The Girl of the Golden West

I was mildly disappointed with this early DeMille picture. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was a sort of hodge-podge handled in a broad fashion, as if Sennett had told his crew to come up with a short feature based on Bret Harte. You have the free-spirited young girl and the western types and the road agent, and they all aspire to something, they know not what, and they all act in an amusingly awkward fashion around each other. I'm sure it's what attracted Belasco to the idea in the first place, and that led Puccini to it, and so forth.

If it was good enough for Belasco, it was good enough for DeMille, so it was one of the properties that DeMille filmized early on -- before he quite knew what he was doing, apparently, or at least before he had learned how to edit things properly. The performances are a tad too stagy, the transitions a bit too abrupt.

However, it was still early days for DeMille. His first movie, THE SQUAW MAN, had come out eleven months earlier. Pretty soon he would be batting them out of the park.