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It might be a missing panel from Griffith's concurrent Intolerance, though Frost ("The Vanishing Red") is rather closer in tone. The Cheyenne squaw seduced and abandoned, her foundling a wanderer in Nature, Douglas Fairbanks grave like William S. Hart. (After a riverside introduction à la Bazille's fisherman, he favors fringed buckskin and a coonskin hat.) The local coquette (Jewel Carmen) enters by descending stairsteps into frame and coyly revealing her eyes from under a bonnet, her father the pastor (Frank Brownlee) rallies against prejudice until he learns the ethnicity of the stranger she's flirting with. "In the future, try to remember that, after all, you are an Indian." The hero's nemesis is the sheriff (Sam De Grasse) who years prior betrayed his mother, his sole ally is a fellow outcast (Alma Rubens) on the run from the law for stabbing her perfidious partner (Tom Wilson). ("That's what I call love," exclaims the fellow as he feels her blade.) In the infancy of cinema's own mixed identity, Allan Dwan and Fairbanks experiment with genre and persona. Extras play on dusty Main Street while a stagecoach crosses the screen in a curving diagonal, the church congregation keeps a background door open for a deep-focus glimpse of a scuffle. For his part, the star trades bounding ebullience for crossed-arms graveness but can't resist using a skinny tree like a vaulting pole. Anita Loos intertitles and Victor Fleming lenses, the teeming saloon featuring a dapper Black gambler and the snake-oil salesman's patter in full swing. ("It will remove spots from the liver and keep the pants from bagging at the knees!") Exiles in the ashes comprise the closing image, later modified by Huston in The Unforgiven. With George Beranger, Elmo Lincoln, and Winifred Westover. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |