Sometimes at Western Night we’ll see a film with a passel of problems but was still well-worth seeing. One of those was THE DARKENING TRAIL (1915), a silent movie Johnny D. Boggs selected for this gathering.
In this frontier morality tale about revenge, a big city cad who, having seduced and abandoned a poor female store clerk, skedaddles for Alaska to escape his wealthy father’s wrath.
It was the first full-length film directed by well-known Western star William S. Hart, who happens to star in this one, too, but doesn’t play the cad. He cast himself as Yukon Ed, a big strapping fellow who’s in love with Ruby, the owner of a mining camp saloon. But she marries Jack, the cad, who, on arrival in camp, was made the butt of a joke by Ed. Things go bad for all of them.
The screenplay by C. Gardner Sullivan is one of the problems here. The set up with Jack the cad takes up almost the first half of the movie. Ed shows up in the other half, and the movie is only 52 minutes long, yet it feels slow. It also doesn’t help that some story points are often repeated.
On the plus side, the picture doesn’t mince its point that evil does not prosper. There are some humorous moments, too, like the dialogue card stating that Ed has asked Ruby to marry him 43 times.
A year after this film came out, screenwriter Sullivan and director-star Hart would make the far grittier, lurid, and fiery HELL’S HINGES, but one can see the genesis of their morality tale about revenge theme in this picture.
THE DARKENING TRAIL is available on youtube for free, but the print is not a restored one.
Along with Johnny, record ten-time Spur Award-winning author and Owen Wister Award winner whose work includes his latest, BLOODY NEWTON, our group includes Kirk Ellis, Emmy winning screenwriter and producer, as well as author of the book, THEY KILL PEOPLE, about the making of BONNIE AND CLYDE; Kirk’s wife, Sheila; David Morrell, award-winning author and New York Times best-selling author of FIRST BLOOD, the novel that introduced the character Rambo; and Robert Nott, award-winning journalist and author of several books on Western films, including his most recent RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY that examines the production, themes and legacy of the film that launched Sam Peckinpah’s career.
