Le ranch Diavolo

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

Truly wonderful as many (most?) silent films are, there are unquestionably some qualities of the era that may may make them difficult to abide for some modern viewers. The older the picture, the more one can observe such idiosyncrasies. Chief among these are a very strictly regimented plot development, and discrete divisions between shots and scenes, leading to a somewhat stilted flow to the feature and a heightened awareness that the course of events is staged (i.e., suspension of disbelief somewhat takes a knock). While it's no fault of the cast, it's also worth noting that there's sometimes such a startling lack of diversity among the assembled actors that, especially for lack of verbal dialogue, characters might be all but entirely indistinguishable from one another, lending to easy confusion about what is happening in a scene. By all means, such movies can be worthy of their own accord, and entertaining, but I can get why they don't appeal to all. I'd have said the same of myself, once, and even still it's not as easy to engage with titles of this kin - and 'Straight shooting' is certainly characterized by such peculiarities to one extent or another.

If one can overlook such matters, there's nonetheless a fair bit to enjoy here. Though limited by the basic nature of how films were made in the 1910s, I think the cast do well with what they're given; at some points the acting is rather impressive, not least in light of the need for body language and facial expression alone to carry the day. The visual presentation is quite fine, including sets, costume design, stunts, and those effects that are employed. John Ford's direction seems capable, with the execution of some moments coming off particularly well, and the core of George Hively's story is duly compelling. It's perhaps nothing remarkable standing next to all this feature's many brethren, but it's a swell tale all the same, ripe for cinematic storytelling.

The value herein is troubled by those facets suggested above, and also a small tinge less focus in the narrative than would be desirable. The more 'Straight shooting' steps to the side from the central thread of villainous ranchers antagonizing earnest farmers, the more one is given pause while watching. The ending sadly feels overdone, for example. Above all I think of the sequence in the first half of the picture, around twelve minutes all told, in which a number of characters all find themselves in the same hotel/bar. Nowhere is the problem of the casting more evident as it's hard to discern who characters are, or what they're actually doing, and this scene doesn't even seem notably crucial to the plot.

Even at that, more so than not this is well made, and fairly fun such as it is. The climax is surely the highlight, that part of the movie that I'd be most likely to point to as an illustration of its worth. The story is reasonably engrossing, and everyone involved clearly put in hard work to make this the picture that it is. A bit more mindfulness would have helped this to meet greater success and stand out more, but it's decent enough as it is - and anyway, what it comes down to is that the faults of 'Straight shooting' are mostly issues that were common to productions in the silent era in the first place. Ultimately this falls rather short of being essential, and anyone who isn't already enamored of early cinema won't find anything here to change their mind. If you're looking for something light, though, something to watch as passing entertainment, it just might be what you're looking for.

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.

A hired gun swaps sides when hired by a rancher to see off a farming family that needs the rancher's water to survive. John Ford's first feature demonstrates just how on top of shot composition he was even in those distant, primitive days. The story is nothing to write home about, but Harry Carey shows just why Ford later eulogised about him being the 'bright star of the early Western sky.'