The Salomy Janes.

I tuned up Raoul Walsh’s 1932 The Wild Girl without knowing anything about it. Sometimes being a diligent film freak plowing through the margin entries on U-Tube comes good.  This has been the high point of my recent viewing. 

It's another of the William Fox Company films that have been allowed to vanish. I was at Walsh seasons in London, Paris and Edinburgh in the sixties, when he was being canonised. None of them came up with this one. That was the time I heard Sam Fuller, fronting his own retrospective, ask why the organisers were fooling about with him, when they could have invited Raoul Walsh.

Right from the get go, The Wild Girl has your attention. The titles are presented like a family photo album come to life, as each panel shows one of the performers in costume delivering a line to explain their character. (“I like trees better’n men. The’re straight”) It’s a pity this device didn’t catch on. It works better than the simulated page turnings the film uses to link scenes. Norbert Brodine, the cameraman who Elia Kazan thought had never done anything of note, catches the big trees environment imposingly, even with a few unobtrusive glass shot skies, at a guess, dropped in there to conceal distant roofs and telegraph wires. It doesn't do any harm either that New York’s MOMA has made this beautiful restoration. I notice that a few, of the small number who saw the original screenings there, went on record to announce their delight.

Wild Girl - Joan Bennett

The film is an adaptation of Bret Harte’s short story “Salomy Jane’s Kiss” and the stage presentation derived from it by Paul Armstrong Jr. This had been filmed in 1914 and again with Jaqueline Logan in 1923, a lost version by George Melford from a scenario by De Mille writer Waldemar Young.  De Mille’s 1917 Romance of the Redwoods repeated the California Sequoias setting in a similar plot about a young woman saving her man from a vengeful mob, allegedly spun off an obscure German piece. The success of films of Owen Wister’s 1902 “The Virginian” would have endorsed interest in the lynching plot. 

Walsh’s film  opens endearingly with twenty two year old Joan Bennett’s blonde urchin child of nature frolicking in the big timber, sharing the frame with deer and bear cubs. She goes skinny dipping with the settlers’ children and hitches a ride in driver Eugene Palette’s Angel’s Gulch - Red Wood stage, only to encounter gropey town boss Morgan Wallace, who she evades by clambering onto the top of the speeding coach. The tricky stunt climb looks like it was doubled but Joan does do the ride along on the bouncing roof.

She’s the only eligible female about (like Lois Wilson in Victor Fleming’s great To the Last Man). Wallace’s purity league has had Mina Gombell’s saloon girls run out of town, though they were the basis of his success. Young Joan, is unsure how to handle her multiple suitors.  She disconcerts Irving Pichel (later to direct the superior Destination Moon and Martin Luther among less notable titles) by telling him that she’ll marry him if he kills off the offending Wallace for her. Silk hat gambler Ralph Bellamy (excellent) is also interested.

Wild Girl - Bellamy & Bennett.

Complications arise when Pallette’s stage is robbed and stranger Charles Seventh Heaven Farrell, still in his tattered Confederate uniform, rides into town looking for Wallace, who wronged his sister. Farrell gets bad notices for his performance here, doing a gentle soul twisted out of shape by his need for violence. Think Brian Ahern as a cowboy! He’s a lot more acceptable than he is in say the Borzage Liliom.  Charles is minimally distracted by the sight of Joan swimming bare-assed. He tracks down the villainous Wallace, after giving him a pistol to defend himself, and smashes through the timber door to put a couple of rounds into the  fleeing blackguard. Gombell watches delighted.

 This is actually another transition western, again with minimal shooting, fighting and fast riding and a strong on character plot. The only other shot fired in the film takes down a critter. Setting, story and performance carry the piece nicely.

  At this point the Bret Hart plot asserts with the locals forming a lynch mob to dispose of robber Willard Robertson (his best role) and killer Farrell. (“Those Vigilantes is allus clingin' and hangin' onter some mere scrap o'the law they're pretendin' to despise”) The film’s strongest scene is (of all people) Sarah Padden’s outburst, seeing the posse about to kill the father of her children. Stirred in, we get the Harte story, with Bennett’s Salomy Jane lifting onto his saddle and kissing Farrel, when he’s about to hang.

The Wild Girl - Farrell & Bennett.

Along with the sub plot of the local laying for her father James Durkin, we get Bellamy acting chivalrously to provide Bennett’s happiness with his new rival. He switches boots with the fugitive, confusing craven Pichel’s pack of blood hounds, with the nasty spotting the deception too late.

Wild Girl is a delight with its great piney woods visuals, excellent performances and well thought out plot but it's not flawless. No matter how appealing Walsh’s regular leading lady Bennett may be, with plucked eye brows and wardrobe department blonde ringlets she's never going to be the convincing frontier woman. We can recognise the director’s style - Pallette running up to deliver a line in close up, as part of the Walsh excessive knockabout. I never thought I’d be writing that we saw too much of Eugene Palette in a movie. A giggling Louise Beavers, replacing the Indian family of the original, is booted by Joan and slapped with a twig and I couldn’t spot Iron Eyes Cody - but I still find the film irresistible because (and appearances can be deceiving) it feels like the work of people who loved making movies for people who loved watching movies. This element will fade in the later Raoul Walsh films, though Gentleman Jim or The World in his Arms still retain traces.

However Wild Girl offers the director in full flight and is a project that stands among the best of its day. It really is a rare and genuine treat.

To get a better grip on the film I checked out Salomy Jane, the 1914 film, made contemporary with Birth of a Nation, as one of the first feature length productions and better adapted to the long form than most of the surviving examples.

Salomy Jane - Mabel Hilliard, Fred W. Snook, Peters, Nigh, Michelina, Ernest Joy and Jack Holt Behind Peters.

This early version already contains the add-ons to the Bret Harte plot found in later films -  rival admirers including the gentleman gambler in his silk hat, the feud (clearer here), Red Pete’s children, his daughter with the giveaway bracelet, the Sequoias. That looks like the same hollow giant redwood but this one has also found a truck size tree stump to use as a foreground object.

Middle aged Latina Beatriz Michelina, with her hand clasping gestures, is not much of a Salomy Jane but clean cut House Peters (senior) cuts a dash as “The Man” and the support are adequate. Long serving B movie director William Nigh plays one of the suitors and the film is a bit schizoid - a division between the imposing exteriors - the vigilantes gathering in the clearing or their horses kicking up water as they ride distant into the river in pursuit of the foreground lovers - alternating with the performers miming out the action in drab studio interiors. 

For an early feature, the pacing is quite sustained and there is Parallel Action though the only close-ups are of inset objects - the sister’s picture, the feuding relative’s letter. I'd rate the handling by Nigh and co-director Lucius Henderson (Sapho 1913) as respectable for the day.

While this is an agreeable curiosity, we have a long way to go to get to the standard of Raoul Walsh’s so nice Wild Girl.

Barrie Pattison 2023.