In this early William S. Hart two-reel Western, "Keno Bates, Liar," Hart doesn't play the usual good badman character, but is, rather, good throughout the picture--by the standards of Westerns, that is. He's a saloon proprietor; he doesn't just drink there. And, when he kills a man, it's in self-defense--a thief he'd chased down. According to Andrew Brodie Smith ("Shooting Cowboys and Indians"), Hart's character here and in other films where he plays a saloon proprietor were based on the Jack Rance character in David Belasco's play "Girl of the Golden West." The two characters more typical to the Hart Western are seen here in the women, one good and one bad. The bad woman is a prostitute type who aggressively tries to seduce Hart. The good woman here is a bit different than in some of Hart's other films, as she's not instrumental to the hero's regeneration; instead, she fights the bad woman and shoots Hart when she misbelieves he's bad. Otherwise, this is a basic Hart Western, which, however, means it's better than contemporaries. A similar plot line was rehashed for Hart's 1918 feature film "Blue Blazes Rawden."
There haven't been very many early Westerns available on home video, but of the three Bison productions and some Tom Mix ones I've seen, Hart's films have superior production values and better continuity editing, including scene dissection and use of medium shots. What they lack in the advanced film technique seen in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Virginian" (1914) or some of D.W. Griffith's later Westerns, such as "The Battle of Elderbush Gulch" (1913), they make up for in presenting a strong protagonist with Hart. There's one especially good shot in "Keno Bates, Liar," which was surely inspired by a similar view in Griffith's "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" (1912): it's a stationary shot where Hart approaches for a close-up as he passes by the camera.
