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"Courage tested," simple scaffolding for gorgeous photographic arrangements: An early shot, lasting ten seconds or so, has two riders side by side atop a hill on the foreground, a team of horses moving in the valley below for the middle ground, and two other riders like dots on another hill in the distant background. Harry Carey is certainly a model for Gary Cooper, the ranch hand who whittles a wooden heart for the boss' daughter (Molly Malone). (His taciturn bearing crumbles ever so slightly when an old biddy strolls in while he's trying on pants at the haberdashery.) The big-city dandy (Vester Pegg) pulls in and sweeps the maiden away, elsewhere tuxedo-clad buckaroos peck at the piano during the jilted hero's wedding reception. "Who will mount this animal here?" John Ford already in full, rollicking swing, robust strokes studded with poetic details. Wyoming vistas versus New York interiors, the comedy of the sagebrush searcher who hears the hiss of a hotel radiator and goes hunting for rattlesnakes with revolver in hand. (He's so earnest that the swindlers in the lobby feel bad about fleecing him.) The bereft patriarch (L.M. Wells) slumps in the darkened cabin as light from an oil lamp isolates him in flickering close-up, a foreglimpse of Major Amberson before the fireplace in The Magnificent Ambersons. "Loneliness, dreams and memories," an intertitle to sum up half of Ford's cinema—the other half comes courtesy of a brawling free-for-all at the ritzy restaurant, where scoundrels get a good dunking. The keen surrealism of cowboys galloping amid cars and trolleys is soon expanded by Keaton (Go West). With William Steele, Gertrude Astor and Martha Mattox. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |