Silent Westerns

I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns from the silent era, which is a genre I have not explored a great deal.  Readers of this blog will know that I am a big William S. Hart fan, but outside of his work, I had seen very few silent Westerns.

I can suggest the following films from my recent viewing adventures: the early John Ford epic “The Iron Horse” (1924), the D. W. Griffith produced “Martyrs of the Alamo” (1915), Fred Thomson and Silver King in “Thundering Hoofs” (1924), and a fun 63 minute version of the 10-episode “Hawk of the Hills” serial (1929) with the incredible villain, Frank Lackteen.

B-Western Trivia

Bobby Copeland has a new B-Western Trivia site!

He features interesting information in sections like “On This Date” and “Headlines From The Past.”  He also presents a daily trivia question like this one from October 27th:

Which horse (Trigger or Champion) appeared in the most movies?

Want to know the answer?  Check out Bobby’s site here.

The Many Moods of Charles Starrett

Acting.

“Along Came Love”

At last!  A “new” Charles Starrett film!  (Thank you, Alpha Home Entertainment.)

It’s a pretty interesting one, at least from the perspective of Charles’ career.   “Along Came Love” was released by Paramount in 1936.   I suspect it was made the year before.  Charles began making cowboy pictures for Columbia in 1935, and was under contract with that studio for the rest of his career.  If I am correct, “Along Came Love” may be the last film Charles made before signing with Columbia.  And the last film where he doesn’t appear in a saddle.

Fittingly, his role is a mash-up of a number of types that Charles had been playing during the previous five years and 30-odd films.   He’s the educated nerd of “Make A Million.”  He’s also the young romantic from “Lady and Gent.”  There’s a dash of the well-dressed suitor of “Desirable.”  Even some of the refined fella in “Royal Family Of Broadway.”   And plenty of the fit hunk of “Fast And Loose” and “Jungle Bride.”

The film is helmed by Bert Lytell, an actor who played another long-time Columbia staple, The Lone Wolf.  This would be his sole directorial venture.  It is based upon a play by Austin Strong, whose “Seventh Heaven” was the basis for Frank Borzage’s classic 1927 film.

Irene Hervey plays Emmy Grant, a shop-girl and a dreamer.  This gal is fun.   She really charmed my wife.  Charles had worked with her a few years before, in “Three On A Honeymoon.”  She’s also Jack Jones’ mother, the singer of “Love Boat Theme” and, my favorite, “Indestructible.”

Emmy visits a planetarium and falls in love with the sketch of a Greek warrior they superimpose over the constellation Orion.  The next day, she slips and falls on a rain-wet street and looks up to see…

It’s the spitting image of the sketch.  It’s the doorman at the Palace Theater.  It’s Charles Starrett.

His name is even Orion.  Well, it’s actually John O’Ryan.  And he’s actually a pediatrician working his way through med school.  He’s far too serious, lectures strangers about baby care, and keeps a regimented schedule for everything he does.  He’s a real nerd, albeit an athletic one — he jumps rope and jogs stiffly, changes from a muscle-T to a V-neck sweater.  But then he falls for the gal.  “Gee, it’s good to laugh, it’s like opening windows and letting in the fresh air.”

More of this — Emmy: “Are you happy, darling?”  John: “Does a fella sit in the dark corner of a park with a girl lisping lily talk because he’s sad?”

Despite his love-struck nerdiness, he looks great in a tuxedo, and swaps cocktail chatter like a pro.

50 of the 63 minute running time is spent on this happy romance.  Conflict only appears in the final act, which seems like it’s missing a reel, or that significant scenes were cut for time.  In short order, Emmy’s mom gets arrested in a raid on a burlesque house, Emmy fears the scandal will ruin John’s career, it seems like the romance is finished, but they figure things out real quick.

Reconciliation!  Marriage! A Kaleidoscopic shot of the couple on an escalator!  Fade out!  The end!

An interesting post-script — Irene Franklin, who plays Emmy’s mother Goldie, sings a song at the burlesque house before her arrest.  The title?  “I’m The Gal The Lonesome Cowboy Left Behind.”

Other Cowboy Stars – Tom Tyler in “Phantom of the Range”

The rumor that “Law of the Northwest” would be playing on TCM this month has turned out to be false.   Alas.  In place of a review of that “lost” Durango Kid film, I present another mind-bending (time-wasting?) chapter in the saga of my attempt to discover what the other B-Western stars were doing in 1935, the year that Charles Starrett began his cowboy star career.

Tom Tyler was chasing the “Phantom of the Range” in this Victory Pictures production.

The titular character wears a white slicker and pretends to be a ghost, riding around at night to keep snooping eyes from discovering what the bad guys are up to at old Hiram Moore’s place.  They are looking for the dead coot’s buried treasure.  Moore’s pretty daughter catches Tom’s eye, so he buys the estate and they join the search for the loot.  The plot features an auction, a map in an old painting, some fights and some riding.  Tom has his own sidekick, a thin gay British Smiley, if you can picture that.

I enjoyed this film, but, boy is it a cheapo.  I’ve written before about poverty row, but this is so cheap.  A lot of the dialogue is ADR and some scenes are shot in weird panning close-ups, in the style of primitive sit-coms.   On the plus-side, it features some great locations in Lone Pine, and the like-able characters are actually very like-able.

I had a realization watching this film that is a testament to how little I knew about the B-Western genre when I began this project.  It’s amazing that it has taken this long for me to recognize that Charles, at least stacked up against his contemporaries, was a real cutey pie.

I mean, no one is going to mistake Hoot Gibson or Wild Bill Eliot for eye-candy.  Gene Autry has a goofy boy next door sort of look.  Tim McCoy and William S. Hart are odd.  Tom Mix has a good head of hair, as does Ken Maynard, but you wouldn’t call either of them matinee idols.

In fact, I can’t think of any other cowboy star of Charles’ day who started their career playing pretty boys (“Desirable” and “Royal Family of Broadway“) or hunks (“Fast and Loose” and “Jungle Bride“).  Can you imagine any of the others shirtless and being whipped by Myrna Loy as Charles was in “Mask of Fu Manchu“?  Johnny Mack Brown?  C’mon!

And then there’s Tom Tyler.

Tom Tyler is an adequate cowboy hero in this picture, and he should be.  He had been playing variations on this role since 1926.  He’s thin and wears a broad black hat.  A handsome guy, but surprisingly ethnic for a cowboy star (Tom’s birth-name was Vincent Markowski and he was of Lithuanian descent.)  With his jet black, slicked back hair and long face, he seems more suited to playing thugs in organized crime movies.

He reminds me of Henry Silva.

The Many Moods Of Charles Starrett

Feisty.

Sadly…More Smiley

I thought I’d discovered all evidence of Smiley at the Autry.  I was wrong.

Beware potential visitors.

Every little bit of Smiley

I spend a lot of time at the Autry Museum, especially in the summer (as should be apparent from my last half-dozen posts).  It’s close to our home, the little one likes the place, it’s not the sort of museum where you have to be particularly quiet, the people are friendly, and it’s got, hands-down, the best air-conditioning in the L.A. area.

We spend a lot of time in the Imagination Gallery, aka, the cowboy movie section.  There’s a blue screen there and a saddle with a button under the horn.  If a little finger pushes it, baby is part of a chase scene set to the William Tell overture.  Briar rides this about 800 million times every visit.

I’ve had plenty of time to peruse the exhibits there and I’m happy to report that there is very little Smiley Burnette  on display.  Fellow Smiley-phobes, you are free to roam these halls with little fear of running into images of the big unfunny man in the battered black hat.

I count two (2) images of Smiley.  The first is a brief appearance in the aforementioned tribute film to stunt men where he is barely recognizable, expect to the keen eye of those who have suffered through hours of his inane antics.

The second, and final, image is this, tucked in with a number of other stills running along the top of the displays.

It’s surprising really, seeing how long he was with Gene Autry.  I mean, pretty much from the beginning, and, after a break as Starrett side-kick, right up until the end.  He’s not even mentioned in the literature or the 20 minute film on Gene’s life.

But, look!  Don’t get me wrong!  I’m NOT complaining!

Charles Starrett’s Final Career Move

Ken Maynard, considered by many as one of the greats of the B-Western, made a little picture in 1932.  The credits list “Tombstone Canyon” as being the product of KBS Productions and World Wide Pictures.

Not quite Columbia’s proud Lady With The Torch.  Which brings me to my point:

Maynard jumped around from studio to studio throughout his career, careening from Poverty Row to major studios and back down to the dregs.  Not so Charley.  Sure, Starrett kicked around some in his youth, but by 1935 he had found a home at Columbia Pictures, and he would end it there 17 years later.

A sports metaphor comes to mind.  Charles played his last game in “The Bigs”  rather than toiling away in the Minor Leagues, keeping the career alive, perhaps hoping for a comeback.

How he was able to do this appears apparent: his family came from money.

The “why” is a little harder to answer.  Was it his pride?  Was it his advancing diabetes, which ultimately left him nearly blind?  Or was it, as he stated in a rare interview near the end of his life, a desire to enjoy the entirety of life, which included not only a career, but family and travel?

The other, perhaps more unkind, answer is that by the end of the “Durango Kid” series, the films were basically being made on a Poverty Row budget and schedule.

The final question that comes to my mind is this: would continuing to make films have meant that Starrett might be better remembered today.  Since he is pretty much entirely forgotten (and don’t get started on the nasty comments, you old timers — I’m on your side but I speak the truth), one can’t help but wonder if there was nowhere to go than up!

What if? Starrett, instead of retiring at 49, made the move to some dirt poor production house that needed to squeeze every last nickel out of every film, and thus exploited every possible form of distribution.  Charley might very well have ended up on late night TV reruns, something that was apparently beneath the folks at Columbia.

Hell, I might have even caught one of these as a kid, rather than discovering Starrett in a pile of old photos in 2003.  Or maybe Peter Bogdanovich would have, and he’d be writing about the man in the black mask, and I could be getting more sleep.

A Special Breed

The Autry National Center of the American West (aka, the Autry Museum) has a series of short films  playing on monitors interspersed among the exhibits.   These presentations examine the history of B-Westerns.  I’ve written about these films before.

Around the corner from the Charles Starrett exhibit there plays a tribute to the stunt men of the B-Western.  It begins with a quick-paced montage of movie stunts (a horse and rider diving off a cliff, a wagon rolling down a hill, etc) and culminates with a long shot of a cowboy maneuvering along a buckboard on a “speeding” wagon, clearly on a soundstage.  Recognize someone?

“…a special breed of people who make movie magic appear to be real.”

I’ll agree with the “special” part, but, c’mon, Smiley as a stuntman?  The guy can barely pull off a convincing pratfall.