TUMBLEWEEDS (67)

Directed by: King Baggot (1925)

Starring: William S. Hart, Barbara Bedford, Lucien Littlefield

The Pitch: In the last days of the Old West, cowboys try to adapt as cattle-grazing land is opened up to homesteaders.

Theo Sez: The best-known vehicle for Hart, the First Movie Cowboy, rolls along exceptionally smoothly, possibly due to judicious trimming at a later date (I saw the 1939 re-issue) but more probably because it's none too complicated plotwise, an episodic storyline padded out with the comic misadventures of our hero's dopey sidekick romancing a fat widow. The main attraction is of course Hart himself, with his gaunt frame and long granite face (any biopic would obviously have to star James Cromwell), and his Victorian rectitude - sternly reprimanding a teenager for coming into the saloon, or fiddling with his Stetson, utterly tongue-tied, in the presence of a lady ; oddly enough he doesn't come across as a prig, because the man-out-of-time awkwardness is part of his persona - the wanderer who's never really been part of Society ("only land I'll ever settle down on'll be under a tombstone"), clinging unconsciously to a simplistic code of manners half-remembered from childhood and reinforced by years of hard living ; he's an unusually human cowboy, nothing like a cool dude - more like your kindly, maladroit uncle who works for the government and never married 'cause he never found The Right Girl. This is perhaps too light to be a great Western - though the final land-rush scenes are spectacular, and there's at least one classic shot of the homesteaders' wagons seen from a distance, crawling across the horizon ; but it still offers a classic Western theme (the transition from cowboys to communities) without the self-consciousness of later variations like THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. When Hart looks at the grazing herds of cattle and says "There it is, boys - the last of the West", there's an unvarnished simplicity about it that's very pleasing.