Straight Shooting (1917) and Hell Bent (1918): John Ford quietly establishes the Western’s essentials (review)

The history of silent cinema is famously patchy, and it’s not surprising when you look at how these films were churned out. Straight Shooting, the first film in Eureka Masters of Cinema’s double-bill of silent-era John Ford films, is the earliest surviving film from the future director of The Searchers. It is generally agreed to be his first feature-length film, but it’s wise to leave a bit of wiggle room in that statement considering that Ford directed ten films of varying lengths in 1917 and only two – this and Bucking Broadway – survive in their entirety. Silent film historians are aware that even the most diligent research can always be overturned by a surprise discovery. For a long time, the only silent-era Ford film available for home viewing in the UK was 1924’s The Iron Horse: nowhere near the start of his career, but its two-hour-plus length and historical scope at least meant it could be billed as “the first great John Ford film”.

Neither Straight Shooting nor Hell Bent are anywhere near as grandiose as The Iron Horse; they each end somewhere around the hour mark, and indulge in a lot of playful, slapstick humour. But then Ford’s grand American sagas were never po-faced affairs either – least of all The Iron Horse, which includes tall-tale elements like walk-on parts for Abraham Lincoln and Buffalo Bill Cody. With that in mind, it’s worth enjoying these two films not as steps on the road to greatness, but simply as enjoyable silent Westerns in their own right. Because they are.

Chief among their pleasures is the lead performances by a star who would have more of an impact on Ford’s career than any other – I speak, of course, of Harry Carey. (Why, who did you think I meant?) Despite having a name that sounds like a samurai suicide method, Carey was a well-established name when he first met Ford – so well-established, in fact, that Straight Shooting was credited with reviving his career. If 1917 seems like an impossibly early point in film history to be talking about comebacks, it makes more sense when you see the film. Simply put, there isn’t anything primitive about Straight Shooting. Ford’s eye for landscapes and large-scale spectacle appears to have arrived fully formed, particularly when the action moves to Gun Sight Pass (actually Beale’s Cut, a location Ford would return to in Stagecoach and 3 Jumps Ahead, the latter of which contains the famous scene of Tom Mix leaping the cut on horseback).

Ford’s talent for creating mythic roles for actors is also in evidence, with Carey as its chief beneficiary. Carey’s Cheyenne Harry gets an unforgettable introduction, crawling out of a hollow tree to look at the Wanted poster that’s just been nailed on it. It’s funny, audacious and a little eerie, and sure enough even as Harry becomes the film’s hero there is still a little menace to Carey’s shadowy, tired eyes. Cheyenne Harry was enough of a hit with the public for Ford to bring him back in Hell Bent; it’s a sequel but you couldn’t call it a reunion, seeing as Ford made eight films with the stalwart Carey in the mere year separating these two films. Either way, it’s remarkable how quickly the Cheyenne Harry character seems to have been established. Both films feature plenty of drunken comedy (there’s a cherishable joke in Hell Bent when a drunk Harry sees a pair of identical twins, causing him to worry he’s even more drunk than he thinks) on their way to an all-action, guns-blazing finale. Harry is, like so many Western heroes, a wanderer, and both films feature him inserting himself into a conflict between rival families.

So for all Ford is just beginning to make his name here (literally – he’s credited as “Jack Ford”) he is quietly establishing a lot of the archetypal ingredients not just of his future films, but of all Westerns. This is why, for me, Straight Shooting was more interesting than the still-entertaining Hell Bent; Hell Bent turns a personal grudge into a chase thriller but Straight Shooting is about one of the Western’s all-time core subjects, the rivalry between free grazers and settlers. As ever in Ford’s films, the landscape tells the story – the verdant fields and hills of Straight Shooting don’t look much like the parched deserts of (say) Wagon Master, but they do establish this land as desirable territory to either feed your cows or build a town. Part of Ford’s sympathies will always lie with the romantic wanderers, but he has enough of the first-generation immigrant’s love of his new country to admire the settlers for building America. It’s the kind of bind that can only be resolved by an unaligned, anarchic outsider, and that’s exactly what Cheyenne Harry delivers.

Thanks to new restorations, Eureka’s Blu-Rays really are quite astonishingly sharp and clear for films made over a century ago. The adjustments you expect to make for antique cinema – settling into the odd frame rates, the flickering light levels, the scratches on the celluloid – are completely unnecessary here. Ford’s biographer Joseph McBride sounds taken aback by how good they look on his two commentaries. The feeling of going back in time and seeing these films as they would have looked on release is compounded by the two new scores by Michael Gatt (for Straight Shooting) and Zachary Marsh (for Hell Bent), both of which have an authentic 1910s saloon-bar sound while remaining fresh, surprising and melodically versatile. There’s also a piece by Kim Newman on Carey’s career, a fascinating surviving snippet of Ford’s lost 1920 steamboat epic Hitchin’ Posts, and more.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF HELL BENT & STRAIGHT SHOOTING

This month’s Pop Screen exclusive sees us (big) suit up for what many people consider the greatest concert movie of all time – Talking Heads’s wildly inventive, Jonathan Demme-directed masterpiece Stop Making Sense. Graham is joined once again by Talking Heads superfan Ewan Gleadow to discuss the band’s career, the wild visual concepts and their possible meanings, the band’s excursions into unexpected genres, Chris Frantz’s moany autobiography and so much more. 

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