Bad Buck of Santa Ynez (Kay-Bee Pictures, Mutual, 1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, instead of giving us a respite after Wolf Lowry so we could let what we’d just seen sink in, Turner Classic Movies followed it immediately with the two other movies on the Film Preservation Associates DVD: Bad Buck of Santa Ynez (1915), also with William S. Hart (as both star and director); and The Sheriff's Baby (1913). Co-produced by Hart’s Kay-Bee Pictures and Mutual, Bad Buck of Santa Ynez stars Hart as “Bad” Buck Peters, who takes a Robin Hood-esque delight in tormenting the local sheriff (Bob Kortman). The sheriff is sufficiently alarmed he organizes a posse to get Buck “dead or alive – preferably dead,” and Buck not surprisingly flees the gang of armed men out to deliver him to the sheriff in one of those states. Only midway through the movie he comes on a youngish woman (Fanny Midgley) and her daughter (Thelma Salter). He says they’re welcome to stay in his cabin as long as they want to but he will have to leave. Then the child goes outside to play and is bitten by a rattlesnake (director Hart gives us a closeup of its tail so we know it’s a rattlesnake even though it’s a silent film). Buck comes upon the girl and tries to save her by sucking the venom out of her leg, but soon realizes she’s beyond what he can do. He rides into town to fetch the only available doctor in miles and brings him back to the cabin even though this means near-certain capture and likely death at the hands of the posse. Buck successfully summons the doctor, who successfully keeps the girl alive, but he’s wounded in the process and dies in the end – one of only four times Hart’s character died out of his over 70 films. (Surviving whatever perils the writers throw at them is a hallmark of Western stars; John Wayne made over 150 films and only died on screen seven times, including his last film, The Shootist, made when he was terminally ill with cancer for real and everyone on the set knew it.)