If William S. Hart's birth date listed on the IMDb is accurate, and my math is correct, he would have been sixty one years old in the picture, which I find to be pretty amazing. Considering that his on screen sweetheart Miss Molly (Barbara Bedford) in the story is twenty two, I'd say that some of the early silents didn't let realism get in the way of a good story. Hart does show his age though in the opening minutes of the 1939 re-release version of the film where he opines about the death of the Wild West and his love of making movies. However there are moments where he goes for melodrama and it comes across as almost comical yet sad at the same time.
This is the only Hart film I've been able to get my hands on, and I'm glad to have been able to see the legendary cowboy in even this one effort. As far as stories go, it's all fairly standard and formulaic, but with some neat elements mixed in. For example, after viewing a few hundred Westerns over the years, not one in the bunch ever mentioned the positions of cowpokes in a cattle drive before. Here we're treated to a couple of neat title cards depicting a Pointer and a Wheeler, pretty cool I thought.
As for action scenes, two instances involving Hart are worth mentioning as stand out. There's the pole vault he used to escape the 'Sooner' stockade in the latter part of the film, along with that magnificent ride on horseback into the Cherokee Strip; that race sequence looked phenomenal.
Hart's sidekick in the film goes by Kentucky Rose (Lucien Littlefield), with the gnarly bearded look that reminds one of those two 'Fuzzy's' - Knight and St. John. He gets entangled in a somewhat unbelievable relationship with the pioneering Widow Riley (Lillian Leighton), and it looks like he won't be a 'tumbleweed' by the end of the story. Most of Kentucky's comedy relief comes by way of facial expressions; for his part, it's a hoot to see how Hart deals with a frustrating cowlick.
"Tumbleweeds" winds up symbolizing a way of life that was already disappearing by the time of the late 1800's, a life characterized by a constant roaming and search for meaning. Hart and Kentucky epitomize the 'tumbleweeds' of the story, finding themselves out of place and out of synch with a country that wants to settle down, with Hart's character best expressing the sentiment evoked by the film's story - "The only land I'll settle down on will be under a tombstone".
This is the only Hart film I've been able to get my hands on, and I'm glad to have been able to see the legendary cowboy in even this one effort. As far as stories go, it's all fairly standard and formulaic, but with some neat elements mixed in. For example, after viewing a few hundred Westerns over the years, not one in the bunch ever mentioned the positions of cowpokes in a cattle drive before. Here we're treated to a couple of neat title cards depicting a Pointer and a Wheeler, pretty cool I thought.
As for action scenes, two instances involving Hart are worth mentioning as stand out. There's the pole vault he used to escape the 'Sooner' stockade in the latter part of the film, along with that magnificent ride on horseback into the Cherokee Strip; that race sequence looked phenomenal.
Hart's sidekick in the film goes by Kentucky Rose (Lucien Littlefield), with the gnarly bearded look that reminds one of those two 'Fuzzy's' - Knight and St. John. He gets entangled in a somewhat unbelievable relationship with the pioneering Widow Riley (Lillian Leighton), and it looks like he won't be a 'tumbleweed' by the end of the story. Most of Kentucky's comedy relief comes by way of facial expressions; for his part, it's a hoot to see how Hart deals with a frustrating cowlick.
"Tumbleweeds" winds up symbolizing a way of life that was already disappearing by the time of the late 1800's, a life characterized by a constant roaming and search for meaning. Hart and Kentucky epitomize the 'tumbleweeds' of the story, finding themselves out of place and out of synch with a country that wants to settle down, with Hart's character best expressing the sentiment evoked by the film's story - "The only land I'll settle down on will be under a tombstone".