King Baggot (1879-1948)

Today in 1948 marks the death of actor and director King Baggot, who appeared in over 300 movies beginning in 1909 and directed some 45 films. Among these was William S. Hart's last film Tumbleweeds (1925), which is available for viewing on Youtube:

Neal Hart (1870-1949)

Today also marks the death of 1920's Western star Neal Hart (no relation to William S.), who was reputedly a sheriff out West before pursuing an acting career. In the sound era he featured mainly as a character actor.

Pete Morrison (1890-1973)

On this day in 1973, acrtor Pete Morrison passed away. IMDB has this to say about him: American cowboy star of silent pictures. He studied science in school but dropped out to pursue a rodeo career. With some success, he was asked to appear in a number of film shorts, all before his eighteenth birthday. He worked for The American Film Manufacturing Company, but was soon signed by Universal Pictures and appeared in Western serials and short features there. He took some time away from movies to travel the country in a Wild West Show, then returned and did numerous Westerns for Triangle and Universal. He agreed to make a series of pictures in Central and South America, but eventually returned to Universal. With the arrival of sound pictures, he shifted into supporting roles before retiring from the screen in 1935, at the age of 45. He died in Los Angeles thirty-eight years later.

On this Day in 1918...

Blue Blazes Rawden was released, starring William S. Hart and Maude George. In the movie Hart plays a kumberjack who kills a man over a woman. Hart is usually associated with the cowboy role, but every once in a while he ventured into othe roles like that of policeman, gangster, Native American, and even Aztec prince.

On this Day in 1928...

On this day in 1928, Pioneer Scout, starring Fred Thomson, was released. IMDB has this to say about Thomson, who was one of the biggest Western stars of the 1920's:



All but forgotten today, Fred Thomson was a silent movie westerner who at one time rivaled 1920s heroes Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson in popularity. Unlike the early, myth-inducing demise of a Rudolph Valentino or Jean Harlow, Fred's untimely death of tetanus prevented the actor, who was at one time billed "The World's Greatest Western Star," from creating a durable Hollywood legacy. Christened Frederick Clifton Thomson, he was born in Pasadena, California, in 1890 and proved a natural athlete, playing football at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and then at Princeton Theological Seminary, and breaking all sorts of various records while a student. Initially interested in the ministry, he became a pastor in both Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles, and subsequently married his college sweetheart, Gail Jepson, in 1913. Following her tragic death of tuberculosis in 1916, he left his fellowship and enlisted in the military.During his duty as a serviceman, he served as a technical adviser for the film Johanna Enlists (1918), a Mary Pickford war feature. It was through Pickford that he met his second wife, pioneer screenwriter/director Frances Marion. They married in 1919 following his WWI overseas duty as an Army chaplain. Initially interested in directing, he ended up standing in front of the camera for one of Frances' films Just Around the Corner (1921) when an actor failed to show up for a shoot. The movie was a hit, and the handsome, highly appealing Fred was signed. Following a co-starring role in another Pickford movie, The Love Light (1921), which was also directed and written by Frances, Fred was off and running with his own action serial The Eagle's Talons (1923), in which he performed his own stunts. Over the years, he provided heroics in such oaters as The Dangerous Coward (1924), Ridin' the Wind (1925), The Lone Hand Texan (1924) and the title role in Lone Hand Saunders (1926). Towards the end of his career, he was seen playing the legendary Jesse James and Kit Carson. With his cowboy reputation solidified alongside faithful horse Silver King, Fred became the No. 2 box office star for 1926 and 1927.In 1928, the unthinkable happened. Fred, who was in his movie prime at age 38, was just making his the transition into talkies. He apparently broke the skin of his foot stepping on a nail while working at his stables. Contracting tetanus, which the doctors initially misdiagnosed, he died in Los Angeles on Christmas Day in 1928. His wife and two young sons survived him.

Broncho Billy Anderson (1880-1971)

“Broncho Billy” Anderson was the stage name of Gilbert Maxwell Aronson, America’s first cowboy movie star. Anderson pioneered the genre that eventually produced stars such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, Buck Jones, and Tom Mix. Anderson also worked behind the camera as a director and producer and developed production techniques still in use today. He was awarded a special Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1958.
Max Aronson was born in 1880 in Little Rock (Pulaski County). His parents were Henry, a traveling salesman, and Esther Aronson. The Aronsons had seven children. Most of the children were born in Texas, but Max was born in Arkansas. Aronson moved to Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) in the 1890s to work for his brother in law, Louis Roth, who had married Aronson’s sister, Gertrude, and who worked as a cotton broker. He left Arkansas around the turn of the century for New York, where he became involved with the old Vitagraph Company, a theatrical group. From 1900 until 1926, Aronson produced, directed, or appeared in more than 600 motion pictures—everything from the one reelers, movies that consisted of approximately 400 feet of film, to full-length motion pictures that consisted of approximately 2,000 feet of film, produced later in his career. By 1902, Aronson was in New York and, in 1903, was cast in Edwin S. Porter’s film, The Great Train Robbery,a classic silent western. In his early films, he played various roles under the name G. M. Anderson, as in the movie Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman for Vitagraph in 1904, the first film Anderson directed. In 1907, Anderson moved to Chicago to produce films. There, he developed the idea that the public would pay to see good western movies, and the era of “cowboy” films, that is, films based on marketing the name of the cowboy, began. For a short time, he produced films in Colorado, but William Selig, an early movie producer for whom Anderson was working, could not see the advantage of western scenery in their releases. Anderson’s contribution was to develop the western film and the techniques he devised, including the “long shot,” “medium shot,” “close up,” and “reestablishment scene,” have become standard techniques present even in modern westerns. Back in Chicago, Anderson partnered with George K. Spoor, a theatrical booking agent. The two of them established Essanay Studios in 1907, the name being derived from a phonetic spelling of their initials, S and A. Anderson married Molly Louise Schabbleman in 1908, and the couple had one child, Maxine.
From 1908 to 1915, Anderson made 375 westerns. The most famous of these was the Broncho Billy series. Anderson read a story in the Saturday Evening Post about a character called Broncho Billy. He liked the idea of a series character and developed Broncho Billy into a franchise of films which were extremely popular with the American public. Anderson established a studio at Niles, California, in 1912, where he turned out a two-reel Broncho Billy story approximately every two weeks. The films cost approximately $800 per movie to produce, and each grossed approximately $50,000. The Essanay Studios were in their heyday. Many legendary Hollywood stars worked at Essanay—Francis X. Bushman, one of the leading stars of his day, Gloria Swanson, and Charlie Chaplin. Anderson signed Chaplin for the unheard of salary of $1,250 per week, plus a bonus of $10,000, but neither Spoor nor Chaplin were happy with the arrangement. Spoor was shocked by the salary, and Chaplin was not happy with either the Chicago or Niles studios and their regimented way of mass-producing films. At Niles, Anderson and Chaplin appeared together in Chaplin’s thirty-eighth film, The Champion, released in March of 1915, the only film in which the two stars appeared together. The Bushman, Chaplin, and Anderson movies produced substantial profits for Essanay, but the studio began to experience problems. First, Chaplin was hired away by Mutual for $10,000 a week and a $150,000 signing bonus. Then, Anderson began to realize that the public was demanding more than simple two-reelers. He approached Spoor about producing longer, more involved features. Spoor did not want to incur more expense for longer productions, so Anderson eventually sold his interest in Essanay in 1916. The separation contract stipulated that Anderson could not engage in motion picture production for two years and that the Broncho Billy character would remain property of Essanay. For all practical purposes, Anderson retired. Essanay finally dropped out of the film production business. In 1918, Anderson attempted producing westerns again, but the public had new heroes on the silver screen, and the franchise ceased. In 1958, Anderson was awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contribution to the development of motion pictures as entertainment. He lived in quiet retirement for most of his remaining years but surfaced again in the publicity of receiving his honorary Oscar. He died in Pasadena, California, on January 20, 1971, of a heart attack.
(From the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History)

Harry Carey, Sr. (1878-1947)

Harry Carey (January 16, 1878 – September 21, 1947) was an American actor and one of silent film's earliest superstars. Carey was born Henry DeWitt Carey II in The Bronx, New York, the son of Ella J. Ludlum and Henry DeWitt Carey, a prominent lawyer and judge. He attended Hamilton Military Academy then studied law at New York University. After a boating accident which led to pneumonia, Carey wrote a play while recuperating and toured the country in it for three years, earning a great deal of money, all of which evaporated after his next play was a failure. In 1911, his friend Henry B. Walthall introduced him to director D.W. Griffith, for whom Carey was to make many films. Although Carey, one of Hollywood's finest character actors of the sound era, received an Oscar nomination for his role as the President of the Senate in the 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he is best remembered as one of the first stars of the Western film genre. He married at least twice and perhaps a third time (census records for 1910 indicate he had a wife named Clare E. Carey, and some references state that he was also married to actress Fern Foster). His last marriage was to actress Olive Fuller Golden (1896-1988). They purchased a large ranch in Saugus, California, north of Los Angeles, which, in 2005, was turned into Tesoro Adobe Historic Park. Their son, Harry Carey, Jr., would become a character actor, most famous for his roles in Westerns. Father and son both appear (albeit in different scenes) in the 1948 film, Red River, and mother and son are both featured in 1956's The Searchers.
Carey made his Broadway stage debut in 1940. Harry Carey died in 1947 from a combination of lung cancer, emphysema and coronary thrombosis, at the age of 69. He was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the family mausoleum in The Bronx, New York. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Harry Carey has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1521 Vine Street. As an homage to him, John Wayne held his right elbow with his left hand in the closing shot of The Searchers, imitating a stance Carey himself often used in his films. According to Wayne, both he and Carey's widow Olive (who costarred in the film) wept when the scene was finished. In 1976, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. (From Wikipedia)

Here's a nice tribute to Carey from Youtube:

On this Day in 1922...

In the Days of Buffalo Bill, starring Art Acord, was released.

On this Day in 1923...

The Lone Star Ranger, based on the Zane Grey novel, was released, starring Tom Mix.

On this Day in 1923...

The Covered Wagon, directed by James Cruze and starring J. Warren Kerrigan, was released. It proved one of the great epics of the silent Western. The following is from Wikipedia:

The Covered Wagon (1923 film) is a American silent short Western film released by Paramount Pictures. The film was directed by James Cruze based on a novel by Emerson Hough about a group of pioneers traveling through the old West from Kansas to Oregon. J. Warren Kerrigan starred as Will Banion and Lois Wilson as Molly Wingate. The film premiered in New York City on 16 March 1923 and ran 98 minutes, but the feature film was edited down into 23 minutes and become a short film by viewers today. Some sources say that all or part of this film had talking sequnces and a music track recorded in the short-lived DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process, but if so, was only shown this way at the premiere at the Rivoli Theater in NYC.

On this Day in 1918...

Mr. Logan, U.S.A., was released, starring Tom Mix. The following is from answers.com:

During World War I, German spies were even capable of infiltrating a Tom Mix Western! The agent in this picture is going by the alias J. Alexander Gage (Val Paul), and he arrives in a New Mexico mining town about the same time as another mysterious stranger, Jim Logan (Mix). A mysterious chorus girl (Maude Emery) soon follows. Gage is in cahoots with the superintendent of the town's tungsten mine. They plan to encourage a strike, and when they blow up the mine, they can blame it on the striking workers. Logan, meanwhile, becomes involved with the mine owner's pretty niece Suzanne (Kathleen Connors). Gage manages to get Logan arrested and then kidnaps Suzanne. But the chorus girl helps Jim escape. He then breaks up the strike and rounds up Gage, who still has Suzanne in his clutches. Then it is revealed that Logan and the chorus girl are both members of the Secret Service. This wasn't one of Tom Mix's better efforts, although his horse did some great stunts -- as a matter of fact, the horse got even better notices than he did.

George O'Brien (1899-1985)

George O'Brien (April 19, 1899 – September 4, 1985) was an American actor, popular during the silent film era and into the talkie era of the 1930s, best known today as the lead actor in F. W. Murnau's 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Born in San Francisco, California, O'Brien was the oldest son of Daniel J. and Margaret L. (Donahue) O'Brien; O'Brien's father later became the Chief of Police for the City of San Francisco (Dan O'Brien ordered the arrest of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in September 1921 at the scandalous Labor Day party held by Arbuckle). After his retirement from that office, Dan was the Director of Penology for the State of California.
In 1917 O'Brien enlisted in the United States Navy to fight in World War I, serving on a Submarine chaser. He volunteered to act as a stretcher bearer for wounded Marines and was decorated for bravery. Right after the war O'Brien became Light Heavyweight champion of the Pacific Fleet. O'Brien came to Hollywood in his early twenties hoping to become a cameraman and did work as an assistant cameraman for a while, for both Tom Mix and Buck Jones. He began his acting career in bit parts and as a stuntman. One of his earliest roles was in the 1922 George Melford-directed drama Moran of the Lady Letty, most notable for starring Rudolph Valentino. In 1924 O'Brien received his first starring role in the drama The Man Who Came Back opposite the English actress Dorothy Mackaill. That same year he was chosen by the famed movie director John Ford to star in The Iron Horse opposite actress Madge Bellamy. The film was an immense success at the box-office and O'Brien made nine more films for Ford. In 1927 he starred in the F. W. Murnau-directed Sunrise opposite Janet Gaynor, which won three Academy Awards. O'Brien would spend the remainder of the 1920s as an extremely popular leading man in films, often starring in action and adventure roles alongside such popular actresses of the era as Alma Rubens, Anita Stewart, Dolores Costello, Madge Bellamy, Olive Borden (with whom he was linked romantically during the 1920s) and Janet Gaynor. With the advent of sound, George O'Brien became a popular star of Westerns and rarely took parts outside of the Western film genre. Throughout the 1930s, O'Brien was a consistent Top Ten box-office draw appearing in scores of Westerns, often atop his horse named Mike. During World War II, O'Brien re-enlisted in the United States Navy where he served as a beachmaster in the Pacific and was decorated several times. He left service with the rank of commander. He later joined the United States Naval Reserve and retired with the rank of captain in 1962, having four times been recommended for the rank of admiral. Following his service in World War II, O'Brien would occasionally take feature parts in films directed by his old friend and mentor John Ford including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Cheyenne Autumn. While serving in the Naval Reserve, O'Brien took on a project for the Department of Defense as part of President Eisenhower's "People to People" program. He was project officer for a series of orientation films on three Asian countries. One of these films, on Korea, was directed by his old friend, John Ford. The other two countries covered were Formosa (Taiwan) and the Philippines. O'Brien dated actress Olive Borden from 1926 until 1930. He married the actress Marguerite Churchill on July 15, 1933 and the couple had a son, Darcy O'Brien in 1939 who would become a successful writer and a daughter, Orin O'Brien who would become a double bassist with the New York Philharmonic. A third child, Brian, died in infancy. The couple divorced in 1948. O'Brien suffered a stroke in 1981 and was bedridden the last few years of his life. He died in 1985 in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, George O'Brien was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6201 Hollywood Blvd., in Los Angeles, California.

(From Wikipedia)

On this Day in 1916...

William S. Hart's The Patriot was released. It tells the story of Bob Wiley, a Spanish-American war veteran and New Mexico rancher whose gold-rich land is robbed by crooked politicians. The embittered Wiley decides to join the forces of Mexican bandit Pancho Zapilla (aka Pancho Villa) who is planning to attack the United States. At the last minute, however, he has a change of heart and ends up thwarting Zapilla's plans. Hence the title. The New York Tribune had this to say about the movie: "Next to the galloping horse there is nothing which brings a Western tang to a picture so successfully as the fine, long, melancholy face of William S. Hart. Mr. Hart can do things with his eyes and the corners of his mouth that almost make you hear the sweep of the wind, and see rolling country and hear hoof beats."

(Adapted from Diane Kaiser Koszarski, The Complete Films of William S. Hart)

Mona Darkfeather (1883-1977)

Mona Darkfeather (January 13, 1883 – September 3, 1977) was an American actress. During the silent era of motion pictures, from 1911 to 1917, she appeared in 102 movies. Playing Native American characters in a dignified way, her most-famous role was possibly as Prairie Flower in The Vanishing Tribe (1914). Her career began in 1909 when she replied to a local newspaper advertisement placed by producer/director Thomas Ince's Bison Motion Pictures. The movie studio was looking for someone with the physical attributes to portray an American Indian and who was physically capable of doing stunts and riding horses. While she had never acted before, Workman fit the appearance that Ince wanted. She apparently embellished her riding skills, as she did not have any, but nevertheless quickly learned horsemanship. Given the stage name Mona Darkfeather, she was cast in her first starring role as an Indian maiden named Owanee in the 1911 movie Owanee's Great Love. She was born Josephine M. Workman in Boyle Heights, California, and baptized at the Plaza Church, Los Angeles, when she was four months old. Her father was of English and Spanish ancestry, while her mother was of Scottish and Chilean. After replying in 1909 to a Bison Motion Pictures newspaper ad, which called for exotic-looking girls to play "Indian maidens," she soon became famous as Princess Mona Darkfeather, noted for leaping onto her pinto pony, "Comanche," and galloping away bareback. Darkfeather's early publicity claimed she was a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian. Though she freely admitted in interviews that she was not of Indian ancestry, she said she was an Indian Princess, that she had been made a blood member of the Blackfoot Nation and given the title of princess by Chief Big Thunder. So successful was the studio's promotion of Princess Mona Darkfeather that over the years, and even in 2005, she has been frequently referred to as an American Indian actress. She played Indian roles in one-reel western melodramas, such as A White Indian (1912) and A Blackfoot's Conspiracy (1912), as well as feature length movies. She was by then a major movie star. She also played leading roles as Spanish women in several historical dramas.
Darkfeather made movies for Bison starting in 1909, the Selig Polyscope Company between 1909 and 1913, Nestor Studios in 1912 and for Kalem Studios beginning in 1913. Many times the star worked under the direction of Frank Montgomery. He directed her in the Selig 14-reeler The Massacre of the Fourth Cavalry (1912), a sensational silent movie success. For Kalem their outstanding effort was The Woman Without a Soul. She and Frank Montgomery (whose birth name was Akley) were married in 1912. Other movies he directed her in include A Forest Romance, For the Peace of Bear Valley and Justice of the Wild, all released in 1913, in which she played opposite Harry von Meter. Darkfeather was Cecil B. DeMille's first choice to portray the Indian wife, Nat-u-ritch, in his famous western The Squaw Man (1914), but she was too busy, as she and Montgomery were producing their own movies independently for release through the Kalem Company, and she was unavailable to play the role. She and Montgomery joined the newly established Universal Studios, in 1914, and continued to collaborate on scores of westerns. Darkfeather appeared in her last movie, The Hidden Danger, in 1917, then retired from the screen. For a while after she retired as a screen actress, she performed on the stage and headlined as Princess Darkfeather. In late August 1918, she made a special appearance at the Liberty Theater in Tacoma, Washington, as actress, singer and lecturer. In her "rattlesnake" dress, she appeared after each showing of the feature movie, Eyes of the World (1917) starring Monroe Salisbury, to sing and give advice to all girls in the audience with ambition to enter show business. Mona Darkfeather died at age 94 from a stroke, due to cerebral atherosclerosis, at a convalescent center on South Crenshaw Boulevard, Los Angeles.

(Adapted from Wikipedia)

On this day in 1924...

John Ford's The Iron Horse was released. A grand epic dealing with the building of the transcontinental railroad, this movie placed Ford in the first rank of American directors.

Harry Carey and the Western

Here's a nice clip about Harry Carey and Straight Shooting. John Wayne talks about Carey's influence on him and other Western stars.

On this Day in 1917...

John Ford's first full length movie, Straight Shooting, was released. Prior to these he had made several short films, but this ws his most ambitious project to date. Starring Harry Carey, with whom he would make some 25 Westerns over the next four years, this is the only film from that collaboration to survive. It was rediscovered in a Czechoslovakian film vault in 1966. Fernando Martín Peña has a nice essay on the film at Fipresci, the the International Federation of Film Critics website:

What makes a man to wander? Where does Ethan Edwards come from in The Searchers (1956)? Probably from Straight Shooting (1917), as many have already noticed. Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey) is a carefree outlaw hired by a cattleman to kill a farmer who does not want to leave his land. When he is about to do it, he's moved by the sight of the old man, mourning the death of his son, and decides to reform. The ending of the film is confusing — there are parts obviously missing or misplaced — and the titles are not reliable, because the print was found in Czechoslovakia and they had to be reconstructed from the Czech titles. However, it seems clear that Cheyenne Harry sets things right, feels unworthy of the farmer's offer to stay with him and replace his son (by becoming his son-in-law) and goes away. Fade out and some decades later we have Ethan Edwards.

But there are many more elements in Straight Shooting that prefigure future Ford films, which is quite bewildering given the fact that it actually was his first feature. How can a film be Fordian before Ford? Where does John Ford come from? Surely from David Wark Griffith and William S. Hart. The climax of Straight Shooting finds the ranchers besieged by the cattlemen in a cabin, much as in The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Ford always kept a direct link with the Master through the frequent casting of Mae Marsh (as Lindsay Anderson pointed out). The change that undergoes Carey's character is very close to the pattern set up by Hart in many films, and the austere, dusty western town in Straight Shooting is very close to Hart's imagery. But those obvious links don't explain it all because the film also contains at least three things that cannot be attributed either to Griffith or to Hart.

In the first place, the legendary "eye for composition," that natural gift that defined Ford's visual style, is already quite developed here, as Lindsay Anderson proved in his book.
In the second place, we already find here the somewhat tragic character who assumes the mediating role between the wild and the civilized and who will reappear over and over again in Ford's future westerns, notably in films like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Like Fonda and Wayne in those films, Carey is not motivated only by virtue (like Hart). He's part of both worlds, but in fact, he's mostly wild: he rides with a band of outlaws, gets noisily drunk with the cattleman's main henchman, seems very happy at the prospect of killing for money and mainly survives by violence, unlike the civilized settlers who don't exactly know how to do that and therefore get killed. So Carey (like Fonda and Wayne) is the one who can exert violence against the violent and help wipe them out with the rest of the wild things, including himself, who feels out of place when the work is done.

And finally, Straight Shooting is devoid of the strong racism that permeates not only Griffith's work but also Hart's. In films like The Aryan (1916), Hart's hero degrades himself by joining an outlaw band exclusively formed by Indians and Mexicans (and quickly becomes their leader, which is presented as the natural thing that happens to a white man in that context). In Straight Shooting, Carey rides with — but does not lead — an outlaw band composed of Mexicans and Indians and afterwards gets their help to fight against the cattlemen and break the cabin siege. Everybody mixes happily in that climax, the outlaw band saves the day, and they even become equated with the settlers when Carey leaves them as well, probably in search of himself, as he finally rides away.

William S. Hart's 1939 Farewell to the Screen

In this 1939 clip, silent movie legend William S. Hart bids farewell to the screen. The last five minutes are worth it!