Webs of Steel

A railroad melodrama programmer featuring a gang of train robbers headed by director McGowan. William Scott as the engineer and Helen Holmes as his bride thwarted their evil scheme. Viewed at Cinefest in Syracuse New York in March, 2003.

"Webs of Steel" (1925) is the terminology given to a complex running line of railroad track in the eponymously named film starring Helen Holmes. Simple and aimed at every age of the audience, this 57 minute long film makes no pretensions at anything except good entertainment. The story's actually stale, but director J. P. McGowan (husband of Holmes) knows how to keep the viewer attending on the goings-on no matter what the story's inherent former tellings might be. Holmes was already 32 when she made this film, and yet she plays someone around 21 or so - and successfully plays the part, may I add... Her ability to do stunts, and very dangerous ones at that, hasn't lessened an iota from the days she was doing those same things in the middle teens in serials, of which she was one of the queens. One in the film, where she is holding on to a railroad trestle while she also has bundled to her both Lassie Lou Ahern and a dog, is quite literally death-defying. Before she died, Ahern made the comment that at age 5 (which she was when she made the film) she probably shouldn't have done the stunt, but she had fun doing it! The story itself is one of romance by a man who has a past, but he is trying to clear himself of the bad parts of that past by somehow proving he was innocent of criminal negligence on another railroad line. The part is played by Bruce Gordon, a stunt player himself and director who was in several dozen Westerns and other films like this one. We only know he was born sometime around the turn of the twentieth century in South Africa, and he was probably younger than Holmes. Fine for the part, though. Also in the show are Spec O'Donnell, Arthur Morrison - as the scheming baddie of the piece - and Andrew Waldron. Waldron is fascinating in that he was 78 when he made this film, and he plays Holmes' father, so he's probably 50 or so character-wise, and he actually pulls it off. The man was born in 1847, and he only lived another seven years after making this film. If one looks at his credits, it becomes clear he was closely associated with J. P. McGowan, as he appeared in several films where McGowan was director or an actor or both. Somewhere in the film supposedly Walter Brennan appears, but I looked for him and never saw him. The railroads - a grand specialty of McGowan who began working on railroads in his native Australia at an early age - are the genuine stars of the show outside of Holmes. If you like a railroad movie with plenty of action and a good guy, a good girl, a baddie, and a couple of other foils for fodder for a quick thriller watch, this one offers all of that. My print is from Alpha, so it's cheap. But the quality of the print is only good at best, never great, and so it's a watch to relax to just before dozing off at midnight.