Straight Shooting

This is notable for being an early directorial effort by John Ford, the great Western filmmaker. It's short and simple--about a feud between ranchers and farmers over water supply. The print I saw was missing some brief footage, and the film isn't in the best shape. Still, it is clearly unimpressive. There are plenty of shots with open doorways, and one might find similarities with Ford's later work, but the static camera positioning is prosaic even for 1917.

Harry Carey's Cheyenne Harry is a bandit turned good after seeing an attractive female--a role too similar to the one William S. Hart had already introduced to the screen in nearly every one of his vehicles. And, the climax of "Straight Shooting" seems to be taken straight from D.W. Griffith; it especially resembles "The Birth of a Nation" in a clumsy, derivative way. Eventually, Ford would improve upon past films and film-making, but here he was just copying others.

A hired gun swaps sides when hired by a rancher to see off a farming family that needs the rancher's water to survive. John Ford's first feature demonstrates just how on top of shot composition he was even in those distant, primitive days. The story is nothing to write home about, but Harry Carey shows just why Ford later eulogised about him being the 'bright star of the early Western sky.'

You can do subtlety in silent film, but it requires a certain attention to specific moments that go well beyond what we normally expect from sound films. You need to focus down with a small scope and bring out details that are harder to do without some level of explanation that can happen through dialogue or even tone of voice. John Ford's first silent feature length film is not at all interested in subtlety. This is a land war in the West with very clear good guys, bad guys, and stakes. This is meat and potatoes Hollywood filmmaking from when the medium was still brand new. Having pretty much committed fraud in order to get the budget from the studio for a feature length film instead of a short (by saying their shot footage had been destroyed when it was all fine), the young Ford built something that almost feels like a whole story around what had surely been the central conflict. The ending almost makes the film, but only almost.

It's pretty obvious looking at the final product that Ford and George Hively, his screenwriter, didn't have the time or inclination to figuring out how to expand the film into feature length in the most elegant of ways. It feels like most of the added footage came in the first half. There are the standard scenes introducing our small hero family of farmers, Sweet Water Sims (George Burrell) and his two children Joan (Molly Malone) and Ted (Ted Brooks), the evil rancher who wants to kick them off the land by cutting off their supply to water, Thunder Flint (Duke Lee), the young man who works for Flint who loves Joan, Danny Morgan (Hoot Gibson), and the gunslinger hired by Thunder to chase them off, Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey). It's the sort of quick and dirty series of introductions you would expect from a silent film. It's all archetypes through and through. The kindly old man with his innocent adult children. The rancher with a twirling evil mustache. The handsome gunslinger. It's all there in proto form.

I have little problem with this, but the issues come up around Cheyenne Harry. There's a long section where he hangs out in the local tavern with another rancher, and it's just a really long scene that far outstays its welcome as they get drunk and into a fight. It really feels like it's there for padding. There's also a fair amount of unclear storytelling going on to muddy things up in the first half hour, things like the largely unexplained movements of a gang led by Black-Eye Pete (Milton Brown).

I was kind of down on the film a bit until about the halfway point when things began to turn around. Ted goes to get some water from the creek now denied him and his family, and one of Flint's men shoots him dead. Sweet Water and Joan, along with Danny, reclaim the body and take him back just as Harry is coming around to do the work he's meant to do. Seeing Ted dead, having been shot in the back, does something to Harry. He has a sense of honor, and the idea of shooting a man in the back turns his stomach so much that he turns on his employer and decides to help the farmers in their conflict with the ranchers. I should also note, that I'm pretty sure Ted gets shot in the stomach, but the "shot in the back" thing may be more figurative than literal.

Anyway, this is when the pieces begin to come together at rapid pace. Joan runs around to all the farmers to prepare for the oncoming attack that Danny's heard about. Harry leads the men in their defense. The ranchers send their men, and a giant shootout commences. This is really bravura filmmaking, this extended fight. There's a lot going on, and Ford expertly crisscrosses between the action inside the central building, outside as the ranchers' men encircle the place firing inside, and the sudden appearance of Black-Eye Pete to help save the day. This is really fun stuff.

And then the movie decides to have a love triangle in its final ten minutes, and it's a really weird thing to insert at the end of a movie that doesn't really work. Joan wants to love Harry, and Sweet Water wants Harry to marry Joan, but Harry is unsure if he should. And then there's Danny who's been loving Joan the whole movie who sort of just gets cast aside.

As the first John Ford film, knowing enough of the highlights of his filmography to come, this has some interesting moments that will reappear in later films. The very first shot of his very first feature length film is of a cowboy, iconically framed on a hillside with a herd of cattle behind him is just the greatest introduction to the career to come. Harry deciding whether he can settle down to far, leaving behind the violent life behind feels like what's going to happen to John Wayne, to a certain subtler extent, in The Searchers.

No, I don't think it works overall. The last minute love triangle along with the muddled first half hour makes this less than what it could have been. However, it's almost there with an obvious technical talent working with archetype and action in ways that he would only refine later.

It's been objected that Straight Shooting uses static camera positions, but especially in the long shots fine action and scenery are captured, like lines of horsemen coming down a hillside. In the story characters make interesting choices: a cowboy aids a farmer, a bandit gets the band of a chum of his to come fight against the bad guys who want possession of the whole territory and especially its water. The Bess played by Mollie Malone (a more solid presence than some other actresses) gets her gun ready as does another woman. And Bess too makes some interesting choices. If I can judge by the hat, a Mexican guy steals a jar of jam, but he's helped save the farm, one of the ways Ford and Hively avoid the sexism and racism of D. W. Griffith's Battle of Elderbush Gulch of a few years previous. That said, the Prague print I saw has gaps following out threads of the story. There's a pretty good shootout with the two guys using long rifles--this is the older west, though already the myth had been around quite a while.

Truly wonderful as many (most?) silent films are, there are unquestionably some qualities of the era that may may make them difficult to abide for some modern viewers. The older the picture, the more one can observe such idiosyncrasies. Chief among these are a very strictly regimented plot development, and discrete divisions between shots and scenes, leading to a somewhat stilted flow to the feature and a heightened awareness that the course of events is staged (i.e., suspension of disbelief somewhat takes a knock). While it's no fault of the cast, it's also worth noting that there's sometimes such a startling lack of diversity among the assembled actors that, especially for lack of verbal dialogue, characters might be all but entirely indistinguishable from one another, lending to easy confusion about what is happening in a scene. By all means, such movies can be worthy of their own accord, and entertaining, but I can get why they don't appeal to all. I'd have said the same of myself, once, and even still it's not as easy to engage with titles of this kin - and 'Straight shooting' is certainly characterized by such peculiarities to one extent or another.

If one can overlook such matters, there's nonetheless a fair bit to enjoy here. Though limited by the basic nature of how films were made in the 1910s, I think the cast do well with what they're given; at some points the acting is rather impressive, not least in light of the need for body language and facial expression alone to carry the day. The visual presentation is quite fine, including sets, costume design, stunts, and those effects that are employed. John Ford's direction seems capable, with the execution of some moments coming off particularly well, and the core of George Hively's story is duly compelling. It's perhaps nothing remarkable standing next to all this feature's many brethren, but it's a swell tale all the same, ripe for cinematic storytelling.

The value herein is troubled by those facets suggested above, and also a small tinge less focus in the narrative than would be desirable. The more 'Straight shooting' steps to the side from the central thread of villainous ranchers antagonizing earnest farmers, the more one is given pause while watching. The ending sadly feels overdone, for example. Above all I think of the sequence in the first half of the picture, around twelve minutes all told, in which a number of characters all find themselves in the same hotel/bar. Nowhere is the problem of the casting more evident as it's hard to discern who characters are, or what they're actually doing, and this scene doesn't even seem notably crucial to the plot.

Even at that, more so than not this is well made, and fairly fun such as it is. The climax is surely the highlight, that part of the movie that I'd be most likely to point to as an illustration of its worth. The story is reasonably engrossing, and everyone involved clearly put in hard work to make this the picture that it is. A bit more mindfulness would have helped this to meet greater success and stand out more, but it's decent enough as it is - and anyway, what it comes down to is that the faults of 'Straight shooting' are mostly issues that were common to productions in the silent era in the first place. Ultimately this falls rather short of being essential, and anyone who isn't already enamored of early cinema won't find anything here to change their mind. If you're looking for something light, though, something to watch as passing entertainment, it just might be what you're looking for.