The Pony Express

Cruze attempted to follow up the success of THE COVERED WAGON with this rousing story of the founding of the Pony Express in the early days of the Civil War. Plenty of talent is entertainingly displayed, from Wallace Beery as "Rhode Island Red" (puh-leeze!) at his coyest and the ever-delightful Betty Compson to excellent camera-work by Karl Brown. But a script devoted more to fanciful attempts by the Knights of the Golden Circle -- a sort of Ur-Ku Klux Klan -- to lynch their way to power, random road agents and the assertion that a running man with a revolver can shoot down three stationary men with rifles makes hash of the entire show.

Still, if you enjoy the sort of piffle that suffused the western for many years, you will enjoy this Cecil B. Demille sort of western And if you can find a clean copy of this work it is a delight to the eyes.

The film isn't bad, but the print I saw on Youtube was dark, and apparently truncated, running a little over an hour.

Cortez plays "Frisco Jack Weston," who is hired to ride for the Pony Express by a California senator who wants California to secede from the Union. All the while, Cortez is in favor of keeping California in the Union (main plot). Ernest Torrence is trying to open a church, while his daughter (Betty Compson) falls for Cortez ... but then she begins to suspect he is a traitor to California (subplot). George Bancroft is in cahoots with the senator, and has eyes for Compson (still another subplot). Then, inexplicably, some of Bancroft's henchmen are in cahoots with the Indians and want to destroy the town (that's a subplot I couldn't follow at all).

Part of the problem is that some of the film is missing. While there is a young character named "Billie Cody" (who is obviously supposed to grow up to be Buffalo Bill), contemporaneous newspaper reviews also mention that Mark Twain and Brigham Young show up as well - but they don't in the version I saw.

Cortez is pretty good in this, and he can apparently shoot his guns without aiming and knock off the bad guys. Wallace Beery shows up as a character named Rhode Island Red; he rescues a young girl during the final Indian attack, which is well-staged. Bancroft plays an interesting villain who eventually sees the light.

Worth a look. The full version is no doubt better.