It's Gold Rush days. The manager of the assay office has just resigned, but his pretty assistant is happy with her job. She and the new manager soon fall in love. Mexican miners accuse him of short-weighting them. When the old manager hears of this, will he warn his rival?
This is a finely composed and shot film by Alice Guy. Unhappily, she is the only name so far attached to the project. Neither the cameraman nor the actors are credited, but it is clear that Miss Guy has caught up with her rivals. Her compositions are now very American, her crowd direction gives everyone something to do, her actors are restrained in their movements -- mostly -- there's a nice comic interlude, and her outdoor compositions are quite lovely. It's a fine movie.
Because I am watching this as part of the FIRST WOMEN FILM MAKERS set, I have been reading the booklet that came with it, and I feel I must take exception to the paean at the end of the discussion they offer for this movie: "the western U.S. becomes a landscape where gender norms can be explored and expanded."
It's true the woman is handy with a gun, but anyone who thinks that Alice Guy is unique in this has never read a Dime Novel nor looked at a contemporary movie except for D.W. Griffith. For three years at this time, Kalem had been producing movies starring Gene Gauntier as an action heroine, for whom pulling a gun was the smallest part of actions. American film makers knew they were making movies for a lower-class audience, and half that audience was women, most of whom had to work hard to earn a poor living. If you said anything about "gender norms" to my grandmother, she would have struck you with an arm strengthened by scrubbing floors.
Any work of art must be considered in terms of its audience, and the audience for these movies were not third Wave Feminists of the 21st Century. Alice Guy had been a film director for a decade and a half by the time she made this movie, and she was in the business of pleasing her audience. If she were so intent on reestablishing norms for the underclass, why was she so down on Mexicans?
