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The maiden and the desperado, she turns to the camera for a smiling introduction while he shoots out the heart in a playing card as target practice. The lass from Utah (Mary Pickford) packs her suitcase in fluttery anticipation, she's headed to "the wonderful West" to stay with her prospector uncle, a cut gives his arrow-studded corpse in the prairie. Respectability in the wilderness is just a matter of wearing a top hat, the stagecoach robber (Elliott Dexter) takes the dead man's place in the mining town of Strawberry Flats, California. Duly manhandled at the rowdy saloon, the little niece is soon running the cabin—the outlaw wields a vicious whip at first, then sheepishly washes his hands before breakfast. "The gulf between," bridged? The Cecil B. DeMille mismatched couple between The Squaw Man and Male and Female, dwarfed by towering tree trunks and illuminated in Flemish-painting interiors. Gold is the temptation for the antihero struggling to go straight, his beloved turns laundress to bring home the bacon, her scratchy suitor (Charles Ogle) grows mightily suspicious. "What we need is a Vigilance Committee!" The rocky cliff dotted with braves, the cardboard moon above the howling coyote, the dainty pistol at last put to use: The genre's iconography fast falling into place. The painful look of recognition during the holdup, the declaration of love in the middle of a hanging posse. "Boys—I reckon when twenty men have been fooled by one small woman—they'd better take their medicine." Among the variations is Grant's The Angel and the Badman. With Tully Marshall, Raymond Hatton, Walter Long, and Winter Hall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |