The Big Diamond Robbery (Film Booking Office, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other Tom Mix film shown May 7 was The Big Diamond Robbery, made in 1929 just as the silent era was drawing to a close. It was produced by FBO Studios (FBO stood for “Film Booking Office”), which was owned and run by Joseph Kennedy – yes, the father of those Kennedys. Kennedy would shortly arrange a merger between FBO and Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which had invented a sound-on-film recording system called Photophone and wanted to own part of a movie studio to market it to the rest of Hollywood. The resulting studio was RKO (which stood for Radio-Keith-Orpheum – “Keith” and “Orpheum” were two old chains of vaudeville theatres whose owners had seen the writing on the wall, decided to convert their theatres to show talking films, and wanted to invest in a studio to make product for them), which had a surprisingly up-and-down history for the next three decades until it gave up the ghost in 1958. The Big Diamond Robbery was directed by Eugene Forde and co-written by him, Frank Howard Clark and future RKO stalwart John Twist, and is really more of a modern-dress gangster film than a Western – though big chunks of it take place at a California dude ranch, which gives Tom Mix a chance to strut his Western stuff and ride his horse Tony, who actually shares above-the-title billing with the human star.

The plot is, if anything, even simpler than that of Sky High: Tom Markham (Tom Mix – a lot of Western stars played characters with strikingly similar names to their own) has come to California to take over the dude ranch belonging to millionaire George Brooks (Frank Beal), whose daughter Ellen (Kathryn McGuite, Buster Keaton’s leading lady in two of his best films, Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator, both from 1924) is severely butch. She has her hair in a tight bob and wears neckties, and she loves to drive fast; in fact, she’s already been busted for speeding three times and has been warned by the judge in her cases that if she’s arrested a fourth time she’ll have to serve a jail sentence. George and his sister, Aunt Effie (Martha Maddox), decide to send Ellen to live at the ranch to see if getting her away from the city and its cars will reform her. While on her way there she has a meet-cute with Markham, though she’s already engaged to marry Rodney Stevens (Ernest Hilliard), a balding man with a “roo” moustache. From the moment we meet him we know he’s up to no good, especially when one of Randolph Bartlett’s titles tells us that he’s hobnobbing with the rich even though he has no visible source of income. Of course, he’s actually a crook, and his latest scheme is to steal the priceless Regent Diamond, which George Brooks has just bought as a present for his wayward daughter. George even helpfully tells Ellen in Rodney’s presence where he’s stashing the diamond: in a wall safe behind a mirror in her bedroom.

From there the movie turns into a three-way chase scene in which Tom Markham recovers the diamond and then gets the girl. There’s also a comic-relief taxi driver named Barney McGill (Barney Furey), whose cab meter runs up to over $40 when Tom keeps him waiting outside the Brooks home while he and George arrange for him to take over managing the ranch. (By coincidence, a man really named Barney McGill would become a major cinematographer, best known for shooting the 1931 Svengali with John Barrymore.) The Big Diamond Robbery is a quite accomplished film technically – proof that, as Charles said afterwards, the artistry of silent film as a medium had filtered down to the lower reaches of the movie world so it was not only the great masterpieces of the era that had excellent production values. It’s also a good deal of fun, and it’s amazing that even at 49 years old Tom Mix had stayed in great shape and could still play the dashing young hero. It was also the last film Mix made before taking a sabbatical from the movie business to ride with a circus, and FBO made the most of that in their ad campaign; one ad for this film read, “NOTICE: As Tom Mix has joined the Circus and not making any more pictures this will be YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SEE HIM.” As things turned out, The Big Diamond Robbery was not Tom Mix’s last film, though he would be off the screen for three years until Universal cast him in the first (1932) version of Destry Rides Again, and for the next eight years he’d be in and out of filmmaking until his love of fast cars finally caught up with him and he died in an auto accident in Arizona on October 12, 1940.