Branding Broadway

I saw this one under a handicap: they didn't have a projector with a suitable aperture, so the left of the image was cut off down to Academy ratio and there was no accompaniment -- two conditions under which one should not see a silent film. However, it was that or nothing and so any reader is warned that my opinion may be influenced by these issues -- but I don't think so. I used to haunt the 80 Saint Marks and I lost a pair of shoe soles in the old Regency, glued there by thirty years' deposit of Coca-Cola residue. At least I hope it was Coke residue.

Anyway, this change-of-pace comedy shows Bill Hart doing some nice comedy -- his dislike of a top hat is most amusing -- and he climbs about the buildings of Manhattan -- Joe August must have enjoyed the trip out east -- like a combination of Douglas Fairbanks and Will Rogers. But despite a good beginning and a good ending, there is a title-heavy middle section in which every joke is contained in the titles and most of the plot events, too. The result is a middle that drags. Add in a couple of thoroughly unlikeable characters that we are supposed to like -- Arthur Shirley and his movie-father, Andrew Robson, and you have a movie that is carried solely on the abilities of William S. Hart -- which are sufficiently broad to make this worthwhile, if not a classic.

This is a nicely-tinted William S. Hart film has been blown up from 16mm to 35mm. Hart is run out of a Western town on a rail because of his constant bar-room brawls. He takes a job in New York as a "baby-sitter" for a rich, spoiled young man (Arthur Shirley) who is constantly drinking and – getting into barroom brawls. The boy has written some incriminating love letters to old flame Seena Owen, and Hart is tasked with retrieving the letters. Owen runs a pancake restaurant in New York, and Hart instantly is smitten with her, while eating many, many pancakes. He believes that Owen loves Shirley, and literally forces Shirley to propose to her. This is where Hart's Victorian values fail him with modern audiences, because who would want to marry someone who was literally hog-tied, kidnapped, and forced to propose at gunpoint?

I saw this film at the 2006 Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy. The very popular William S. Hart was something of an anomaly among silent-film stars. Whereas most male silent stars tended to play either exclusively good guys or exclusively baddies, Hart usually played characters who started out bad but were reformed by the love of a good woman before the last reel. Offscreen, Hart had the bizarre habit of proposing marriage to his leading ladies.

In 'Branding Broadway', Hart plays a rootin'-tootin' sixgun-shootin' rancher from the Triple Bar X ranch who rides into Whetstone, Arizona in search of a drink, pausing only to address some Chinese immigrants as "Chinkos". The local goo-goo committee hog-tie Hart and toss him into a baggage van bound for New York.

In the city, Hart gets a job as "nurse" to a tough playboy who likes to start stosh-ups in nightclubs. (Why do they keep letting him in?) The playboy has written some compromising letters to pretty Seena Owen, who demonstrates her skill flipping flapjacks in a restaurant called the Wheat Cake. (Where a stack o' wheats will set you back 20 cents.) When the playboy's father sends Hart to retrieve the letters, Hart takes one squizz at pretty Seena and ... Katie, bar the door!

I hugely enjoyed this film, which is a nice urban change of pace for the outdoorsman Hart, but still features enough action to keep his fans happy. There are a couple of nice stock shots of Manhattan, and some funny jokes in the intertitles. If not for that "Chinkos" line, I might have rated this movie a perfect 10. As it is, 9 out of 10.