The Legend of Tom Mix.
Under lock down, it was a sure thing that I’d get around to Tom Mix sooner than later. I did try that nice copy of La Voleuse on You Tube, figuring that anything with Romy Schneider and Michel Piccoli would hold my attention but Marguerite Duras’ script credit should have been a warning light. I lasted a quarter hour.
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| Tom Mix |
Snapping back into character, I fired up the Tom Mix 1927 Zane Grey adaptation
The Last Trail. This one could represent the past of Richard Dix’ character in
It Happened in Hollywood,
like the TV package of fifties cowboy movies Tarantino fronted to
suggest the back story for Leonardo di Caprio's movie star lead in his
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Filmed nearly a decade after the Mix film, It Happened in Hollywood pivots on the then enormous nostalgia for silent movie cowboy juvenilia of which The Last Trail
is a perfect example. Time for a double feature of them.
Both films incidentally feature William B. Davidson, a
busy actor who became a recognisable element of Hollywood iconography,
registering in films where he only had an uncredited walk-on but also
showing that he could sustain a substantial role, as in W.S. Van Dyke’s
1934 Laughing Boy or here as the bad guy. His black bow tie is a give away. Tom Mix should have worked out who the secret gang leader was from that alone.
The film opens with Mix riding hell for leather on Tony, double up with his friend’s wife across the saddle but still outdistancing the pursuit of marauding Indians. No sooner is he through the fort gate and the woman back in the arms of spouse Lee Shumway than Tom is on the parapet blazing away. No question who’s the hero here.
A ten year later letter from Shumway, now Carson City sheriff, calls Tom back to see the little boy they named after him. Shumway’s driving the express coach carrying the area’s gold, the city’s lifeline under constant threat from stage robbers. Carmelita Geraghty (Jordan Baker to Warner Baxter’s Jay Gatsby) is busy trying to get Shumway’s motherless child Jerry Madden to take a bath at his cabin and hears gunfire as the bandits shoot up the coach - a great chase scene exchanging fire and racing through the steep rock cañon and onto the plains at full gallop. Carmelita saddles up to ride to the rescue - now there’s a switch. Young Madden trails after them dragging a long gun. “Where’s all the injuns.”
However Tom in his big white hat has arrived and sees the confrontation distant. He charges in, scattering the bandits. Carmelita gets the wrong idea and lets off a couple of rounds at him. Mortally wounded Shumway passes his tin star and little black note book to Tom. (“Keep my badge. You’re the man to wear it!”) Businessman Davidson notes this with concern.
Tom makes his presence felt worrying the outlaw gang. “Hold-ups ain’t safe with that gun totin’ cyclone on horseback actin’ as Sheriff.” However he’s a hit with Madden and Carmelita who bakes him a coconut cake. Davidson has his eye on her but Tom sends him on his way. “If there wasn’t a lady present I’d clean up this town’s mangiest coyote right now.”
The concerned Express Company owner makes it clear that he plans on re-assigning the franchise that Carmelita’s dad Oliver Eckhardt runs and sets up a stage coach race to establish the new operator. Davidson hires all the drivers to work for him - a list corresponding to Shumway’s book. Finding Eckhardt unable to get a driver for his entry,Tom steps up.
After a failed attempt by the heavies to take Tom down, our hero makes it to the race as the starting pistol is raised. Davidson, still not reaching the limit of his infamy, has Tom’s reins cut.
The actual race is a great set piece with Mix clearly really doing some of the dangerous stunting - diving down among the pounding hooves to retrieve the slashed reins in the best Yakima Cannutt style and driving flat out among over-turning coaches as the nasties try to box him in. The date this was filmed falls between shooting the land rush scenes in William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds and the Richard Dix Cimarron (and later the Cagney Oklahoma Kid) and suggests that the same stunt people were involved. Last Trail is not disgraced in this impressive company.
It’s simple minded but has enormous energy in a good naturedly sadistic way. It works a whole lot better than more serious and better known Mix-Zane Gray film, Lynn Reynolds’ 1925 Riders of the Purple Sage which incidentally is the prototype of The Searchers via an Alan Le May novel. Last Trail intriguingly compares favorably with the surviving John Ford silent cowboy movies.
Some of the western comedy of the Selig-Mix shorts persists - trying to lasoo the kid and roping Geraghty instead. Director Lewis Seiler’s handing is spot on, as with his Mix The Great K&A Train Robbery. It’s not a little sad to know that Seiler would spend the bulk of his career on drab potboilers, though the 1942 Humphrey Bogart The Big Shot does have the old spark.
Most movie enthusiasts now don’t realise the enormous public profile Tom Mix had in the twenties. Later vault fires at Fox destroyed the bulk of his best work and, outside the beautiful copy of Just Tony, this is now represented, if at all, by murky dupes. Even the great action footage in these doesn’t seem to have made its way into use as stock in later films. Fox in the Zanuck era showed minimal interest in preserving the celebrity of the stars which created the studio - Theda Bara, Buck Jones and Mix prominent among them.
However hints do emerge. Daryl (“The Last Detail”) Ponicsan’s 1975 “Tom Mix Died for Our Sins” is on the way to being my favorite movie biography, endearingly offering Mix' macho pride and involvement with western lore along with his fallibility as he dealt with a success no one could have predicted. Carlos García Agraz’ 1992 Mexican film Mi querido Tom Mix comes close to catching the star’s heroic twenties presence and Sunset, the Blake Edwards 1988 movie account of the fictional partnership of Mix and Wyatt Earp, has Bruce Willis’ Mix bridling at the suggestion that he play Earp saying “I didn’t get where I am by being other people.” (Mix was a pall bearer at Earp’s 1929 funeral) That one’s the best of the director's later films, surprisingly after Edwards' slack earlier cowboy movie Wild Rovers.
The appearance of Sunset may have deep-sixed Oliver Stone’s proposed filming Clifford ("Fake") Irving’s novel about Mix and Pancho Villa. I ran into Stone, when he was considering that. and nominated Mix as the great lost movie star. He had to look at me sideways and ask whether I was serious.
Barrie Pattison 2020.
