The Half-Breed

THE HALF-BREED is an incredibly underrated silent drama and I am so glad it recently got the gorgeous restoration it deserves. Photographed and acted beautifully, this is one of the best Hollywood productions of its time and still worth watching today.

That THE HALF-BREED came after the incredibly racist THE BIRTH OF A NATION is fascinating. The movie is not without its dated elements, but it is far more progressive in its call for tolerance and indictment of the white man's treatment of Native Americans than you would expect in a movie from 1916.

Doug Fairbanks is an actor more noted for his charisma and derring-do than his thespian chops. However, he does an admirable turn as Lo, the half-Native American, half-white outcast. This character is more somber than his usual roles, though no less active and principled. Sam De Grasse plays the villain as he often did for Fairbanks and he does well with his usual underplaying style.

However, the best performances come courtesy of Jewel Carmen and Alma Reubens. These two women get the meatiest roles in the movie: a flirtatious yet Machiavellian debutante flirting with scandal when she pursues Lo, and a world-weary con-woman on the run from the law and her own sordid past. Both bring great depth to these parts, neither fitting fully into the ingenue/vamp dichotomy you see in a lot of American films of the 1910s.

While THE BLACK PIRATE is my favorite Fairbanks movie, THE HALF-BREED is a close second. I absolutely enjoy watching this beautifully made movie and would recommend it to silent movie mavens.

The usual suspects -- star Doug Fairbanks, writers Anita Loos and John Emerson and director Allan Dwan -- try something different from their usual light-hearted romp with social commentary, working from a story by Bret Harte.

Unfortunately, the copy screened by the Museum of Modern Art is in poor shape. Only about twenty-five minutes of the one-hour feature could be screened, and the print showed a lot of damage. The titles, when possessed of any humor, are dour and there isn't much of Doug's usual stuntwork -- he clambers around the redwood forests of northern California for a bit and bends a young conifer double a couple of times to spring from one place to another. We do get a bit of beefcake in an early scene, where he is shown, stripped to the waist, but that's about it.

The rest is an open attack on racism. Doug, the titular half-breed is trapped in a small, nasty town full of racists who dislike him solely because he is an Indian. Of course, Jewel Carmen and Alma Rubens have yens for him, but besides showing jealousy when Doug is not present, do nothing about it. The genially corrupt individuals who inhabit most of Harte's better known works are not present. Instead, they are selfish, nasty and smug

It's difficult to judge the impact of this movie almost a hundred years after it was produced, but over all it looks like an earnest work with some good production values: an attempt to expand Doug's range as a movie star. Judging by the fact that he went back to his usual mode of movie until 1920s' THE MARK OF ZORRO, it almost certainly didn't take. Nor, judging by what remains, should it have.

While Douglas Fairbanks is famous for his fantasy and adventure films (such as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, ROBIN HOOD and THE MARK OF ZORRO), he also made a variety of other films...including some westerns early in his film career. TCM showed two of them tonight, THE GOOD BAD MAN and THE HALF-BREED. Both are about equally enjoyable, though THE HALF- BREED is exciting to watch because of its location filming in Boulder Creek (near San Jose) and Calaveras County (near Yosemite). Seeing all these giant redwoods is reason enough to see the movie!

When the film begins, a native woman has a baby and has been dumped by the father of the child. She is friendless and neither the whites nor Indians want anything to do with her. She then gives her baby to a nice old naturalist living in the woods then she kills herself! So the child is raised away from civilization by the old man. When the old guy dies, the now grown Sleeping Water (Fairbanks) travels to the nearby town and learns that pretty much most of the white folks he meets are Indian-hating scum. He decides to leave and return to the woods and is soon joined by Teresa, a woman who has stabbed two perverts who couldn't keep their hands off her. Additionally, Nellie from town inexplicably has fallen for Sleeping Water...as has Teresa. What's next? See the film.

While this is not a great film, it does do a nice job of humanizing the main character and the plot all centers on how trashy the 'civilized' white folks could be. In many ways, this is like a great silent western, THE SQUAW MAN...which is a must-see. As for THE HALF-BREED, it's very good for when it was made and ages reasonably well. Sadly, the film was restored by piecing together many different prints and some of them are pretty shabby condition- wise.

Pretty heavy themes in this 1916 melodrama. I have just been rediscovering Fairbanks' early works and this one caught me by surprise. After watching silent films for almost 50 years, what a joy it is to see them digitally restored. A far cry from the fuzzy 8mm prints of my youth. If I had seen a musty out of focus truncated print of this film, I would have missed much of its joy. Thank you to all who worked so hard to bring this one back to all of us.

There is now a fair understanding of the way that the fatuous Hollywood-centred account of silent cinema with which we all grew up falsified and deformed the history of cinema. The rediscovery of the great European films of the era have very effectively put paid to any such notion. What is perhaps less appreciated is the way that the history of US cinema itself was deformed by the simplistic picture painted of it and its genuine excellencies often obscured. No one has I think suffered more from this than Douglas Fairbanks.

Just as Chaplin found himself trapped in his role as "the little tramp" and Pickford imprisoned in eternal gnome-like childhood, so Fairbanks became, whether he would or no, the archetypal swashbuckler. The very selective survival of silent films almost entirely obfuscated the fact that it was not swashbucklers that first made Fairbanks a star but the sophisticated and often highly innovative comedies produced in the earlier period with John Emerson and one of the sharpest satirists of her time, Anita Loos. Now, with so many more available, we have at long last a truer picture of Fairbanks' career.

Fairbanks' style of comedy has much in common with that of the great French comedian, Max Linder (whose similarities with Chaplin are almost entirely superficial) and often shows, in its approach to the surreal, the influence of European style. Like Linder, Fairbanks tended to be a bit hit-and-miss (both were experimenters rather than perfectionists in the Chaplin manner) but the great films of this pre-swash period (The Mystery of the Leaping Fish 1916 or When the Clouds Roll By 1919 are my personal favourites) have a quality not really to be found elsewhere in US cinema. In saying this, I do not by any means intend to devalue the swashbucklers (Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro or The Thief of Bagdad remain classics and are themselves pervaded by the charming nonsensicality of the comedies) but rather to revalue the other Fairbanks that lay for so long ignored.

Allan Dwan who had made his way to Griffith's Fine Arts Film Company via a long stint at American Film Manufacturing Company, making mainly westerns and then with the Ince companies at about the time they were gobbled up by Universal. His image of Fairbanks was very much as an action hero and the combination Dwan-Loos that we have in this film is almost a perfect representation of the two ways in which the star was being pulled.

Amongst the various Dwan try-outs for Fairbanks was the politically correct western hero rather in the mould of William S. Hart (he and Fairbanks would even make a film entitled The Good Bad Man in 1916). This film is politically correct in another way too. The revisionist approach, with its very overt attack on racism and white supremacism, was not new (it had always been a significant element in the Ince westerns) even if it is here more outspoken than usual.

Even if the defence of Native Americans and Mexicans was less controversial in this respect than that of African Americans (and acceptable to Grifith), it was still of consuiderable importance in the face of the resurgence of white supremacism that followed Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The silent presence of an elegant black gambler in the saloon in this film is not, I think, insignificant amongst all the various minorities represented and contrasted with the miserable specimens of the "superior" white man. Similarly the parson's announced sermon on "intolerance" (never delivered) is obviously a nod to Griffith's better angel (several of the cast also appeared in the Griffith film). All in all the message is clear and, if a shade strident, is nonetheless important.

With the character of Nellie (Jewel Carmen), with her expensive education, "trained misunderstanding" of music and faultless taste in clothes, a sort of lily-white Lorelei Lee of the West, Loos comes into her own and the balance tips towards satire. The métisse Teresa (Alma Rubens) is on the other hand the free strong-minded female heroine that Loos offers as the counterpart in another political element of the story that invites the audience to see the white male treatment of women as comparable to that of its treatment of minorities.

The film is in the end neither the action film that Dwan might have preferred nor the satirical comedy that Loos could have written but a half-breed somewhere between the two. Yet, even if Dwan and Loos resembled each other only in their cynicism - of the three Fairbanks himself was the most idealistic - it does emerge as a surprisingly angry film at a moment when racist and anti-immigrant feeling was at its height in the US and still very much on the rise. The union of the two mixed race characters (Fairbanks and Rubens) is sometimes seen as an evasion of the racial issue but it does serve to underline the message stressed throughout the film that (in direct contradiction of Griffith's prologue to Birth of a Nation and to the fashionable eugenics of the day), it is "whiteness" that represents the problem in US society while the diversity represented by métissage is its redeeming feature.

But for Fairbanks personally it was neither the political nor the satirical aspects of the film that pointed the way forward but rather the forest idyll of the lovers with its incidental resemblance to Robin Hood. The swashbucklers, with some inevitability, proved ultimately a dead end for Fairbanks just as the "little girl" films did for his Hollywood queen and it proved impossible for him in later years, despite some not uninteresting attempts, to successfully either develop his potential as a dramatic actor nor to revive the great comedian he had once been. In Hollywood "when the legend becomes fact"......