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It begins where Stroheim's Greed concludes, as it were, and by the end a seed has been planted for Polanski's Chinatown. The grand American desert, "unconquerable Empress of the Wilderness," its vastness and heat baked into the yellow-tinted celluloid. The orphan in the covered wagon is scooped up by the settler (Charles Willis Lane) who dreams of bringing irrigation to the dunes, she grows into a spirited maiden (Vilma Bánky) torn between the engineer from New York (Ronald Colman) and the patient cowpoke (Gary Cooper). The Easterner dubs the environment a graveyard and the heroine "an orchid in a bucket of sand," she demurs and rather sees the harsh beauty of the desert. So does Henry King—a makeshift grave in the corner of a granular vista, "dancin' dust devils that play hell" with flat horizons, a rocky canyon suddenly chipped by bullets. "And they call this God's Country!" In the footsteps of Cruze and Ford, the natural world and the expanding nation. Exultation of the new dam, cf. Eisenstein's The General Line, a camera given to placid portraiture until it races alongside a zipping jalopy. Greed turns out to be the impetus of the entrepreneur (E.J. Ratcliffe), willing to hire bandits to keep his rival's wages from reaching their destination. "Nothin' but a nest of robbers," this would-be oasis, the neighboring hamlet is no less precarious. (A cluster of gregarious homesteaders can turn into a hanging party in the blink of an eye.) A new beginning is perceived in the wake of the deluge, wasteland into garden after a fashion. "Our battle with the River has just begun," a theme for Flaherty and Vidor. With Paul McAllister, Clyde Cook, Erwin Connelly, Ed Brady, and Sammy Blum. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |