The Squaw Man (1914)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Squaw Man |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1914 |
| length | 74 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Cecil B. DeMille Oscar Apple |
| script | Beulah Marie Dix |
| production | Cecil B. DeMille |
| music | H. Scott Salinas |
| camera | Alfred Gandolfi |
| cut | Mamie Wagner |
| occupation | |
| |
The Squaw Man is an American silent film produced in the winter of 1913/14 by Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar Apfel with Dustin Farnum in the title role. The film, which is considered to be the first “grand wester” in film history, “was extremely successful and laid the foundation for a career that was unusual even for Hollywood standards”.
action
James Wynnegate and his aristocratic cousin Sir Henry, the Earl of Kerhill, are English aristocrats who set up a generous foundation for war orphans. Henry is addicted to gambling and has secretly embezzled money to pay off his horse betting debt. When Wynnegate catches his cousin in his wrongdoing, he takes the blame when the embezzlement comes out. Wynnegate is in love with Henry's wife Diana. With the police on his tail, Wynnegate flees from England to New York and then on to Wyoming, where he buys a small ranch and soon clashes with Cash Hawkins, the local bully. A shootout breaks out in which villain Cash Hawkins dies. Nobody knows who fired the decisive shot. A young Indian named Nat-U-Ritch confesses to Wynnegate that it was she who killed Cash Hawkins. He advises the Indian girl to keep quiet about it.
In an American foreign country, the Briton gets from one adventure to the next. In the mountains, Wynnegate goes snow blind and stumbles into some poisonous hot springs. Again, it's Nat-U-Ritch who saves James' life. She follows him every step of the way and brings him to safety. While the chief's daughter nurses him back to health, the white man and the squaw fall in love, become a couple, and James ultimately becomes the eponymous Squaw Man. When Wynnegate sees her making tiny moccasins, he realizes that his Indian woman has obviously become pregnant by him.
A few years have passed. Henry has in the meantime fallen into the depths while hiking through the Alps and, lying dying, confesses his former misdeed, which James had undertaken at the time and which then caused him to flee. Now there is no longer any reason for James to perish with the "barbarians" on the other side of the Atlantic, says the noble widow, Lady Diana. She goes to America and seeks and finds Captain James Wynnegate. She and her friends who had traveled with them convince him to take his son with him to England in order to give him a "civilized" upbringing there. In the meantime, the local sheriff has found the gun in Nat-U-Ritch's and James' home that used to shoot Cash. Nat-U-Ritch fears losing her child and at the same time being held responsible for the violent death of Cash Hawkins. Then she kills herself. Now James, who mourns the dead squaw with the chief, is free for his great love Diana.
Production notes
The Squaw Man was filmed for several weeks from December 29, 1913 in January 1914 and premiered on February 15, 17 or 24, 1914 (depending on the source). A German premiere cannot be proven.
The manufacturing cost was a modest $ 15,000. After the film ran in full houses, the two producers DeMille and Lasky were able to rake in a net profit of $ 244,000 and with this money each set up their own production company.
Jesse L. Lasky was the line producer for this film. Wilfred Buckland created the film structures. Hoot Gibson did the stunts.
Farnum received "for an impressive $ 250 a week for the title role" in this opus. Previously, he had "rejected DeMilles alternative offer to take over a quarter of the production company DeMilles instead of the fee".
Lillian St. Cyr, who played Nat-U-Ritch, was actually an Indian and part of the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska. Cecilia DeMille, who made a brief appearance, was the director's then five-year-old daughter. The future star producer Hal Roach can also be seen briefly.
The film was supposed to be shot in Flagstaff, Arizona. On the advice of Dustin Farnum, however, the decision was made to continue traveling to the much warmer Los Angeles, which until then had hardly been of any importance as a film city, when the snow fell by surprise.
In 1918 and 1931 DeMille made two remakes of this story, which received nowhere near the same attention as his directing debut.
Reviews
On moviessilently.com it says: “The acting is pretty typical of 1914, still very theatrical and full of grand gestures. Farnum has a personable, masculine presence on screen, and Red Wing (pseudonym of Nat-u-Ritch, note) has a disarming sincerity, but Winifred Kingston is just terrible and her oversized bow of hair is ridiculous. The rest of the cast ranks between obnoxious (Joseph Singleton as the drunken father of Red Wing) and smear acting. "
On Allmovie.com you can read: “The full 6-act melodrama is the first full-length western to be shot entirely in Hollywood. The result is terribly stupid but a quintessentially Victorian romance of an English nobleman (Dustin Farnum) falsely accused of a crime committed by his brother. "
"Farnum convinced as a male, muscular hero in this film as in the following."
literature
- Robert S. Birchard: Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood. University Press of Kentucky 2004.
- Scott Eyman : Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. Simon & Schuster 2010.
Individual evidence
- ^ The large personal lexicon of films, Volume 5, p. 448. Biography Cecil B. De Mille
- ^ The large personal dictionary of the film, Volume 2, p. 620. Biography Dustin Farnum
- ↑ criticism on moviessilently.com
- ↑ Review on Allmovie.com
Web links
- full movie on YouTube
- The Squaw Man on moviessilently.com
- The Squaw Man in the Internet Movie Database (English)