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A Farewell to the West – and the Western
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Tumbleweeds was William S Hart’s last Western. Hart left Paramount in 1924, aged 60, disillusioned and unable to cope with the new breed of Western with young, dashing, showy cowboys like Tom Mix. Hart’s brand of authentic-look, rather staid picture was no longer fashionable. But he had one great project he still wanted to realize, a farewell to the old West called Tumbleweeds. The movie was to be centered on the April 1889 land rush following the opening of Oklahoma Territory to settlers. Huge epics had become all the rage but successes like The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924) were about the birth of the West and Manifest Destiny. Hart wanted to make an epic picture about what he saw as the closure of the frontier.
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According to Hart, the land-rush, when the old cowpokes had to make way for the settlers, marks the end of the West. Of course the subtext is that the film about it was the end of the Western: the end of the authentic version Hart pioneered anyway. Now Westerns were just circuses.
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The chief badman is J Gordon Russell (27 Westerns, 1916 – 1930) and we know he must be bad because in his first appearance he is seen a beating a young boy. Actually, the boy has a puppy and when a man mistreats both a child and a puppy, well, he must be really bad. Of course, Hart dunks him in a water trough and makes him apologize to both boy and dog. In contrast, Hart is first seen rescuing two wolf cubs whose mother has been poisoned. When Hart meets a rattlesnake, he draws his gun instinctively but then says, “Go ahead an’ live. You’ve got a whole lot more right here than them that’s a comin’.” Heavy symbolism was Hart’s stock in trade.
The plot is a fairly standard one of ‘Sooners’, those crookedly forestalling the land rush to reserve prime land for themselves. Hart has fallen for the bad guy’s sister, the very Western-named Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) but she still believes her Sooner brother until… Well, you get the idea. Actually, a certain amount of cradle-snatching is going on here because Bedford was 39 years younger than Hart but never mind.
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