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Griffith's The Adventures of Billy is a clear precursor, though the main bedrock is solidly Mark Twain. "You wanna earn two bits?" "I got two bits." The burg between Wyoming and Nebraska, the affable layabout (Buck Jones) who befriends the tiny hobo (Georgie Stone) chucked off a moving train. Bath time means scrubbing the protesting tyke while he's suspended from a rope in the barn, going to class means sucker-punching the gangling bully in the yard. "The original anvil chorus" of gossipy locals disapproves from the wings: "If talk was a breeze, kid, that bunch would be a cyclone." There's also the plaintive schoolteacher (Helen Ferguson) and the shady fancy-pants (William Buckley) and the grasping doctor (Edwin B. Tilton), John Ford lays out the crisscrossing plot strands in a graceful long shot of main street before pulling them together through dynamic cross-cutting. The bucolic idyll already has a rotten core, respectable citizens are judgmental and hypocritical and all too eager to form a lynching mob. Facing scandal, the distraught heroine wanders by a creek and sees a boy ordered to drown a litter of kittens (he frees the contents of the bag while his mother's back is turned). Outlaws have a go at the bank, meanwhile the sheriff (Duke R. Lee) flashes his tin star to bypass the collection plate in church. A bum's honor triumphs at last, "that's more than I can say for all the memorial committees this town ever had." Eastwood builds on it gratefully in A Perfect World. With Eunice Murdock Moore, Bert Appling, and Slim Padgett. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |