Branding Broadway

I saw this film at the 2006 Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy. The very popular William S. Hart was something of an anomaly among silent-film stars. Whereas most male silent stars tended to play either exclusively good guys or exclusively baddies, Hart usually played characters who started out bad but were reformed by the love of a good woman before the last reel. Offscreen, Hart had the bizarre habit of proposing marriage to his leading ladies.

In 'Branding Broadway', Hart plays a rootin'-tootin' sixgun-shootin' rancher from the Triple Bar X ranch who rides into Whetstone, Arizona in search of a drink, pausing only to address some Chinese immigrants as "Chinkos". The local goo-goo committee hog-tie Hart and toss him into a baggage van bound for New York.

In the city, Hart gets a job as "nurse" to a tough playboy who likes to start stosh-ups in nightclubs. (Why do they keep letting him in?) The playboy has written some compromising letters to pretty Seena Owen, who demonstrates her skill flipping flapjacks in a restaurant called the Wheat Cake. (Where a stack o' wheats will set you back 20 cents.) When the playboy's father sends Hart to retrieve the letters, Hart takes one squizz at pretty Seena and ... Katie, bar the door!

I hugely enjoyed this film, which is a nice urban change of pace for the outdoorsman Hart, but still features enough action to keep his fans happy. There are a couple of nice stock shots of Manhattan, and some funny jokes in the intertitles. If not for that "Chinkos" line, I might have rated this movie a perfect 10. As it is, 9 out of 10.