Works featuring "flashback" (29)

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.

Keno Bates, Liar

Keno Bates, Sleazeball, runs a saloon. As every Hart movie has shown, saloon owners are despicable scumbags who run crooked gambling halls. When one of Keno's victims refuses to accept that he'd walked into Keno's trap, he lashes out in armed revenge to retrieve his money - just as the “hero” of Hart's The Silent Man (1917) does. Although both Keno and his henchman were armed, they offered no resistance (which would be considered legitimate self-defense), made no attempt to dissuade the man, and afterwards never notified the law.

Instead Keno Bates, Lyncher and his henchman set out after the money they'd swindled, and the hombre who had the gall to grab it back - despite knowing he was armed and desperate.

When Keno Bates, Murderer eyeballs a snapshot of his victim's sister, he warns his henchman to get ready to take their lying to a whole new level, as Keno Bates, Slimebucket starts scheming how to use the murder he just committed to bust a move on the dead man's sister.

Later, when the sister learns that she has been deceived, she reacts like her brother. First, she lashes out murderously against the innocent messenger - the only honest person in the whole flick, and the one who legitimately pulled a weapon in self-defense.

Then she lashes out in armed revenge against Keno Bates, Sucker, who has fallen for a wild vixen in sheep's clothing, who will bring into his life the hell that he rightly deserves, and the DNA that would eventually result in Norman Bates, Psycho.

Regeneration

Long introduction of no relevance, gangs but no crime, DA with no case, ship fire of no consequence, romance but no joy. Still, any flick where all cops are creeps can't be all bad. The filmcraft is impressive, despite the sappy story - as a one-reeler, minus the filler, could've been a killer. Plus, it's rare to see a murderer go unpunished. And this particular restoration is worth watching just for its beautifully sick music.

A Reckless Romeo

A childish upper-class alcoholic husband who passes out drunk in a bathtub (evoking an uneasy laugh, as it is not unrealistic and is a cause of death: remember Whitney Houston?), and who wants children from a wife that sleeps with her mother, provides an imaginative flashback of an imaginary event, with strangely incongruent details. But as his family watches the actual event in a newsreel, the actual event is reenacted in the present. So we have a film that shows how film is a technology that can replace our imaginative lives with virtualized actualities. But when we choose to enter its realm of virtualized actualities, we may find it not only conflicts with our idealized world, but also revives and reinforces the conflicts inherent in our actualized world. Pretty scary slapstick...

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?