Wolf Lowry is a 1917 Western directed by William S. Hart and starring the Western leading man as well. It's not bad and demonstrates that by 1917 (and probably before) all the imagery characterizing the Western was well-established and could be effectively, even poetically, deployed. Hart rides his pinto across barren ridges, silhouetted against the sky, wild animals lurk in desert terrain, and great dappled herds of cattle surge like tidal waves over the empty range. The story is vestigial, but compelling. Hart plays Tom "Wolf" Lowry, a tough hombre who runs a cattle ranch. He's got a half-dozen cowpokes who work for him and a long-suffering Chinese cook, the subject of some brutal racist jokes -- at one point, the cowboy's mimic hanging the man for the theft, as they see it, of a chicken. A squatter is living in a remote shack and Lowry pays him a "neighborly visit" to roust the man from his property. The squatter has acquired fake title to the property from a shady realtor (and "land agent") with a pencil-thin moustache and villainous demeanor. The land agent, confronted with the trembling prospector to whom he sold the fake claim, unloads the property on Lowry's ranch to a young woman named Mary -- in a title we learn that she's more courageous than wise. Mary sets up house alone in the shack. Lowry confronts her, but, beneath his tough exterior, is too kind to throw her off his land. Mary is waiting for a handsome bloke, her fiancee, a man named Owen Thorpe. One night, the realtor comes to the premises and tries to rape Mary. Of course, Lowry comes to her rescue and, in the ensuing fight, gets shot through the collar bone. He almost dies, but Mary nurses him back to health. By this time, Tom is in love with Mary and proposes to her. Thinking that her betrothed, Owen Thorpe is dead, she accepts. (At the time of the movie, Hart was 53; the young woman seems about twenty -- the implicit age diffential is not highlighted but central to the later action.) Then, Thorpe shows up unannounced. On the morning of the wedding planned with Lowry, Mary elopes with Thorpe, leaving the hero at the altar. Lowry rides in pursuit of the couple, but gets dry-gulched by the evil realtor. In a gun battle, the land agent is shot. Thorpe who is wandering around in the night nearby has a fistfight with Lowry who beats him up and, then, ties him to a tree, expecting the wolves to eat the dead realtor and the live rival. A title simply declares "Wolf Lowry." Back at the ranch, Mary pleads for her fiancee's life and agrees to marry Wolf if he will spare her boyfriend. Lowry goes out in the wilderness and saves Thorpe. The wedding ensues in which Wolf is too noble to marry a woman under this sort of duress. He gives his wedding ring to Thorpe who is duly married to Mary. Wolfe goes to Alaska where he has gold claims. He writes to Mary claiming with false bravado that he's struck it rich. But we see him shivering in an empty cabin in the high mountains. He thinks of Mary and, outside, a wolf howls forlornly.
The story is told efficiently. Hart's trademark effect is to glower impassively straight into the camera. Hart, born in New York, had been a Shakespearean actor of some note before coming to Hollywood. He had traveled widely in the West and knew how to stage scenes with guns and saloons and horses in a plausibly accurate manner. Hart has porcelain skin that seems eerily smooth and pale. He's astonishingly handsome but in a very remote way -- his face is a bland mask. (He resembles Buster Keaton to some degree and, indeed, the men were enemies; Keaton made a movie parodying the straight-laced Hart who had, in turn, denounced Keaton's comedian friend 'Fatty' Arbuckle for rape. I assume that Keaton's famous 'stone face' was too offensively similar to Hart's stoic and immobile features.) Hart also resembles Clint Eastman and, like all great movie stars, has an indefinable charisma -- when he is on-screen, you really can't see anyone else and he is far prettier than his leading ladies. Hart has a gift for landscapes, a quality necessary to Westerns, and he looks beautiful on horseback. Several scenes in Wolf Lowry are staged in near total darkness and they don't really work, at least, in this otherwise superb restoration -- you can't tell what's going on. In the scene in which a wolf menaces Thorpe, we see a German shepherd peeping curiously out of a bush. The rest of this sequence is also shot in total darkness so Hart doesn't have to figure out how to show the animal being shot down. The scenes showing cabins are always shot from an aerial perspective -- the little structures are below in dry ravines and none of the eye-lines even remotely match the vantage that we're shown on the shacks.
Bad Buck of Santa Inez is robust two-reeler also directed by, and starring Hart. It was made in 1915 and is also effectively directed. Bad Buck is a troublemaker who keeps getting into ludicrous stand-offs with the feckless local sheriff -- he and the man eye one another suspiciously and pour each other drinks at gunpoint. Out in the desert mountains, a wagon is plowing through a river bed, using the stream as a roadway. In the wagon, driven by a woman, a man is dying of fever. Intercut with the scenes of Bad Buck threatening the sheriff, we see the man die. He leaves his wife and a very expressive and cute little girl alone in the mountainous wilderness. Bad Buck has to get out of town after winging the sheriff in a gunfight and he happens upon the woman kneeling by her dead husband and the child. Bad Buck, although hotly pursued, pauses to bury the dead man. He escorts the woman to his cabin and lets her stay there. The child goes out to gather flowers by the stream and is menaced by a rattler. The snake bites the child who begins to die. Enter Bad Buck, who dispatches the rattlesnake, and rides hell-for-leather to town to get the doctor who specializes in "Snake bites and Delirium Tremens." On the ride out of town, Bad Buck gets shot. The doctor and outlaw reach the cabin and save the child. Bad Buck drops dead from his wound. This film is noteworthy for featuring another staple of Westerns, beautiful horses crossing a ford and kicking up water with their hooves. Bad Bucks' cabin is next to a river and the only way to reach the place is by riding straight through the stream. The same stream, next to a picturesque dead tree, leads into town and so it has to be forded in this film several times, both coming and going. This short movie, also illustrates, Hart's skill photographing dramatic landscapes.
D. W. Griffith directed the extremely violent 1913 two-reeler The Sheriff's Baby. This movie is a precursor to John Ford's Three Godfathers, another film involving the desert, bad men, and a highly photogenic baby. The Sheriff's Baby isn't too good -- it's too frenetic and implausibly bloody. The sheriff's wife has died, apparently, and, for some unknown reason, he sends his baby with a couple of settlers across the desert. The settlers and baby travele in an enormous Conestoga wagon that is, in many ways, the chief protagonist in this film -- the wagon is vast, white, with a cavernous interior and huge wheels; it's a splendid-looking thing. The settlers are idiots and immediately get lost in the waterless desert. Both man and wife die, leaving the baby on a boulder to be menaced by a cougar and a bear (although the editing is bad and we can't really tell where the bear is located vis a vis the foolish pioneers. No such problem with the cougar who gets to sniff the live baby up close and personal -- there are no CGI effects here and the baby seems exposed to actual peril.) A group of outlaws led by Harry Carey and his sidekick played by William S. Hart, attack the Wells Fargo stagecoach station and there's a bloody shootout; it results in five casualties. The three surviving bad men flee into the desert with the sheriff's posse hot in pursuit. They come upon the pioneers dead from inanition and the squirming baby who has previously been menaced by the bear and the cougar. The outlaws plan to shoot the baby and stick the muzzle of the gun in the infant's face. But they can't bear to pull the trigger. Then, they plan to brain the poor kid. But this is also too heartless and, so, with the infant in tow, they set out across the desert. Five Indians scheme to steal their horses. There's another gunbattle in which all the Indians are killed and the other two outlaws gunned down as well. The sheriff comes upon the battle scene, takes the mewling baby from the bad man's hands (the sole survivor is Hart) and, then, gives the outlaw a canteen so he doesn't perish on the desert and departs with his posse and the child. There are about 15 casualties in this short film and, certainly, no one would accuse the movie of being anything other than action-packed. Billy Bitzer photographed the picture -- he would later lens Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The action is legible and crisply edited but there's too much gunplay and murder in the short movie for my taste.
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