Screenwriter Frances Marion's silent adaptation of a Bret Harte story vigorously evokes life among mountaineers, but director Marshall Neilan's lets the cast run wild and the result si too much emphasis on folksy comedy.
Rambunctious adolescent M’liss (Mary Pickford) lives in Red Gulch, perched in the High Sierras, with her aging and indulgent pa, Bummer Smith (Theodore Roberts). Fortunately, stage-coach driver Yuba Bill (Charles Ogle) and Sheriff Sandy Waddles (William Brown) keep an eye on M’liss and serve as occasional playmates. When handsome Charles Gray (Thomas Meighan) arrives armed with teaching credentials, most of the townspeople welcome him. But barefoot lass M’liss doesn’t fancy the refinements book learning entails. Given that the schoolmaster is awfully easy on the eyes, however, M’liss eventually applies herself to her studies. While Bummer and M’liss live in contented poverty, Bummer’s wealthy brother, Jonathan, is dying in San Francisco. His caregiver, Carla Peterson (Winifred Greene), and her brother, Jim Peterson (Val Paul), are horrified when they learn how little Jonathan has left them, and decide to steal the share earmarked for Bummer. First they hire a local assassin to murder him, then Clara goes to Red Gulch and declares herself Bummer’s long-lost wife. For his part, Jim sets about sowing suspicion as to Mr. Gray's intentions by pointing out that he often tutored M’liss at the Smiths’ cabin. After Gray is railroaded for Bummer’s
slaying, Yuba Bill conducts his own investigation – can he stop the stirred-up community from playing into the hands of the Petersons and lynching an innocent man?
This quaint bucolic melodrama -- a three-ring circus of comedy, romance and mayhem -- could be seen as an unofficial warm-up for Pickford’s superior rural vehicle, HEART O’ THE HILLS (1919). The most memorable thing about it is that cinematographer Walter Stradling appears to have been equally in love with the High Sierras and Pickford – both look glorious. leave a comment --Robert Pardi