Sky High (Fox Film Corporation, 1922)

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

My husband Charles and I watched the welcome return of Jacqueline Stewart’s weekly program on Turner Classic Movies, “Silent Sunday Showcase,” last night (Sunday, May 7), featuring two films starring Western action hero Tom Mix. Tom Mix is one of those legendary Hollywood names a lot of people have heard of but far fewer have actually seen. Though his name cropped up in some unlikely locations – including Dinah Washington’s R&B novelty “TV Is the Thing (This Year),” about a woman who seduces her TV repairman, in which she says, “Last night I was watching old Tom Mix/My TV broke, boy I was in a fix” (highly unlikely since most of Mix’s films were silent and early TV almost never showed silent films) – almost none of Mix’s actual output has remained in circulation, partly because many of her Fox Company films were destroyed in one or more fires on the studio lot. Tom Mix was born Thomas Hezikiah Mix on January 6, 1880 and enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War, though he later deserted (a secret he guarded all his life because it wouldn’t have accorded well with his heroic good-guy image). He appeared in several Wild West shows during the nineteen-aughts and got into movies when one show he was working for, Will B. Dickey’s, was contracted to supply horses and other necessities for Western movies made by Selig. Mix started making Western shorts for Selig until William Fox hired him away and gave him features. Mix did all, or mostly all, his own stunts (like such other movie luminaries as Buster Keaton and, generations later, Jackie Chan), and when he wasn’t making movies he liked fast cars and fast planes.

The first of the two Tom Mix movies TCM showed on their “Silent Sunday Showcase” was Sky High (1922), a basic modern-day Western story in which Mix plays Grant Newbury, Federal immigration agent in the wilds of Arizona looking for a gang of coyotes smuggling in, not Mexicans, but Chinese. The scene abruptly cuts to Chicago, where a young woman named Estelle Halloway (Eva Novak) is graduating from “seminary” (Charles was momentarily perplexed by that, wondering if a woman in a 1922 movie was really training for the priesthood until he remembered that “seminary” had other meanings then) and preparing to go out West to Arizona to visit her guardian, Jim Frazer (J. Farrell MacDonald). She calls him “Guardy,” which seemed almost as terrible a nickname as “Gastro” (which I’ve heard in a number of commercials advertising prescription stomach medication – the announcer tells viewers to “ask your gastro,” short for “gastroenterologist,” but “Gastro” sounds to me like a minor villain in the Marvel universe), and while exploring the wilds of Arizona she’s hit on by her guide, Victor Castle (William Buckley, a name Charles couldn’t resist joking about), until she stalks off after saying, “You’re no gentleman!” Meanwhile, Grant Newbury has taken a job as a bartender and bouncer at a club in Calexico owned by Jim Frazer.

He’s really done this as part of an undercover plot to trap and bust the human traffickers; he will get involved in a barroom brawl started by someone else (and the man who starts it is played by Art Mix – no relation – who’d cross paths with Tom later; an enterprising “B” Western producer signed Art Mix to star in a 1934 film called The Rawhide Terror and billed the lesser Mix with “Art” in really tiny letters and “MIX” in very big ones, as if a future Western producer had billed “Tom WAYNE” or “Dave EASTWOOD”). Though the man isn’t really dead, Grant’s plan is to have him play possum so Frazer will think Grant has a murder charge hanging over him and can be blackmailed to join the trafficking gang. By far the most interesting aspect of this movie is where the smugglers (in jewels and laces as well as human beings) are hiding out: the Grand Canyon. In the opening credits Fox made a big to-do about how the film was actually shot in the Grand Canyon and included the first film of it taken from above via an airplane. The cinematography by Benjamin H. Kline (who had a long career in Hollywood and is probably best known for his work on Edgar G. Ulmer’s low-budget film noir, Detour, from 1946) is really excellent and does full justice to the spectacular Grand Canyon scenery. Grant and Estelle meet when she loses her footing on one of the canyon’s ledges and comes close to falling into the Colorado River hundreds of feet below while Grant has sneaked out of the baddies’ camp to warn his bosses in the Federal immigration service about what’s going on. (As I joked to Charles, we’ve seen worse meet-cutes than that.)

It’s pretty obvious that the stars really were on location in the Grand Canyon and, though it’s not certain, I suspect Mix personally flew the plane in the climactic sequence in which he monitors the situation from above and aids in the capture of the traffickers, then descends into the Colorado on a rope ladder to join the chase personally. Made when its star was 42 years old but still looked boyishly handsome enough to play the goody-good hero, Sky High is an estimable piece of work, highlighted by the Grand Canyon scenery and the insouciance of a lot of “B” Westerns – particularly over when they take place: this one is obviously from its 1922 present but it’s really, like a lot of other cheap Westerns, set in a never-never world in which horses, cars and planes are equally important modes of transportation. It also has a surprisingly moving ending for which writer-director Lynn Reynolds (a highly capable filmmaker who suffered one of the weirdest deaths in Hollywood history: in 1927 he was hosting a welcome-home party for his wife when they had an argument and he suddenly took out a gun and shot himself dead in full view of his guests) came up with a surprising resolution for the question we’ve been asking ourselves all movie: how is Estelle going to respond to the news that her beloved guardian is the head of a human trafficking gang and her boyfriend is a federal agent sent to bust him? Reynolds’ solution was to have Frazer take a tearful leave of his ward, telling her he’s going off on a long business trip while he’s actually on his way to prison: an ending later used in both the 1925 silent and 1929 early-talkie versions of the Lon Chaney, Sr. vehicle The Unholy Three.