Customer Reviews

William S. Hart: Projecting the American West

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This slender volume offers an overview of Hart's life and an appraisal of his work, without detailed analysis of individual films.

Unfortunately, the tragic view of life which was central to Hart's personality and art appears to arouse the author's hostility. In fact, Prof. Davis has little use for Hart as a human being, assaulting him with a wide range of denigratory epithets: "rigid", "melodramatic", "immature", "self-pitying", "whining", and even "wimpish"(!). Hart's famous 1939 spoken introduction to TUMBLEWEEDS, which most viewers find quite moving, is here described as "bombastic". In short, the reader is caught in a clash of personalities between author and subject.

The book's greatest asset is an abundance of new biographical information, gleaned from Hart's own letters and other sources, pertaining mostly to his later years.

Diane Koszarski's COMPLETE FILMS OF WILLIAM S. HART, with its excellent introductory essay, is a good introduction to this film-maker's work. Despite Prof. Davis' efforts, there is still a need for full-length biographical study which takes Hart seriously as a person and as an artist.

I just know it could have been a lot better. Davis is talented at picking his subjects, from John Ford to Linda Darnell to Van Johnson, for in each case we wanted to know a whole lot about each personality, and then he had the additional gift of being able to do thorough research, and yet somewhere between the wish and the execution the person slips away, but it just might be that Davis isn't a very good writer, at least in the traditional sense of making people come alive. I think I wound up knowing less about William Hart after reading the book than I did before, because now I'm just confused.

His antagonistic thrust against Hart is puzzling. If Hart was such a bad actor and negligible screen presence, why did people adore him and how did he stay on top of the screen world for so long? Davis never answers these questions. When he wrote about poor Van Johnson, he explained away Johnson's reign on top of the box office charts by, pretty much, MGM paying for it (cheating, as it were). But in Hart's case, was he able to make literally hundreds of films through payola? I don't think so! Come on, Ronald Davis, next time write a book about someone you really like! We haven't seen your sympathetic side yet, just your Kitty Kelley sneer side.

William S. Hart and Tom Mix helped establish the model of the western action star. Mix was a lovable character on screen who presaged Gene Autry, and Hart expressed a deeply thoughtful, stoic, Shakespearean quality that survived into the best work of Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood. Ronald Davis provides the first indepth look at Hart's life and craft. Hart is not always a pleasant person, but great artists often do not fit the mode of a "nice guy." Hart was deeply interested in the West and formed close friendships with some of the region's great characters (such as Wyatt Earp) in an attempt to broaden his understanding of what the "West" meant. This biography is well written and reads nicely, drawing on newly available letters from Hart's collection. Anyone interested in early Hollywood or the development of the Western should have this book on their shelf. Let's hope Davis will turn his attention to that other great early Western star, Tom Mix.

This long-overdue study on Western icon William S. Hart (1864-1946) provides new archival information and a better understanding of the actor-filmmaker's forced retirement from the silver screen. However, author Ronald L. Davis offers minimal analysis on Hart's work - particularly his silent classics "Hell's Hinges" (1916), "The Toll Gate" (1920) and "Tumbleweeds" (1925) - which this book desperately needs. For scholars and researchers, it would be helpful to know how many films survive from Hart's 11-year career. "Projecting the American West" takes the right path, but the movie pioneer's life and art deserve further exploration.

The silent movie era has now been gone for almost a century and it is hard to believe that at one time the glitz and glamour that is Hollywood was once the scene of rural roads, dusty back lots and where eateries were few and far between. Such was the scene of the nascent production of films in Southern California at the beginning of the 20th Century. Westerns filmed here actually involved people who actually worked in the frontier as younger men.

This biography records the life of one of the earliest stars of the Westerns, William S. Hart, who worked in that genre from 1914 to his retirement after filming "Tumbleweeds" in 1925. The book does its best to record the life of this man, but the author admits that the facts surrounding his boyhood and early stage career are scant due to little recorded information, thus most of the information that is found in the first three chapters of the book is taken from Hart's autobiography "My Life from East to West," written in 1929. From what I could read, the author cotends that Hart embellished a lot of his expolits among the Indians during his stays in Iowa, Illinois and the Dakotas to score points with lovers of the Western films at the time. Whether this is true or not cannot be known as such information is lost to history. Hart is portrayed as a man of high-virtue almost to the point of phoniness in the author's opinion. He was outgoing to children who idolized him, but was very reserved around women. He engaged in few romances and was married for a brief time in 1922 and remained single for the rest of his days.

There was a genuine effort by Hart to create real westerns with daredevil action with constant protrayals of "good" bad guys. From the viewpoint of today, his films could be viewed as corny, but surprisingly he won praise for his film efforts at that time from the likes of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. The studios were averse to film more Hart westerns as they thought that the times had changed by the mid-1920s and that his type of westerns were passe. Hart took offense to this contention, retired from filmamking and remained more or less on his ranch in Newhall, California for the rest of his life until his death in 1946. The book also tells of his relationship with his sister Mary Ellen who had great influence on his life.

The author seems to be gunning for William Hart with an abundance of namecalling with words describing his personality as introverted, melodramatic, hammy and wont to live in the past. Perhaps he was just a man of his time or he was just different, yet he still had a great following nevertheless well after his retirement.

The Old West is long gone and the silent film era as well. Many of the people who worked in those films are long dead and the children of these stars are fast dying off leaving us with no more institutional memory of this genre. Time is running out for the creating of books of the silent era using first hand sources and books of this type, although imperfect, are needed more than ever to help us remember the cinematic past.

It is a a disgrace that an author can project his or her personal opinions in subtle but obvious "digs" without a full disclaimer in the preface. So much for scholarly ehthics in this day of easily attainable PhDs. Find another source for info on Mr Hart