The Sheriff's Baby (Biograph, 1913)

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

Doubtless the people at Film Preservation Associates paired The Sheriff’s Baby (1913) with Bad Buck of Santa Ynez because it too is a tear-jerker about a baby lost in the Western wilderness. In fact it was an uncredited version of Peter B. Kyne’s novel The Three Godfathers, published in book form the same year the film was made (1913), though it was originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1912. The Sheriff’s Baby was directed by D. W. Griffith for Biograph (though at the time Biograph wasn’t including any credits to individuals in a futile and doomed attempt to keep the “star system” of the stage from insinuating itself in the film business as well) and featured an all-star cast of Griffith’s “regulars”: Henry B. Walthall, Harry Carey and the young Lionel Barrymore as the three outlaws at the center of the story, Robert Harron as the deputy sheriff and Donald Crisp in an uncredited role.It’s about a baby (Eldean Stewart) whose guardians, a settler couple (John T. Dillon and Kate Bruce), both die of exposure in the middle of the Western desert. The local sheriff (Alfred Paget) is trying to apprehend the three titular outlaws – though just what they’ve done is unclear (in Kyne’s story they are fleeing after a bank robbery and they encounter the baby when mom is dying in childbirth and she pleads with them to be godfathers to her newborn and find the kid a decent home). They’re also attacked by Indians, and in the end one of the outlaws is killed by the Indians, one dies of exposure, and one lasts long enough to turn the child over to the sheriff, who immediately recognizes it as his own. Alas, by this time I was pretty much burning out and nodding off through much of The Sheriff’s Baby, and I got the impression D. W. Griffith himself was also burning out on the limitations of working for Biograph. Soon he’d be secretly shooting a four-reeler, Judith of Bethulia – based on the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes – and when the “suits” at Biograph caught him and fired him for his insubordination, Griffith signed with Mutual, made a feature-length compilation of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories called The Avenging Conscience (1914), and then independently produced and directed the racist masterpiece that would make his reputation, create the technical grammar of film as a medium, and stain his name forever once the “line” on African-Americans, the legacy of slavery and the Reconstruction era changed: The Birth of a Nation (1915).