The Big Diamond Robbery (1929)

Director: Eugene Forde

Cast: Tom Mix, Kathryn McGuire, Frank Beal, Martha Mattox

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I’ve been down on silent westerns. One would hope that they would be wall-to-wall action, but oddly enough the silent comedies are more interested in keeping things moving in improbable ways.

It’s also frustrating to try to sit through a silent film that went neglected for far too long. The Last Trail (1927) had degraded to some blurry shadows with light poking through. I’m happy to report that for some reason the Library of Congress got involved with some restoration*. The copy I saw was pristine, with no strange film breaks. I really feel like I saw the film in the way it was intended to be seen, and that’s even before I mention that I got to see it with an organist.

With all of that being said, it’s now time to be kind of down on this one, too. Take a look at that title. It screams action. Gunplay. Horseplay. Maybe, dare I expect too much from the world of the 2020s, a diamond robbed or two.

Maybe the more apt title of “A Light Romantic Comedy Eventually Involves a Horse And There Are Some Mild Misunderstandings Surrounding a Diamond, But They’re Really Secondary” had no hope of fitting on a poster. Even those huge ones they had in the pre-talkie era. But I would have at least not felt like I was getting short shift from the whole affair. Relegating the diamonds to an afterthought might have been forgiven if Mix was in top form. Reaching the end of his career, he’s understandably not moving as improbably as he might of in those films that only barely exist anymore.

*And yet, the film is not on the National Film Registry. After all these years, it’s really not clear to me where, when, or why they might get involved with something. Probably never will, at this rate. Probably should tell me something.

Sky High (1922)

Director: Lynn Reynolds

Cast: Tom Mix, J. Farrell MacDonald, Eva Novak, Sid Jordan

Have I Seen It Before: Never

Did I Like It: I’m not entirely sure where the line of demarcation is between a nearly lost film, a well-preserved film, and a lost film. The Last Trail (1927), the silent movie I took in for last year’s Tom Mix day, barely exists anymore beyond a rudimentary sense that there might be some difference between light and shadow. Something like City Lights (1931) looks as good today as it did all of those years ago. And then there’s this film, which purportedly was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, but parts of the film look mostly fine, and others look like the best version of the footage exists from a cheap VHS. Might just be the copy we watched, but the practically fried in watermark for the first few minutes couldn’t help but take me out of the proceedings for a little bit. The big appeal of seeing these movies in a theater is to hope that for brief moments I can feel like I’m watching the movie at the time of release. It didn’t happen here, and for once it had nothing to do with someone’s cell phone going off.

And yet, there’s something in this film that probably should be seen to be believed. Yes, there is something to the first motion picture footage shot at the Grand Canyon, but beyond that there is an honest-to-god shot where a stuntman dangles from a rope tied to a biplane high above the said Canyon. That’s the kind of thing you can’t even see Tom Cruise do now. Usually when I glance at information about these kind of things, the magic goes away a bit. Here, the fac that the guy nearly died trying to pull this off somehow makes it even better.

The Last Trail (1927)

Director: Lewis Seller

Cast: Tom Mix, Carmelita Geraghty, William B. Davidson, Jerry Madden

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Not entirely sure I’ve seen it at this point.

Did I Like It: I’m sure most genres worked for the silent screen in their day. But I’m supremely confident that, save for a few exceptions, only comedy and horror—those two genres which insist on the viewer having a visceral, involuntary reaction to a film—have any staying power in the here and now.

Therefore, this film is already working at a disadvantage. True, Mix has an impressive fearlessness when it comes to stunts, but that only is brought to any kind of fruition in the final moments of the final act, when Mix surfs the scant remaining splinters of a stagecoach to a final victory against the bandits trying to fix the race. Everything else feels very basic, right down to the main character being forced to adopt an imp of a child who spends most of the runtime outwitting everyone around him like an early-day Jay North, or more accurately a store-brand Jackie Coogan. It feels like Charlie Chaplin would have sent a cease and desist letter if the film would have been a bigger hit, and if every picture of the era didn’t feel the need to partner him up with a little rascal (small “l”, small “r”).

Then there’s the matter of the film’s presentation. I’d be hard pressed to speak ill about a silent movie presented with a full organ accompaniment, especially when some lumbar company bought all the tickets, but let’s confront some unfortunate truths. First, we may not need to see any animated representations of people of Chinese descent from before… Well, anything before Mulan (1998) is going to have to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Also, there’s probably a reason that Felix the Cat disappeared into the mists of time*.

Second, it’s hard to get too much of a handle on the movie at all, as the only available version of the film has degraded so much from the original nitrate stock, that there are a number of shots which are nothing more than bright white light with a few scant shadows. I complain about the film’s average-ness here, but I don’t think mostly disappearing is a fair fate for any movie.

*There may have been an uncomfortable cartoon before the feature.