Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart Productions, United Artists, 1925; reissued with sound by Astor Pictures, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 1925 Tumbleweeds, which Turner Classic Movies showed right after the 1912 The Invaders on Sunday, January 25, was something else again. Made when silent-era filmmaking had reached its artistic peak, Tumbleweeds was a technically assured movie in which all the techniques of cinema as they had matured were brought to bear on a story of the real-life Oklahoma land rush. The U.S. had originally set aside what is now the state of Oklahoma as “Indian Territory,” only as the 19th century went on they cut various portions of it off and made them available to whites. At first, at least according to C. Gardner Sullivan’s script for this film, the U.S. government had allowed the Native tribes in what was called the “Cherokee Strip” (though most of the Native inhabitants were Creeks and Seminoles) to lease their land to white cattle ranchers, but prior to the 1889 land rush Congress and President Benjamin Harrison ordered all the cattle ranchers to move their herds off the land so it could be taken over by homesteaders and converted into farms. Tumbleweeds is about the Box K Ranch (named after the brand it put on its cattle to distinguish them from other ranchers’ herds) and the drifter who worked there, Don Carver (William S. Hart), who proudly proclaimed himself and the other cowboys (in the most literal sense; a “cowboy” was a man who helped drive cattle herds, and they still exist, only today instead of riding horses they drive trucks or SUV’s) “tumbleweeds.” That meant that instead of settling down in one place, they drifted from one frontier community to another. In the version we were watching, a sound reissue from 1939 to which the long-retired Hart added a talking prologue and Arthur Gutman contributed a musical score (a rather hackneyed one drawing on well-known songs, including “Home on the Range” heard whenever one of the characters thought about settling down and building a home of their own), two songs about these nomadic cowboys were actually sung on the soundtrack.

Carver and his comic-relief sidekick, Joe Hinman (James Gordon), are playing around in the local saloon in Caldwell, Oklahoma, from which the Land Rush is supposed to start on April 22, 1889. As a joke, Carver attempts to lasso Hinman but actually catches Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) in what is got to be one of the oddest “meet-cutes” in Hollywood history. Earlier Carver has shown his sense of justice when he protected a boy and his dog from being beaten by an obnoxious town bully who turns out to be both Molly’s and the boy’s half-brother, Noll Lassiter (J. Gordon Russell). Carver literally waterboards Noll to force him to apologize to both the boy, Bart Lassiter (Jack Murphy), and the dog. Noll is in cahoots with Bill Freel a.k.a. Bryson (Richard Neill) to appropriate the Box K ranch in the Land Rush and keep Carver from getting it. Carver in turn wants to grab the Box K and settle there with Molly because he’s getting tired of being a tumbleweed and wants a place to settle down. Noll Lassiter and Freel trick Carver into going back to the Box K the night before the Land Rush, allegedly to fetch some stray cattle that had been left behind there. Once he crosses into the Strip, Noll and Freel have the U.S. Army arrest him as a “Sooner” (actually a major part of Oklahoma’s mythology; it meant someone who jumped the gun – literally; the Land Rush was signaled by a cannon shot – and grabbed a choice piece of land by cheating; the state motto of Oklahoma became and remains “The Sooner State”) and hold him in a stockade until the Rush is over. But Carver manages to escape and, in a beautifully staged suspense sequence, he rides across the range in time to claim the Box K land for himself and Molly to live on and farm. There’s a bit of a disagreement between Carver and Molly and it briefly looks like he’s going to hit the range and become a tumbleweed again, but ultimately Carver and Molly pair up, as do Hinman and a widow with kids he’s met in Caldwell, and an elderly couple also looking for a homestead (George F. Marion – the actor whose terrible fake Swedish accent helped weaken Greta Garbo’s 1930 talkie debut, Anna Christie – it would have sounded bad enough on its own but was especially disgusting by comparison with Garbo’s real one – and Gertrude Claire) who provide the film a bit of much-needed pathos.

William S. Hart (1864-1946) had been a “tumbleweed” himself, a Western drifter who’d seen much of the lifestyle his films were depicting before he went into acting. As film historian Richard Kozarski put it, “Demanding realism in his [film] settings, Hart knew that it was not merely his physical presence, but the entire design of his films that audiences recognized. They knew a Bill Hart film from a Broncho Billy through the integration of landscape and action, the characteristic dilemmas of the protagonists, and the gritty realism of the studio interiors. Hart was obsessed with all these details, and made sure they dominated the screen 100 per cent of the time.” Unfortunately, by 1925 Hart was 50 years old and was starting to look decidedly careworn on screen. He was also facing competition from younger Western stars like Tom Mix and Buck Jones who weren’t so obsessively concerned with realism, but were giving the Western audience what it wanted: unambiguous good-guy heroes and bad-guy villains in plots that were easy to follow and didn’t present either their characters or their audiences with moral dilemmas. So Hart decided to hang it up after Tumbleweeds, though he thought enough of this film to reissue it as a sound film 14 years later and shoot a speaking prologue for it. Judging from the prologue, it’s probably just as well Hart never attempted a talkie; his voice recorded well but he veered back and forth between natural speech and oratorical boominess, and even seemed to be crying at the end over the passing of both the West itself and his career.

It was ironic that one of the things Hart said he missed about filmmaking was the cry of a director telling him after a shot that it had gone well, when Hart mostly directed or co-directed his own films. Tumbleweeds was co-directed by Hart and King Baggott, and produced by Hart through his own company, though for the sound version (actually surprisingly well synchronized and edited by James C. Bradford) he licensed the film to a cheap-jack studio called Astor Pictures. It still holds up surprisingly well, with Hart delivering an understated performance that reminded me of Gary Cooper (so much so that I was mentally adding Cooper’s voice during the film instead of Hart’s own as we’d heard it in the prologue) and the other actors also reasonably capable. It doesn’t help that John Ford would stage an even more exciting land rush on screen in his woefully ignored masterpiece Three Bad Men just the next year, or that the Oklahoma Land Rush would appear on screen again in films like Wesley Ruggles’s Cimarron (1931) and Lloyd Bacon’s The Oklahoma Kid (1939), the latter of which film historian and programmer Tom Luddy called “a gangster movie in Western drag” since it was made at Warner Bros. and James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were the leads.