turns out he’s the new guy 'Joe' Grant (Rogers) who eventually gets assigned to Maggie for ad hoc induction to the world of the store.

The two get on well and soon share their lunchtimes sitting cosy in a packing crate in the staff room. It is here where we see Mary’s first prolonged screen kiss: a side-on affair that conveys much delicate passion.

Maggie invites Joe home, where he gets to meet the family: Pa Johnson (Lucien Littlefield) a man disorientated by the curious position in which life has left him, not least of which is his easily-shocked and narcoleptic wife (Sunshine Hart) whom he frequently has to rouse with smelling salts.

Then there’s sister Liz (Carmelita Geraghty) a jazz baby hanging around with decidedly-dodgy men and, as a result, in constant conflict with her parents.

Sunshine Hart, Carmelita Geraghty, Mary, Pat Harmon and Lucien Littlefield

Maggie is ashamed of their bad humour and pretends that they are rehearsing for a play, leaving Joe waiting on their porch for their first date.

But she’s not the only one hiding something… “Joe” is actually Joseph, the son and heir to the Merrill fortune who has been assigned to the shop by his father Robert (Hobart Bosworth) in order to learn the business without his name giving him advantage.

His mother Esther (Evelyn Hall) also has ambitions and wants to see him married off to the winsome and wealthy Millicent Rogers (Avonne Taylor). Joe doesn’t appear to have any strong feelings about this social arrangement, at least not yet at any rate.

Buddy Rogers

Joe does well at the store and is soon being promoted but he’s also getting closer and closer to Maggie. To two spend a blissful journey in the back of a truck after walking through traffic as if it wasn’t there: totally absorbed in each other’s presence. This section reminded me strongly of the closing sequence of Sunrise (made some months earlier…) with the couple walking through the staged street traffic…

Joe and Maggie go on a rain-sodden date as he ignores his parent’s request to dine with them – they are planning to announce his engagement. He persuades Maggie to venture to the Merrill’s house to see if the family’s oft-pronounced equal treatment would extend to their being offered dinner.

Winking his way past the doorman and butlers he gets them to lay on a meal whilst Maggie looks around in nervous amazement: even more delighted by her dazzling young man than before. But, they are rudely interrupted by Joe’s parents as they arrive back home with the decorative Millicent in tow… the game’s up!

Meanwhile, Liz’ fella has really dropped her in it and they are being processed before the night court. Unable to contact the brains of the family, the Johnson’s are helpless to prevent their younger daughter from being locked up.

As luck would have it, Maggie, having tearfully made her excuses and left, encounters Ma and Pa downtown as they enter the court: she goes into battle for her sister in front of a Judge played by Mack Swain.

But Joe isn’t done yet and goes out in search of his “best girl” – he’s not going to be swayed. A helpful hobo spots events and directs him to the court where he is in time to see Maggie’s eloquent defence and to end up in clink after thumping Liz’s no good boyfriend.

Maggie brings order to the court

It makes the papers and there’s a big stink but, will class barriers be broken and will true love run smooth… We been here before my friends and I have no intention of revealing what happens.
 
My Best Girl is a lovely film and one to file under heart-warming. Rogers is good in the same way he was in Wings: wholehearted and sincere… my teenage daughter recognised those regular features instantly!

But he’s not the one you watch. It’s Mary’s show and she demonstrates an undimmed intensity with a face and a voice that can almost be heard… so close is she to the talkies. She performs particularly well in the ending section I’m not mentioning and there was hardly a dry eye in our living room: how can she do that when we can almost see it coming!? Amazing skill: a wizard and a true star!

The look of love...

I watched the Milestone DVD which comes with some precious home movie footage showing Mary and Buddy’s wedding and their honeymoon – a nice touch. Whatever the ups and downs of the decades to follow this was one of those Hollywood marriages built to last. It may have started here in front of our very eyes.

My Best Girl is available direct for institutional use from Milestone or from Amazon’s second hand sellers – seems it’s out of print and becoming collectable. Hopefully the good folks at Milestone have a Blu-ray in the works, this is indeed amongst the very best of Pickford.

Trivia: Carole Lombard has an uncredited appearance as a Flirty Salesgirl whilst Charles Rosher deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography. He shot so many of Pickford’s films not to mention his other projects with Herr Murnau.

Carole Lombard and Buddy