Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2004
Abstract
This first biography of the early film star William S. Hart is solidly researched and full of useful information, even if written in unexciting prose. Hart is a difficult subject, a taciturn, self-dramatizing figure about whose peripatetic childhood on the Great Plains little is known and who came to live the Western persona created through his silent movies. He was forty-nine before his first film in 1914, and his career lasted only a decade. Still, in those years he starred in forty-eight feature-length films (and an additional nineteen two-reelers), for many of which he also served as de facto writer and co-director. The output is daunting, but one missed opportunity of Ronald L. Davis's book is any exploration of the strengths of particular films, most of which are tossed off with a sentence or two of analysis, and it becomes impossible even to guess which of them can now be seen. (In an era from which at least 80 percent of US features are lost, Hart's have a relatively good survival rate, partly because he himself appreciated their worth and kept copies).
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:4 (Fall 2004). Copyright © 2005 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.