Two Little Rangers

When a trading post is robbed and its manager disappears, it takes two young girls to find the clues and set matters aright.

This is an interesting, well composed and, at the appropriate moments, exciting short subject from Alice Guy, the first woman motion picture director and arguably the first motion picture director. Yet, despite its excellence in many regards, it reveals a shortcoming that I see in many of Mme. Guy's later pictures. The acting is too broad.

Had Mme. Guy been directing so long that she could not adjust to the new, subtler pantomime that was becoming popular? I suspect the answer is simpler: Alice Guy was a Frenchwoman and this movie was a Solax Production, based in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Her actors were Americans. I suspect they were miming in their native style, but Mme. Guy was "reading" them in French, so, for her to pick up what they were indicating, they had to mime broader.

That issue aside -- and it is a considerable one -- this is a well-made and often exciting movie. If you wish to see it for yourself, a good print is available at the Eye Institute site on YouTube.

One is sometimes apt to assume too readily that the films of Alice Guy will have proto-feminist content because of her pioneering role as a director (starting with Gaumont in 1896) but there is no doubt that many of her films privilege forceful female characters and distinctly women-orientated themes.

That is very clearly the case here. The two heroines women, the two daughter of the post-mistress who track and capture the evil-doer where the men prove remarkably ineffectual and who use considerable resource and imagination in doing so. Doughty female heroines are not that, however, that rare in early westerns although they are rarely so entirely the heroines as the two girls in this film. I cannot recall another shoot-out that culminates in a confrontation between the villain and a little girl - to the little girl's advantage.

Equally remarkable is the general theme of the film which turns not so much on the crime committed by the villain but on his abusive treatment of his wife.

Overacting there is but it concerns the weakest element in the film - its silly melodramatic ending (which I shall not reveal).

An ok western from Alice Guy with plenty of plot for 1912. No big names in the cast, but plenty of enthusiasm.

Relative to other very old films, such Westerns as "The Little Rangers," otherwise known as "Two Little Rangers," benefit from the opening up of filmmaking from taking the action and the cameras outdoors. Besides the greater scenery, there's actual exploration of depth of field and often the pacing is quickened. Evidently, some of this one is missing, but basically two female gunslingers chase down a bandit who pushed another man off a cliff. A woman lassos and pulls the man up from the cliff fall, and there's some good stunt work here otherwise, including jumping and more falling and the bandit escaping from a burning shack.

Goes to show that the world's first female director, Alice Guy, could make exciting shoot-em-ups, too, out of her characteristic challenging of conventional gender roles, as with the heroines here. Another early production from Solax, Guy and her husband's American studio, is an even more subversive Western and very much worth checking out, "Algie, the Miner" (1912).

P.S. Thanks to fellow Letterboxd users, I see that a complete or more-complete (the opening title remains missing) print than the BFI one on the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers set exists from from the Eye Filmmuseum and is available on their YouTube channel. It shows that the film begins with a couple interior set-ups before opening the picture up to the outdoors.