William S. Hart

Several Indian actors found interesting and rewarding employment in the early Western, but no Indian ever became a star. Broncho Billy's successor was not William Eagleshirt (prominent among the Inceville Sioux) but another Ince employee, William S. Hart. Though born in New York, Hart was brought up in the Midwest at a time when it was still frontier country, and his entry into pictures was directly motivated by a desire to make Westerns which were more realistic than the ones he saw on the screen.

?Hart had achieved moderate success as a stage actor. In 1913 he renewed his acquaintance with Thomas Ince, his room-mate when they had toured together in a play. Ince put Hart to work making a couple of features and a succession of two-reelers in the first year or so. The pictures were highly successful, though Ince managed to keep this from Hart for a time, paying him only $ 125 a week for both acting and directing. When Ince moved to Triangle he took Hart with him and then to Famous Players-Lasky in 1917, where at $150,000 per picture Hart was at last paid in proportion to the sums his pictures earned. (For the equivalent sum in the 1980s we should multiply by at least ten.)

Hart's screen persona has something in common with Broncho Billy. Though he sometimes appears as a prospector or Mountie, he is usually in the costume of a cowboy. Frequently, as in one of his best known films, Hell's Hinges (1916), he is the Good Badman, still essentially a cowboy figure, one who has strayed outside the law and who may be reformed by the love of a woman he fears is too good for him. Like Broncho Billy he is ill at ease with women, though in place of Billy's comic bashfulness Hart displays a painfully rigid aloofness. But if Hart owed something to what had gone before, he greatly deepened and enriched the genre. To his roles he brought a moral intensity which, even viewed some seventy years later, retains much of its power. Hart was unsurpassed at communicating, merely through the expression on his face, implacable hatred of wrongdoers or unshakeable resolve to pursue vengeance. Perhaps among Westerners only Randolph Scott was ever to rival Hart in the ability to suggest a soul ennobled by suffering. Hart also brought to the Western an emphasis, since commonplace, on the hero as loner. He rarely has partners or family. At the same time he introduced the subject that has since become so frequent as to constitute for some the heart of the genre: the frontier town torn between lawlessness and the desire of the decent folk to build a community. However stiff with Victorian melodrama they appear now, Hart's Westerns are always about something. And there is a certain honest austerity in the visual style. Though Hart's world as a whole is no less than any other an artistic construction of a certain idea of the West, his frontier towns, evoked in all their drabness and lack of refinement, compare realistically with photographs of actual Western streets.