January is Western Film Month here. I will post quite a few brief notices of westerns.

Bucking Broadway (1917), directed by John Ford. This early Ford film is a revelation. It is a comedy-romance western that shows Ford beginning to find his style. Ford signatures such as beautiful landscapes, shots through doorways, male sentimentality, older man/younger man relationships, men in groups working together, and high concept brawls appear. Harry Carey as Cheyenne Harry gives a stalwart performance. The villain is suitably oily. We have early examples of cross-cutting such as in the scene in which Harry sets out to buy a new suit cut with the scene in which the city slicker sets out to seduce the fair maiden, Molly Malone (Helen Clayton). We also have an early use of back projection when Harry rides his horse and catches the moving train. The sequence in the Cosmopolitan Hotel at the end is a hoot, outdoing the hijinks of the Keystone Cops by a long shot. The balcony has layers like the decks on a luxury liner. The woman in the hotel who begins to con Harry proves to be more interesting than she first appears. This is a fine film and, should you be interested, you can find an excellent copy of it on YouTube.  Oh, and the film is a snappy 53 minutes.

The Prairie Pirate (1925), directed by Edmund Mortimer. Forget the plot holes, this is an amazing film for 1925. The opening sequence with the sister of our protagonist threatened with rape by a gang of villains headed by the oily Aguilar (Fred Kohler) is harrowing. They break into her house; she shoots one member of the gang and then flees to the cellar, Aguilar lights a smoke, goes to the cellar and discovers the woman has killed herself rather than be defiled. Strong stuff. The woman’s brother, Brian Delaney (Harry Carey) returns home to find his siter dead and his house wrecked. Of course, he sets out on revenge, taking the persona of the Yellow Seal, a bandit dressed in black, with a black mask, who rides a white horse (shades of the Durango Kid). The rest of the film cannot match the opening, but it does offer a rousing, if predictable, series of actions with riders galloping here and there, a saloon with gambling and cheating and a sneaky owner who wishes to marry the heroine of the piece, Teresa Esteban (Trilby Clark). Harry Carey, in the character of Brian is an aw-shucks kind of fellow, and in the character of the Yellow Seal he mounts his horse and rides with the best of them. I know, you are wondering why he has the sobriquet The Yellow Seal. Well, he leaves a small yellow seal at the scene of his robberies. Don’t ask me why he does this, because I have no idea. Edmund Mortimer made a few films with Harry Carey and a couple with Buck Jones. He also made the 1923 version of The Wolf Man, with John Gilbert.

Hop-a-long Cassidy (1935), directed by Howard Bretherton. This is the first of Paramount’s Hopalong Cassidy films, the one in which he acquires his sobriquet. Hoppy first appears high on a ridge seemingly far away from three riders down below, one of whom threatens to pull a gun on the others. From high on the ridge, Hoppy fires his pistol and shoots the gun from the villain’s hand. Then he rides down the precipitous hill. This is Hoppy’s entrance, and it announces a hero capable of impossible feats, a hero of fantasy. The film has to do with cattle thieves stealing from two ranchers and in the process pitting the two ranchers against each other. One of these ranchers is Buck Peters who owns the Bar-20. Buck is played by Charles Middleton, best known for his role as The Merciless Emperor Ming in the Flash Gordon serials. Anyway, Hoppy catches a slug in the leg and consequently he has to hop about for a while, thus acquiring the name Hopalong. George (not yet Gabby) Hayes turns up as Uncle Ben, an old friend of Hoppy’s who provides the film’s comic relief and also its moment of sadness. We also have the hot-head youngster played by Jimmy Ellison. In other words, the film has all the ingredients of of the many Hoppy films to follow, including Red Connors (Frank McGlynn) who is a mainstay of the Hopalong Cassidy television series some fifteen years and more later. In the TV show, Red Connors is played by Edgar Buchanan. Anyway, for Hoppy fans, this first entry in the series will prove satisfying and fun.