Works by William S. Hart (11)

The Bargain

Solid performances, plausible backdrops, and gratuitous greaser-bashing overcome lack of action and implausible story. Bargain for a square deal from a crooked cop? That's as believable as a woman who never speaks. Even though her lips move, and others talk and respond to her, none of her dialogue was deemed worthy of a title card. Was she mute or censored?

The Taking Of Luke McVane/The Fugitive

Luke McVane is some geek that moves so slow you wonder what kind of “horse” this cowboy is really on. Wearing his virginity on his sleeve, he goes starry-eyed over the town floozy when she hoochie coochies for a saloon full of drunken cowboys. When Garcia takes her as private property, Luke remembers Broncho Billy And The Greaser and jumps at his chance to score nookie points. But, unlike Broncho Billy, this square flips his roscoe once too often, so the town figures the strange mad dog needs to be put down, and he ends up a lamster. Suddenly the nerd's looking less hero, more antihero - and this sleepy little flick turns out to be better than expected.

Note:
  • The Miracle Cure: Although the wounded sheriff initially had to be carefully helped into the saddle, when Apaches are spotted just a short while later he needs no help mounting the rear of a running horse!
  • An Equal Opportunity Employer: This work is marked as one featuring an “ethnic stereotype” because of the opening standoff with unruly knife-toting Garcia. But it must be noted that closer inspection of the background in later scenes shows an unusual twist for a film of that era: cowboys in similar Mexican garb join the Deputy's posses for lynching Luke McVane and for exterminating Native Americans.

The Ruse

When Hart's character rides up he's introduced as “reformed gunfighter” so we can relax: this ain't yet another one of Hart's No-More-Mister-Bad-Guy yarns. In its place, zoophilic fantasizers are treated to a stunningly explicit shot of big horse booty, center screen. Then, in a scene reminiscent of Broncho Billy And The Greaser (1914), he immediately gets in a rumble - even before he's flirted with the Big Butt that hangs out at the post offices of the cinematic Old West. All this has nothing to do with the story. Maybe it's just to let you know that the reformed gunfighter still can duke it out. But after the first four minutes of testosterone flow, he gets suited up and goes pussyfooting around Chicago, so you'll have to wait another 15 minutes before he gets a-rootin' and a-tootin'. But he's no Yosemite Sam: doesn't say a word until the last minute of the film!

The Silent Man

Surprise: this drops Hart's standard cowboy-changed-by-a-woman formula. Bigger surprise: it's a total mess...

  • 52 words of highfalutin prose on 3 title cards in the first 40 seconds to describe...nothing: Gee, the desert is awfully empty!
  • It gets worse. From the 90-second mark until 3 minutes in, there's never more than 6 seconds between title cards. Since the title cards are onscreen 5-9 seconds, most of time is spent reading, not viewing. The barrage of titles doesn't slow to a more reasonable pace until 5-6 minutes in.
  • But just when the titles let up, the action on screen in this video gets hopelessly muddled: the hero fights the villain, tries to escape, but somehow ends up out cold on the floor. The next time we see him, a fortnight later, he is followed by a man with a rifle who tells him: “You're turned loose, stranger,” - apparently, he's been jailed but we're not told why.
  • The hero's version of later events doesn't seem to agree with what is shown on screen.
  • When the hero next encounters the villain, he gets his revenge by forcing him to...do something that seems pointless and of no benefit.
  • Both the heroine's-little-brother subplot and the parson's-church subplot are never made to feel relevant - and are never shown to be resolved.
  • Worse of all, the resolution of the main conflict, between hero and villain, is the worst kind of script cop-out.
And then there is the biggest unresolved mystery: why is the hero called “Silent” when he is no more silent than anyone else in this silent film?

Riddle Gawne

The film is mostly lost, about 11 minutes of scattered fragments remain. But there is some Hart slapstick, a peek at Lon Chaney with too much hair and, for a change, Hart's character stops kissing his horse and instead French-kisses his preteen niece - though he really had his eye on the dog...

Canonical Hart: William S. Hart films in a nutshell

The story formula of an outlaw's salvation by one of “The Gentle Sex” was an ice-cold killer cash cow for The Good Bad Man William S. Hart, who milked it so often that this critic called him out for it:

"The Gun-Fighter," by Monte M. Katterjohn, is well constructed and consistent in both development and direction, but it is too obviously a vehicle for Mr. Hart and therefore lacking in that first value of a play, originality...This story reverts to a role Mr. Hart ought to be thoroughly tired of, that of a Western tough whose soft spot is found by a woman of refinement. He has played it so often that one might get the impression that he would not be effective in any other part...Mr. Hart, to use a newspaper expression, "follows copy." He is the same man he was in other plays of the same kind, the same exponent of brute strength, modified in some sudden and almost unaccountable conversion when a young lady comes on the scene, as if he had never seen one before in his whole life... --– The Moving Picture World, February 10, 1917