"Hell Bent" (1918) with Harry Carey, Sr., Neva Gerber, Duke R. Lee, Vester Pegg, Joe Harris, and others, directed by John Ford (here as Jack Ford), is newly released in Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, and is a wonderful epitome of nearly every trope John Ford ever used in one of his films, especially the Western. Running at only 50 minutes, this accomplishes much in its short time: it begins with a novelist receiving a letter from a publisher's assistant saying the public isn't buying this writer's ideas any more because they've gone too far off track, so the novelist looks at a Western painting by Frederick Remington, sees a story in his mind's-eye, and tells it to himself - that's the movie. What's the story? Harry Carey (Cheyenne Harry) gets out of town quick because he's been in a card game that went haywire when he put some cards into it that shouldn't have been there and nearly got shot for it! He goes to Rawhide where he runs into a real story; several people who want to steal a large gold shipment from a stage; Neva Gerber who is now working at the local saloon and dance hall because her brother has been fired and is now too lazy to get another job, this, while their mother is evidently in extremely poor health and needs money; Cimarron Bill, a tough with whom Carey gets into a nice friendship and they both become bouncers at the dance hall, this, while both learn they equally love to sing the song "Genevieve"; and Beau Ross (Joe Harris), a slick and oily character who is actually a stage robber and is after the gold shipment.
All the photographic tropes that became Ford parcels in his Westerns are used here, and the cinematographer, Ben F. Reynolds, does a more-than-superlative job capturing gorgeous local color of town, people, desert, you-name-it...same cinematographer who shot many of Ford's early Cheyenne Harry Westerns, plus "Greed", "The Wedding March", and more. All the Ford/Irish "humor" that salts and peppers Ford's films are seen here. The beginning of the film is nearly a soft comedy rather than a hard Western, but all that soon melds into the hardcore tropes of nearly all "B" Westerns that came after. At the same time this Western was being made, William S. Hart and Dustin and William Farnum were making very genuine looking hardcore Westerns, Tom Mix was on the rise, Broncho Billy Anderson on the wane, but, all in all, the Western was capturing the essence of Americana, that is, a psychology of tough, rough and ready, expansion in the land, independence, and an ideal of rugged individualism, mixed with a modicum of humor to temper the sometimes explosive personalities.
This is the essence of what became a good "B" Western. No, it's not an "A" Western, but it sure is VERY watchable, and I certainly enjoyed every minute of it.
