Works, By Duration: 31-60 minutes (30)

Total: 357 works

The Aryan/La fiera domada

The title raised the excited hope of going beyond the usual stereotyping and slurs, instead delivering an explicit exposition of racial ideology - taking Birth Of A Nation out west. Unfortunately, this is just an incomplete reconstruction of a film considered lost until 2008. The introduction states that this version comes from an Argentine mid-1920s rerelease (dates within the film are given as 1923), with titles that “differ quite a bit from the original”. Most segments have not been digitally restored, and lost segments are replaced by photographs.

The original may have been more directly concerned with racial ideology, but here Cowboy's main conflict is with women: Cowboy is massively Madonna–whore complexed. This is immediately suggested in the very first scene, where Cowboy's sacred love for his distant mother is juxtaposed with images of him petting and kissing his bestial companion. Then after he deludes himself that a sleazy mining camp on the border is his ideal “town inhabited by men of iron heart”, and that his mother would love a girl he met in a bar there, he is of course vamped. But instead of dumping her, he takes her as his whore he loves to hate, as he does a No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy. Finally, he meets The Virgin Mary Jane and he again falls to his delusions as she cons him into believing his White Man's Duty is to give away his riches. He leaves behind his whore to return to his Brotherhood and replay the Heroic Defender role that first got him vamped, before riding off in the sunset to seek his next imagined Madonna to transform into an imagined whore. So goes the life of an iron-hearted Aryan.

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?

Shoes

Eva is a young woman who works in a variety store for a meager salary, solely supporting her two parents and three sisters - while her father lies in bed reading dime novels, smoking his pipe, and drinking pails of beer. As her only pair of shoes disintegrates from long use, so does her hopes, her respect for her father, and her resistance against a leering cabaret singer.