Treasures Of The West

Preserving rare old films is crucial, but the National Film Preservation Foundation believes it’s just as important to bring them to the widest possible audience. That’s why its Treasures from American Film Archives series is so valuable. Treasures 5: The West gathers an exceptionally wide range of films from 1898 to 1938, including early documentaries, promotional shorts, home movies, newsreels, cowboy yarns, and Hollywood feature films. Together they give us a compelling look at how the real West was depicted in the early 20th century, and how the mythicized West captured the public’s imagination.
The meticulous care that has gone into this release sets a standard for everyone in the archival community. Each film is thoroughly documented, onscreen and in an informative booklet written by Scott Simmon. You can even learn at precisely what speed the—

A scene from Life on the Circle Ranch in California—as staged for the camera.
—silent films were transferred, from original materials held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, National Archives, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the New Zealand Film Archive. Every selection features a commentary track by an expert, including world-class film scholars and Western historians who provide often eye-opening counterpoint to the images we see.
For instance, I found Life on the Circle Ranch in California (1912) an absorbing look at ranch life in the early 20th century, until I listened to Donald W. Reeves, from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, who revealed that much of the film was plainly staged, demonstrating behavior that no real cowboy or rancher would tolerate. So much for “seeing is believing.” (There is still much of value here, including a living lexicon of cowboy terminology in the title cards.)

The misleading title sequence from We Can Take It.
In a similar vein, I’ve always been fascinated by the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, which is promoted in a 1935 silent short, We Can Take It. The film opens with a shot of enthusiastic CCC boys gathered in front of the camera—including some black faces in the crowd. I remarked to my wife that I never realized the CCC was integrated. Then I listened to Neil M. Maher, author of a book about the CCC, who debunked that shot and several others like it by explaining that the camps were definitely segregated. These scenes were filmed for propaganda purposes. Again, the information Maher provides doesn’t negate the significance of the short; it places it into historical context and separates truth from what we might call public relations.
The forty disparate films on this three-disc set offer an infinite number of discoveries—from social, historical, ethnographic, and cinematic points of view. Here is a rarely-seen 1914 feature film based on Bret Harte’s Salomy Jane featuring a Latina leading lady, Beatriz Michelena…an early color short extolling the glories of California fruit (and fruit pickers) called Sunshine Gatherers…a docudrama about hobo life, Deschutes Driftwood…Romance of Water, chronicling the story of bringing H20 to Los Angeles…a demonstration of How the Cowboy Makes His Lariat…the first dramatic film shot in Yosemite, The Sergeant, from 1910…and early examples of Western dramas starring Bronco Billy Anderson, Tom Mix, and real-life outlaw Al Jennings.

Clara Bow in the great outdoors in Mantrap.
There are two slick Hollywood features among these more primitive efforts, transferred from beautiful 35mm negatives. Mantrap (1926), directed by Victor Fleming, stars a radiant Clara Bow as a city girl who impetuously agrees to marry Ernest Torrence and live in his backwoods home. Womanhandled (1925) is a lightweight farce starring Richard Dix and Esther Ralston that plays on Easterners’ romantic vision of the West, as opposed to the reality of life on a modern ranch. The latter film is missing about ten minutes of footage, which doesn’t affect the simple story. (Only a non-profit endeavor such as this would release a partial feature for the value of its surviving content. What’s more, the NFPF was able to license both of these still-copyrighted features from Paramount, which is great news for silent film buffs—and Clara Bow fans.)

Silent-film comedienne Mabel Normand escapes from some angry Indians in the amusing 1912 Biograph short The Tourists, directed by Mack Sennett on location around the train depot in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
As the project has called on a variety of experts, it has also drawn on a number of sources for original music scores, curated by Martin Marks of MIT. Familiar and talented composer-pianists like Michael Mortilla and Stephen Horne are joined here by promising students who are newcomers to the world of silent-film accompaniment.

The White Shadow

The unveiling last week of a nearly eighty-year-old British film on which Alfred Hitchcock served as assistant director, art director, and co-scenarist was another exciting event in the recent parade of major archival discoveries. On Thursday night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held the premiere screening of The White Shadow (1924)—or at least, the first half of the feature, which is all that survives. This is just the latest archeological “find” to emerge from a partnership of the New Zealand Film Archive, the American archival community, and the National Film Preservation Foundation that, most notably, unearthed—
—John Ford’s long-unseen 1927 feature Upstream last year.
The White Shadow, adapted by Hitchcock from a screenplay by Michael Morton, is a plot-heavy, often preposterous drama about twin sisters who lead different kinds of lives, because one has a soul (“a white shadow,” indicating purity) and the other is a hedonist. The favorite daughter turns her back on her stern father, who loses his mind as a result but somehow finds his way to Paris, where she has adopted a new identity at a Bohemian nightclub called The Cat Who Laughs. (Later, in what is described as “a vagrant flash of understanding,” he regains his senses—only to be struck by his daughter’s car back home in England. That incident, mercifully, occurs in the missing second half of the picture.) Meanwhile, a proper gentleman (Clive Brook) falls in love with the “bad” sister, so the “good” sister takes her place in his arms rather than see her sibling disgraced.

The film stars Betty Compson, a popular American actress who was lured to England by a lucrative salary of 1,000 pounds a week by producer Michael Balcon to star in Woman to Woman in 1923. It was a smash hit, unlike this follow-up, made by the same creative team.
A “new” Hitchcock film is tantalizing, of course. But, if you’ll forgive an expression I simply can’t avoid, it comes with a hitch: determining how much the future director influenced what we see. Graham Cutts is the credited director, but most histories agree that his young, ambitious assistant and jack-of-all-trades had a lot to do with what wound up onscreen. Hitchcock later said that he did the lion’s share of work as the official director was perpetually distracted. In Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man, Patricia Hitchcock and Laurent Bouzereau write of her experience as the editor of Woman to Woman, “...She was apparently not particularly fond of director Graham Cutts. She did not think he was pleasant or professional; he knew very little and Alma felt she and Hitch were doing all the work.” (If one is looking for an objective view, it’s easy to trace Hitchcock’s rise and Cutts’ fall over the next decade by examining their filmographies.) In the same vein, cinematographer Claude McDonnell did nothing particularly distinguished in his brief career, which ended in 1930; Hitchcock chose to work with him only one more time, on Easy Virtue in 1928.
But just as it’s impossible to assess who did what, even on a contemporary film—where actors sometimes improvise lines, uncredited writers contribute to the screenplay, and a gifted production designer and cinematographer may compensate for a director’s shortcomings—it’s dangerous to be too certain about how a film from 1924 was crafted.
David Sterritt, current chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, has done his homework, and comes to the conclusion in his Academy program notes that “even static images from The White Shadow convey a sense of Alfred Hitchcock’s early gift for creating drama by purely visual means. Betty Compson’s impish smile and half-open eyes framed by a jauntily angled hat and a wreath of artfully positioned smoke; the motley crew of men she effortlessly controls at the poker table; Clive Brook’s steely gaze set off by a slash of light across an otherwise dark background; the graceful shading of an ivy-draped window framing a wistful face. These and many other images confirm Hitchcock’s precocious talent for silent storytelling.”
There is no question that Sterritt’s overall assessment is correct, but I would be hesitant to credit anyone for a star’s impish smile or the jaunty angle of her hat unless I’d been on the set myself to see how the scene came to life.
As for content, it’s tempting to extrapolate that The White Shadow’s story of identity and duality is an early exploration of themes Hitchcock later pursued in Vertigo. Or the comparison might be ridiculous…who can say?
What matters is that another piece of film history has surfaced. I’m sure there are more discoveries yet to come.