Crossed Signals

For many years of the early silent film era Helen Holmes was a hard working Serial Queen with only Ruth Roland and Pearl White having greater popularity within that genre, her specialty being action melodramas with a railroading background, generally including the chasing of villains along the top of fast-moving rail cars, or bounding from same onto horses, along with other athletic stunts. However, in this film the Amazonian actress has slowed perceptibly with the years, one leap over a balcony and a timid ride along the side railing of an engine being the only references to her former physical prowess, as her co-star, tall German actor Henry Victor, is saddled with the rough stuff and Holmes winds up the final year of her career in silents giving a lacklustre performance. The story places Victor as Jack McDermott, a Federal agent, into "Middletown" in order to find the headquarters of a counterfeiting operation apparently centered at the rail station where Holmes, as Helen Wainwright, is manager and where she is framed for the crime by the actual culprit, a co-worker played by William Lowery. There are several subplots, handled in a cursory manner and apparently written for some sort of (woefully inadequate) comic effect, featuring a hobo sidekick of Jack, "Overland Ike" (Georgie Chapman), who is only irritating with his attempts at humour; Jack and Helen share the duties of quelling the ne'er-do-wells, although by then we are past caring. The picture is directed by prolific J.P. McGowan, former husband of Holmes who is at the helm of the majority of her outings, and is one of the most shabbily produced efforts of his career; although he churned out these adventure productions by the bucketful, seldom does one see such sloppy details as with this affair, with inconsistent dialogue, poor titles, and flaccid direction, its short length being its sole merit.

There are counterfeiters working out of the staging town for the railroad, and Henry Victor has been sent to deal with them. He goes undercover, and when station manager Helen Holmes has no explanation for how all that fake money wound up in the safe, he tells the local cops to let her go. Then he discovers that she isn't wiling to sit around and wait for him to save her. No, she charges into the situation, and then he has to save her.

A dozen years earlier, Miss Holmes had been one of the Queens of the Serials, starring in THE HAZARDS OF HELEN, until she and her director/husband J. P. McGowan left to make their own pictures. They were successful, but after about 1920, she started playing reporters instead of women who didn't need any man to rescue her from a railroad, and her popularity declined.

Idiocies in the story aside, Miss Holmes and her director were trying to replicate the things that had made her such a star a dozen years earlier, and the movies had moved on. Neither was she fighting the "oh, girls don't know anything about railroads" stereotype in this one. While she's smart and good, and willing to jump two flights while costar Henry Victor cautiously climbs down, and holds a gun on the bad guys, they now can take it away from her, and she must depend on the men for raw strength, instead of her brains.

Who knows what might have happened if Miss Holmes didn't need to depend on men to get her out of trouble in this movie? We'll never know, because after this, she gave up the movies, although she returned to them occasionally. She died in 1950 at the age of 57.