Le ranch Diavolo

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.

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.

This film is important, because it was John Ford's first. You can see some of the camera-work and styles, first being born in this film, that he would use in his later classics, most notably Ford's classic "Front-Door" shot. He always shot the front door from inside the house, framing the outside world in the doorway as the characters walk in. It's one of his biggest shots in The Searchers (1956) and there is one in this film too. It also begins Ford's relationship with then silent superstar, Harry Carey and they would do 22 films together just in the period between 1917-1920.

In this film, Harry's character learns that you need to see both sides of what is being said before you make your choice. Bad guy Cattleman Flint sends other bad guys to harass a farming family only to see his own men turn on him to protect the innocent farmers. There are also cool shots of the open-West and prairie, which would be a huge part of the western film's allure that would follow for the next 60 years. Wide shots of beautiful scenery always helped to drive the western forward and those shots are in this film too.

But, it is however still a very basic plot (part of the pioneering film-making evolution), and the film can be tedious at points. As always, I try to put myself into 1917. I try to enforce on myself a mind-set, an attitude and emotion that helps me understand what it was like to be a person living in 1917 and seeing this film for the first time. It's also pretty cool to think that the characters/settings in this film took place in a part of history that, for this film, only happened about 35 years before, as opposed to 135 years before for 2020. Everyone should see this entry into film-history.

7.3 (C+ MyGrade) = 7 IMDB

"Straight Shooting" is of historical interest for many reasons, including the grouping of Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, and John Ford.

Even this early in his career, Ford knew how to frame a shot, and many a beautiful shot here involved framing in doorways and windows.

Carey's character seemed often modeled on those so frequently portrayed by William S. Hart, whom Carey in some ways copied: both were Easterners who wanted to be Westerners, and both beautifully presented to us a picture of the rugged and basically decent character we want to think of as the essential Westerner.

Hoot Gibson was about 25 here but looked younger. He never was especially good-looking but he was always, in every movie I've seen him in, likable, and always one of the greatest of cowboys. At this stage, he'd been in pictures for about seven years.

Providing the love interest, but also much more, was a lovely young lady -- though at age 29 not so young as the part she played -- who frequently reminded me of the wonderful Mae Marsh. She seems to be relatively unknown although she has 88 credits here at IMDb, all in silent films.

So, yes, there is motion picture history here, the early years of some movie icons, a foreshadowing of some great careers, but the editing ... oy.

Many early movies suffered from some scenes, frequently static, that seemed to run on and on and on. Even D.W. Griffith allowed some pointless, non-moving shots to just hang, for no apparent reason.

Here we have the exact opposite problem. Probably because of sloppy editing, far too many scenes or angles are just cut off. It's hard to tell who is doing what to whom, and why. Even in the middle of the big battle, people aim, others fall, and it is confusing as to who is who and whether we should care: bad guys or good guys?

Yet, some other scenes, of Cheyenne Harry just staring, do go on and on, a fairly amateurish effort at showing the character pondering ... and pondering ... and pondering. By no means just once.

Perhaps, too, at least part of the problem is the version presented at YouTube. Though official run time is listed as 57 minutes, the version I saw is 2 hours and 13 minutes! For who-knows-what-reason, after "The End," the middle of the movie starts again! (Frankly, at YouTube, many a movie is uploaded by a liar or an incompetent, or both! And there seems to be no way to get YouTube to call down the offender.)

"Straight Shooting" is a movie every Western fan, every John Ford fan, every Harry Carey fan, every Hoot Gibson fan -- and each of those includes me -- should watch, if only for the chance to see the early years of their film work.

More than that, though, it is a good story, with good characterizations, and so intriguing in the directing.

There is a lot of evidence of D.W. Griffith influence, and at least one shot seems directly taken from "The Birth of a Nation." But "Straight Shooting" is generally exciting as well as interesting and very definitely worth watching.

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.