The Squaw Man

History seems to consider The Squaw Man to be Hollywood's first feature-length film. However, Custer's Last Fight (Francis Ford, 1912*) runs at just under an hour. I'd consider that feature-length. And it was made in Hollywood. So, I dunno.

In any event, this is a really important film, historically, and Cecil B. DeMille's first feature--and his first film, period. Supposedly, he hadn't even seen a film until shortly before he made this. It totally shows.

It's kind of a clumsy jumble of scenes taken from a book. There's no real cinematic logic or flow. There are lots of scenes of people just standing around talking--which doesn't really work in a silent film, especially without many intertitles. Characters were hard to tell apart, because they were mostly filmed in long shot. I found it all somewhat difficult to follow, although I guess I got the gist.

Still, some of the individual scenes are interesting. I suppose the theme of interracial marriage was probably notable for the time (and its outcome predictable). And the film ws mostly filmed on location, which made it a bit easier to watch. I don't imagine I'll ever feel a burning desire to see this again, but it was worthwhile seeing once as an historical document.

C. B. DeMille did learn his craft quickly. By 1915, he was doing vastly better work than this (Carmen, The Cheat).

5.5/10

* Although the version I saw was a 1920s reissue, and it's possible it had some footage added, but it seems unlikely, because that almost certainly would have been jarringly obvious.

... And the first feature-length movie made in Los Angeles. A British former soldier named James (Dustin Farnum) is blamed when a lot of money is embezzled from the military widows and orphans fund. It was actually James's cousin Henry (Monroe Salisbury), but James gets the blame and goes on the run to the US, while Henry inherits an ancestral title and becomes nobility. James ends up in Wyoming, where he buys a ranch, falls for native girl Nat-U-Rich (Lillian St. Cyr), and runs into trouble with local bad guy Cash Hawkins (William Elmer). Also featuring Winifred Kingston, Baby Carmen De Rue, Joseph Singleton, Raymond Hatton, and Hal Roach.

This is as creaky as one would expect, with primitive filming techniques (most scenes are framed like a stage play, and are usually one continuous shot), and wild pantomime acting. Farnum and St. Cyr are a bit thicker in the middle than most screen stars. My favorite moments include one scene where someone falls off the side of a mountain (a bad dummy is used to humorous effect) and the people who rush to help him do so by rubbing his hands; a scene in which our hero is overcome by the poisonous gases of the "Death Hole"; and a scene where a small child is placed on a horse, given a pistol, and then urged to shoot, which the kid does, seemingly into the back of the horse's head (thank goodness for blanks).

The Squaw Man may be best remembered as the first picture directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and the first made in Hollywood, then a convenient wilderness. It's a rather inglorious debut on both counts, and nowadays is perhaps most interesting as an example of the early western feature.

In pioneer westerns of the 20s and 30s the main theme was usually the exploration of the unclaimed west, but in the 1910s the most common set-up was of a civilized easterner heading to an already-settled but still unruly west. This is the case in Griffith westerns like The Battle of Elderbrush Gulch (1913), as well as later features by DeMille such as The Virginian (1914) and A Romance of the Redwoods (1917). It's worth bearing in mind that, in this early part of the twentieth century the "old" west would have been a fairly recent memory, and the western was then more a lesson in geography than history. It's also rather apt given the circumstances of production – companies from the east going out west – and probably also the reason why they are called westerns and rather than being some sub-genre of the historical feature.

While the outsider in westerns of this period was typically a lady or gentleman of New York or some other east coast city, the titular squaw man is an Englishman. There are a few establishing scenes set in England, with a plot regarding an embezzlement from an orphan's fund that is very reminiscent of Griffith's biograph shorts. This is not surprising, as Griffith took his themes from the American stage where he began his career, and The Squaw Man is based on a play. The trouble is, Griffith was a master at making these theatrical stories cinematic, whereas the adaptation of The Squaw Man is rather flat and weak. The plot takes bizarre, improbable and pointless turns, sometimes getting bogged down in subplot and at other points zipping ahead making the narrative incomprehensible at times.

As noted this was Cecil B. DeMille's debut as director, although this is perhaps misleading. It was co-directed by Oscar Apfel, who had already made two-dozen shorts for Edison and Pathe. Accounts of the production state that Apfel handled the technical side of things, whereas DeMille coached the actors. DeMille may therefore be responsible for some of the fairly decent naturalistic acting on display here, although there are some lapses into appalling pantomime. There are some DeMille style attempts to photograph the imagination, with double exposures showing the hero dreaming of home, one of which is very effective, with a picture in a magazine morphing into the woman he has left behind. There also seem to be some experiments with lighting going on with some contrasting brightness and dimness in interiors, perhaps a forerunner of the Rembrandt lighting that would soon become a DeMille trademark. It is of course very difficult to accurately attribute ideas, although DeMille is also credited as "picturizer" (i.e. screenwriter) and producer.

In spite of these meagre marks of quality, as a whole The Squaw Man lacks excitement and real drama. In comparison DeMille's first feature as solo director, The Virginian, is a far more solid production, and although made only a few months after The Squaw Man it is light years ahead in style.

"The Squaw Man" (1914) co-directed by Cecil B. DeMille is considered the first full-length feature film from Hollywood.

In spite of it's historical significance, it is poorly directed, which can only be expected from the first effort in full-length film making.

The story revolves around a chivalrous British officer who decides to take the blame for his cousin's embezzlement and journeys to the American West to start a new life on a cattle ranch.

It is, quite simply boring and primitively executed and produced. Cecil B. DeMille would go on to direct some of early Hollywood's most genre-defining features such as his epic take on "The Ten Commandments" (1956), which I highly recommend anyone experiencing, but I only recommend his debut feature for film historians and enthusiasts.

This is an adaptation of a stage play--an awful melodrama, which incorporates the Western and flirts with taboo love--adultery and miscegenation. Apparently, Oscar Apfel was doing poorly at teaching Cecil B. DeMille how to direct; there's plenty of outside filming, which is supposed to be a benefit of California, yet this movie is remarkably inept in how the framing of outside scenes is as theatrical as the scenes inside. Of course, it was a commercial success, leading DeMille to remake it twice, and is now a footnote in film history. Probably of more consequence than it being a feature-length film made in Hollywood, unoriginal reinforcement though it was, is the movie's soap opera histrionics coupled with a Caucasian playing a Native-American.

The actors of this movie protrude what their characters would be doing or feeling via gestures, staring at nothing and other magnified histrionics; they're trying to communicate the plot to the audience despite silence and a distanced camera. There's no realism, subtlety, nor, even, characters. The directors and actors of "The Squaw Man" blunder further by misunderstanding the silence concept. Silent films are silent to us, but the fictional world within a silent film is usually not silent. (Likewise, we still hear the music scores in modern films while the characters in the fictional world don't.) In this film, there are some awkward moments when a character lingers behind unnoticed, or is transparently suspicious-looking, but that happens to be when everyone is looking at something else. Yet, I suppose they still do that in soap operas.

In defence of DeMille, it was his first film, and senior director Apfel surely deserves more blame. One learns from imitation, and there weren't many worth imitating then. There was no indication in "The Adventures of Dolly" that Griffith would become the best director in the world. To see DeMille's potential, watch the subsequent year's "The Cheat". Its story is also wanting, flirts with adultery and miscegenation and is driven by embezzlement from charity, but, otherwise, the films couldn't be more different.