Wolf Lowry (Kay-Bee Pictures, Triangle, 1917)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 16), after the telecast of the 77th annual Tony Awards, my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating triptych of silent films originally re-released in 2022 as a DVD by the Film Preservation Associates. They were all Westerns and two of them, the feature Wolf Lowry and the two-reel short Bad Buck of Santa Ynez, starred William S. Hart. Hart is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of American silent film; though he was born in New York City in 1864 he spent a good number of his teenage years in the West (the Dakota Territory). Later he returned to New York and became a stage actor, playing the villain Messala in the original 1899 stage version of Ben-Hur (and repeating the role in an unauthorized 1907 film of the chariot-race sequence, which was suppressed when the producers of the stage version sued for plagiarism and won, thereby establishing the principle that if you wanted to make a movie of a copyrighted work, you had to license the rights first). Hart became a movie actor at the unlikely age of 49 when he saw a Western in 1913 and was appalled at how inaccurate it was. He soon achieved stardom in a series of downbeat melodramas in which his character frequently started out as a villain and achieved nobility, usually (as here) through his involvement with a woman. Hart was also one of those stars of the teen years who gradually lost popularity in the 1920’s as younger audiences in particular lost patience with the intensely moralistic attitudes of his films. He was particularly jealous of Tom Mix because, while Hart had played multi-dimensional characters with both good and evil aspects, Mix was a Western superhero – the “good good man,” as film historian Arthur Knight put it, compared to Hart’s “good bad man.” Yet the two joined forces in 1929 to carry the coffin at the funeral of real-life Western hero Wyatt Earp.

Hart retired from films after making his epic Tumbleweeds (1925), directed by King Baggot, and made only one more movie – a cameo appearance as himself in King Vidor’s marvelous romantic comedy about Hollywood, Show People, starring Marion Davies (who’s damned good!) and William Haines. Hart retired to a ranch in Riverdale, California and lived there until his death in 1946, though in the late 1930’s he recorded a narration for a reissue of Tumbleweeds. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Wolf Lowry but what I got was a masterpiece, directed by William S. Hart himself (though the official credits list someone else, both imdb.com and Turner Classic Movies host Jacqueline Stewart named Hart as the director and I suspect “Walter Brisbane,” or whatever the name on the credits was, was a pseudonym) from a script by Lambert Hillyer and Charles T. Dazey. Hillyer would later become a director himself and rack up some quite interesting credits, including The Invisible Ray and Dracula’s Daughter (both 1936, the last two horror films made by Universal while Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. still controlled the studio) and the 1943 Batman serial, one of the two best serials ever made. (1934’s The Return of Chandu is the other.) Hart was a protégé of Thomas H. Ince, who more than any other individual created the job of studio head of production; though he directed films himself (notably a 1916 anti-war epic called Civilization, which like D. W. Griffith’s similarly themed Intolerance was a box-office disaster), he saw himself more as a producer and he built the largest movie studio in Hollywood, a lot at Culver City that became MGM’s headquarters during the classic era and is now owned by Sony.

In 1915 Ince arranged a merger between himself and two of the other most successful producers in the business, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, to form a company called Triangle, which co-produced Wolf Lowry with Hart’s own company, Kay-Bee Pictures. Unfortunately, Triangle lasted only three years and the founders went their separate ways after that, while the catalog of their films was sold. Wolf Lowry survived mainly in a 28 mm print issued by one of Triangle’s successor companies and sold to Pathé, but this was severely edited by the new owners, so important sequences, especially the film’s ending, had to be reconstructed from a technically inferior 35 mm version. Nonetheless, Wolf Lowry survives in good enough condition to establish itself as one of the major works of the period, and Hart as a quite good and innovative director who’d learned from Griffith how to make a film that actually holds up as movie drama instead of just a photographed stage play. The title character of Wolf Lowry (his real name is Tom but he’s been nicknamed “Wolf” because he’s so tough) is a cattle rancher who’s fiercely protective of his land – of which he needs a lot because in the opening we get a good look at the sheer size of his herds. In the opening scene we see him run off a white-haired man who’s built a cabin on Wolf’s land and tried to set up a homestead there. The man goes to the film’s principal villain, land speculator Buck Fanning (Aaron Edwards), to demand a refund on the claim. Buck in turn resells it to a young pioneer woman, Mary Davis (Margery Wilson), who carries a photo of a man named Owen Thorpe (William Fairbanks, though billed as “Carl Ullman” obviously to avoid confusion with Douglas Fairbanks). Wolf notices smoke coming from the chimney in that cabin, rides out to investigate, and is predictably surprised that the claim jumper is – gasp! – a woman! He’s immediately smitten with her, and he decides to ride out to the cabin every night and essentially stalk her.

One night he sees Buck Fanning enter the cabin and try to rape Mary; Wolf breaks in and rescues her but in the process he’s shot in the chest and Mary has to nurse him back to health while he recovers from the wound. (Though afflicted with some quick cuts I’m sure were introduced by others whose hands the negative passed through after Triangle went out of business, the rape scene is still quite powerful, shot in a semi-dark chiaroscuro effect that anticipates film noir not only decades before noir became a “thing” but two years before the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German movie that established that kind of chiaroscuro effect as “German lighting.”) Proximity works its magic on Wolf and he proposes marriage to Mary, who accepts only because she thinks Owen, her previous boyfriend, is dead. When he turns up alive in the community and Buck Fanning gives him a job, Mary lies to Wolf and says he’s her half-brother. Only she starts having guilt feelings about marrying Wolf when she’s still in love with Owen. On the day Wolf and Mary are scheduled to get married, Wolf catches Mary and Owen in a decidedly non-sibling appropriate embrace. He catches on and, in a sequence that surprisingly anticipates the ending of Casablanca a quarter-century early, announces that the wedding will go ahead as planned but with Owen instead of himself as the groom. Wolf makes out a piece of paper which at first I thought would be a deed to the part of his property Mary had staked out, but it turns out it’s a deed to the entire ranch. Wolf gives this to Owen and Mary as a wedding present and announces that he’s off to Alaska to join the latest gold rush (which would date the setting of this movie as the late 1890’s or early 1900’s).

Flash-forward a year later (in the part of the movie that got deleted along the way and had to be reconstructed from a technically inferior print) and Owen and Mary have had their first child, a son they’ve named Tom in honor of Wolf’s real name. They get a letter from Wolf saying he’s struck gold in Alaska and is making more money than he knows what to do with, but then Hart cuts to Wolf’s real existence: alone and dirt-poor in a wilderness cabin surrounded by bears. (One wonders who Hart’s “bear wrangler” was.) Wolf Lowry is an amazing movie, especially for its time, and stunningly well-acted. Hart’s own close-ups strikingly anticipate Gary Cooper (indeed I found myself wishing there’d been a mid-1930’s remake with Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck), and though there’s a scene with Owen in which Margery Wilson sails over-the-top and indulges in the kind of arms-waving overacting most people who’ve never seen a silent film start-to-finish before think they were all acted like, for the most part she’s amazingly subtle and can communicate volumes with just tiny changes in posture or facial expression. (One wonders why she didn’t have more of a career; aside from an experimental TV movie in 1939 she didn’t work again in films after The Offenders, a contemporary crime movie, in 1924 even though she lived until 1986.)