The Squaw Man

... And the first feature-length movie made in Los Angeles. A British former soldier named James (Dustin Farnum) is blamed when a lot of money is embezzled from the military widows and orphans fund. It was actually James's cousin Henry (Monroe Salisbury), but James gets the blame and goes on the run to the US, while Henry inherits an ancestral title and becomes nobility. James ends up in Wyoming, where he buys a ranch, falls for native girl Nat-U-Rich (Lillian St. Cyr), and runs into trouble with local bad guy Cash Hawkins (William Elmer). Also featuring Winifred Kingston, Baby Carmen De Rue, Joseph Singleton, Raymond Hatton, and Hal Roach.

This is as creaky as one would expect, with primitive filming techniques (most scenes are framed like a stage play, and are usually one continuous shot), and wild pantomime acting. Farnum and St. Cyr are a bit thicker in the middle than most screen stars. My favorite moments include one scene where someone falls off the side of a mountain (a bad dummy is used to humorous effect) and the people who rush to help him do so by rubbing his hands; a scene in which our hero is overcome by the poisonous gases of the "Death Hole"; and a scene where a small child is placed on a horse, given a pistol, and then urged to shoot, which the kid does, seemingly into the back of the horse's head (thank goodness for blanks).

Cecil Blount DeMille, a stage actor dabbling in playwriting, was able to secure through his mother's connections an association with Jesse Lasky, a successful Broadway vaudeville producer. The partnership proved beneficial for both in 1912, when the two rolled out a couple of financially very successful plays in New York City. DeMille, though, was tiring of the theatrical business and was catching the cinematic fever in 1913. With Lasky, Lasky's brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and several East Coast businessmen, DeMille became part of the newly-formed Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The production company would concentrate on longer feature films, with its first one scheduled to be an adapted 1905 play called "The Squaw Man."

DeMille, who never directed a movie before, was assigned the directorship duties alongside veteran director Oscar Apfel. Together with camera/lighting/set designer crews and actors, the pair journeyed to Flagstaff, Arizona, to shoot the Western. After a few exterior shots in the mountains, however, they soon realized the small town was inferior to the look they wanted. They then boarded the train for Los Angeles, a growing community of filmmakers.

DeMille realized the perfect spot to produce "The Squaw Man" was the nearby town of Hollywood. He rented a barn on the corner of Selma and Vine Streets, converting it into a simple film studio for interior shots and editing (Paramount Pictures moved the barn in 1926 and is now the Hollywood Heritage Museum). Although not the first movie made in Hollywood--that honor goes to D. W. Griffith's 1910 short "In Old California, --"The Squaw Man" became the first feature film to be produced in Hollywood, 74 minutes in length.

DeMille was a quick learner while observing Apfel directing the cast and crew. He began to assume more directorial duties as the filming went into the final third week.

Before the production, the Lasky Company realized they needed a big star to attract viewers to "The Squaw Man." Lasky offered popular stage actor Dustin Farnum either up to $5,000 to be in the film, a pretty good chunk of money in those days, or a percentage of the Lasky Company (reportedly 25%). The actor took the money, but ultimately gave up millions since the small studio would eventually become a big part of the future mega- movie company Paramount Pictures.

While the movie crew was busily traveling and filming "The Squaw Man," Goldfish (Goldwyn) was criss-crossing the country selling the rights of the movie to exhibitors before it was released to the public. This became the first time a motion picture rights had been pre-sold before its production had been completed.

"The Squaw Man" made a ton of money for Lasky's company, profiting almost $250,000 in 1914. DeMille would go on and direct two remakes of the story, in 1918 and a sound movie in 1931.

This is an adaptation of a stage play--an awful melodrama, which incorporates the Western and flirts with taboo love--adultery and miscegenation. Apparently, Oscar Apfel was doing poorly at teaching Cecil B. DeMille how to direct; there's plenty of outside filming, which is supposed to be a benefit of California, yet this movie is remarkably inept in how the framing of outside scenes is as theatrical as the scenes inside. Of course, it was a commercial success, leading DeMille to remake it twice, and is now a footnote in film history. Probably of more consequence than it being a feature-length film made in Hollywood, unoriginal reinforcement though it was, is the movie's soap opera histrionics coupled with a Caucasian playing a Native-American.

The actors of this movie protrude what their characters would be doing or feeling via gestures, staring at nothing and other magnified histrionics; they're trying to communicate the plot to the audience despite silence and a distanced camera. There's no realism, subtlety, nor, even, characters. The directors and actors of "The Squaw Man" blunder further by misunderstanding the silence concept. Silent films are silent to us, but the fictional world within a silent film is usually not silent. (Likewise, we still hear the music scores in modern films while the characters in the fictional world don't.) In this film, there are some awkward moments when a character lingers behind unnoticed, or is transparently suspicious-looking, but that happens to be when everyone is looking at something else. Yet, I suppose they still do that in soap operas.

In defence of DeMille, it was his first film, and senior director Apfel surely deserves more blame. One learns from imitation, and there weren't many worth imitating then. There was no indication in "The Adventures of Dolly" that Griffith would become the best director in the world. To see DeMille's potential, watch the subsequent year's "The Cheat". Its story is also wanting, flirts with adultery and miscegenation and is driven by embezzlement from charity, but, otherwise, the films couldn't be more different.

"The Squaw Man" (1914) co-directed by Cecil B. DeMille is considered the first full-length feature film from Hollywood.

In spite of it's historical significance, it is poorly directed, which can only be expected from the first effort in full-length film making.

The story revolves around a chivalrous British officer who decides to take the blame for his cousin's embezzlement and journeys to the American West to start a new life on a cattle ranch.

It is, quite simply boring and primitively executed and produced. Cecil B. DeMille would go on to direct some of early Hollywood's most genre-defining features such as his epic take on "The Ten Commandments" (1956), which I highly recommend anyone experiencing, but I only recommend his debut feature for film historians and enthusiasts.

History seems to consider The Squaw Man to be Hollywood's first feature-length film. However, Custer's Last Fight (Francis Ford, 1912*) runs at just under an hour. I'd consider that feature-length. And it was made in Hollywood. So, I dunno.

In any event, this is a really important film, historically, and Cecil B. DeMille's first feature--and his first film, period. Supposedly, he hadn't even seen a film until shortly before he made this. It totally shows.

It's kind of a clumsy jumble of scenes taken from a book. There's no real cinematic logic or flow. There are lots of scenes of people just standing around talking--which doesn't really work in a silent film, especially without many intertitles. Characters were hard to tell apart, because they were mostly filmed in long shot. I found it all somewhat difficult to follow, although I guess I got the gist.

Still, some of the individual scenes are interesting. I suppose the theme of interracial marriage was probably notable for the time (and its outcome predictable). And the film ws mostly filmed on location, which made it a bit easier to watch. I don't imagine I'll ever feel a burning desire to see this again, but it was worthwhile seeing once as an historical document.

C. B. DeMille did learn his craft quickly. By 1915, he was doing vastly better work than this (Carmen, The Cheat).

5.5/10

* Although the version I saw was a 1920s reissue, and it's possible it had some footage added, but it seems unlikely, because that almost certainly would have been jarringly obvious.