The Virginian (Preferred Pictures, 1923)

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Silent remake

We’ve been looking at The Virginian, the novel by Owen Wister, and the first movie The Virginian, the Jesse Lasky/Cecil B DeMille one starring Dustin Farnum in 1914. Click the links to read about them. Today we’ll look at the silent remake, made less than a decade later.

So many important silent Westerns have been lost but this one is, happily, still readily available, for example in the Lost Silent Classics Collection of DVDs. It is eight reels, 84 minutes long, so quite a serious proposition for the day.

It’s actually quite good. Its star, Kenneth Harlan (1895 – 1967), was, Wikipedia tells us, “an American leading man of the silent film era, playing mostly romantic leads or adventurer types”. He was first a lead in 1916 under DW Griffith. Later, “He made a smooth transition to talkies, even singing in a few films, but his film roles remained minor throughout his later career. Harlan worked until the 1940s and retired in 1943.” He was in fact in many Westerns, 29 altogether, ending with Daredevils of the West in 1943, but The Virginian in 1923 was his first. He had rather craggy good looks and was quite convincing as the Virginian, at least in appearance (which is after all the main thing in a silent movie). Furthermore, although many of these silent actors hammed it up unmercifully, Harlan was relatively restrained and he managed to communicate the taciturn toughness and decency of the original hero well. Only in the scene where Steve is lynched does he do a really corny closed-eyes look-away to show his grief, and you grimace, but that was standard then and as I say, most of the time he is very solid.

 

The best thing about the movie, though, is Russell Simpson. Now I am a dyed-in-the-wool Russell Simpson fan, and have been ever since I saw the 1930 Billy the Kid, in which he played McSween. He had in fact had a bit-part in the DeMille 1914 The Virginian but here is promoted to the key role of Trampas. With his black mustache and evil leer, he is superb. He was 46 at the time, though looks younger. We are so used to seeing Simpson as a religious elder or old timer because John Ford took him up after the Second War, when he was already in his late sixties, and it comes as quite a surprise to see him leap athletically aboard a horse and gallop off. The movie is worth watching for the Simpson Trampas, if nothing else. The scene where he kicks his fallen horse (unfortunately, it looks as though he really did kick it) and the one where he shoots his partner Shorty in the back to get the horse they are then sharing make him a really nasty villain.

 

The film was directed by Tom Forman, born 1893, who acted in, wrote or directed eight Westerns (his last was The Flaming Forties in 1924 starring Harry Carey) before shooting himself in the heart in 1926. He does a good job on The Virginian, especially visually. There are some fine scenes with the Alabama Hills up at Lone Pine standing in very successfully for Wyoming. The episode in which the (very large) posse led by the Virginian catches two of the rustlers (including Steve) and huge shadows are projected onto the rockface by the firelight, is especially well done.

The cinematography was by Harry Perry, who later shot Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels, and Wings for William Wellman. Perry later wrote an autobiography and gives interesting details on the shooting of the film. He and Forman scouted locations at Lone Pine and he said that this film was, at that tme, the biggest logisitical effort so far to make a film (presumably this was before The Covered Wagon).

Perry also said that the use of the new panchromatic film, which was especially good for realistic exteriors, vastly helped The Virginian. Itr had first been used on  feature the year before. It was more expensive, it had a relatively short shelf-life, and it was more difficult for laboratories to process because it required working in total darkness, but it certainly gave better results. One New York critic (Perry doesn’t say which) enthused over the photography of the picture, comparing it to Remington and Rembrandt!

 

BP Schulberg produced the picture, with his company Preferred Pictures (‘owner’ of Clara Bow). Schulberg had been a publicity manager at Famous Players-Lasky and would join Paramount as a producer. He would go on to produce the first talkie The Virginian, the one with Gary Cooper, which will be our next review.

 

Florence Vidor is a very pretty Molly. In the book Molly is in my view an essentially silly person but in this film she has a bit more weight and seriousness as a character. Ms. Vidor (King Vidor’s wife) was a famous beauty and it shines through, despite the fashionable cupid’s bow lipstick and 1910s dresses. I don’t know why women in Westerns always wore dresses of this period. Such attire was contemporary when Western films were first made but they remained standard issue right through into the 1930s. Men’s costume made some attempt at 1870s authenticity, especially under William S Hart, but women always wore dresses of about 1910 vintage, whatever the year of making the film or the year it was set in.

 

The movie concentrates on the usual selected episodes of the book (as the play did, and the 1914 motion picture), namely the opening saloon scene, in which Wister’s famous line is given: “When you call me that… smile!”, followed by the Virginian saving Molly from the stage when crossing the river and then the baby-swapping party. The hanging scene is quite dark and sinister, prefiguring The Ox-Bow Incident in a way, and as in all versions, novelistic, theatrical or filmic, it is a difficult moment dramatically. How to make a man who leads a cold-blooded illegal lynching seem sympathetic? It isn’t easy.

 

The final climactic Main Street shoot-out, however, is poorly handled, filmed with a tensionless static longshot which lacks drama. Mr. Forman slipped up as director there.

The wedding-day gunfight with unwilling bride reminds us of High Noon, of course and the later Gary Cooper version of The Virginian (our next review) especially reinforces this link to all Western fans, aka human beings.

I would also just mention Sam Allen as ‘Uncle Hughie’. Allen was a veteran actor who joined Biograph in 1910, was in eight Westerns (this was his first) and has the distinction of being an exact Gabby Hayes lookalike.

 

Raymond Hatton provides a comic-relief Shorty who also shows pathos and tragedy. Hatton, I’m sure you know, was in over 500 films and is best known to Westernistas as Rusty Joslin in The Three Mesquiteers series and as Johnny Mack Brown’s sidekick.

The 1923 version of The Virginian is not the best one. That prize will forever be reserved for the Coop talkie of 1929. But it is quite classy and for all those interested in this key story in the romance of the West, it’s a must-see.