Director: George Terwilliger
Cast: John Lowell, Evangeline Russell, F. Serrano Keating, Jane Thomas
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Only vaguely certain that I’ve seen it now.
Did I Like It: Hacking together the mere idea of the motion picture must have been heavy work, but one gets the sense that one of—if not the key—motivations would have been to show people around the world something they were unlikely to see in their own lives. Nosferatu (1922) wanted to give us something monstrous and inhuman. Georgees Méliès took us to the moon. Hell, even the famed train that startled everyone out of their seats was meant to show people an unattainable nagle on something.
So, here’s the problem: Living in Oklahoma for most of my life, I’ve had to work fairly hard to avoid seeing a circus with a horse show at its center, and I’ve been fairly successful in that pursuit. So seeing horses and horse people—and divorced from any sort of adventure story or some great neo-Western naval gazing—is at least a waste of the nitrate film that captured the light and shadow at play, and certainly a waste of what had to be a heroic effort to save the film from the vagaries of rot and disinterest.
A long time ago (although not as long as the film has been around), I promised myself that I would write at least 300 words for these reviews, and I find myself struggling to come up with much more here. I also wonder about some of the potentially great films whose only sin against the forces of oblivion were not having enough luck. I’d rather have every Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin film in pristine condition than think of all the pokey horsey movies that shoved their way on to the last chopper out of Saigon*.
*There. I made it to 300. If you had told me that the last word of this review proper would be Saigon.