Director: Henry King
Cast: Ronald Colman, Vilma Bánky, Gary Cooper, Charles Willis Lane
Have I Seen It Before: Never
Did I Like It: Well, my Apple Watch seems to think I got a poor night’s worth of sleep for an hour of it, so that’s not great, right?
I’ve been almost resolutely down on silent westerns as I’ve taken them in. Every once in a while, Tom Mix might be able to milk a thrilling action sequence out of the proceedings, but for the most part, I’m left with people sitting on horse not quite knowing what to do next as a camera—which was probably invented the week before they started making the picture—stares at them.
Such is definitely the case here, and I think things are definitely weighed down by the fact that it feels like the filmmakers are trying to do a faithful, and dare I say comprehensive adaptation of the Harold Bell Wright novel. The silent cinema repels the novelistic adaptation like a north pole of a magnet bumping against the south. Details of thought, setting, and nuances of character are just not something in the wheelhouse of a format more suited to mugging for the camera, which if you remember from earlier was just invented.
And so we come to Gary Cooper. It’s always weird to see an otherwise unremarkable film and have a verifiable movie star—complete with good looks and the kind of charisma that makes people throw money at them—suddenly show up in what is pretty much an unremarkable. Chalk this one up to Harrison Ford appearing as a bellhop in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966) or Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) or Clint Eastwood as the lab tech in Revenge of the Creature (1955). It’s enough to make the film noteworthy, but maybe not enough to make it watchable in its own right.