Tom Mix

Hart's career was at its zenith around 1920. His decline was swift; after 1921 he made only a further three films. Tutnbleweeds, his last, was completed in 1925. Long before then Hart had been replaced as the number one Western star by a new and totally different kind of hero.

Tom Mix had begun working in pictures when he was employed by the Selig-Polyscope Company to handle the horses for its documentary Ranch Life in the Qreat Southwest, made in 1909. Mix also appeared in the film, and went on over the next eight years to make nearly a hundred one- and two-reelers for Selig. Rut his career really blossomed when in 1917 he moved to Fox. The films he made in the next decade changed the course of the history of the Western.

Mix, like Anderson and Hart before him, based his persona and costume on that of the cowboy - the footloose knight of the plains. His success ensured that henceforth there was no possibility of any other type dominating. Not that the cowboy excluded all others; in the 1920s there were films about mountain men and scouts, soldiers, miners and outlaws; and films about the great Northwest, often based on the novels of Jack London, James Oliver Curwood or Rex Beach, constituted a sub-genre on their own. But it was the cowboy who held centre-stage, until in the 1950s the cowboy proper shaded into the gunfighter. If Tom Mix followed Hart in being a cowboy, his conception of his role could not have been more different. Where Hart had aimed for moral intensity and realism, Mix aspired only to entertainment. His films were a carefully concocted melange of stunts, comedy, fistfights, chases and above all glamour. As the 1920s progressed Tom Mix's costumes became ever more elaborate, leaving behind the last vestiges of the authenticity which Hart had claimed, and taking off into a realm of pure fantasy. Frequently the action took place in a contemporary setting, with Tom on his horse Tony chasing cars and even planes. The world of Tom Mix's West was a never-never land; one film is actually set in Ruritania. The stern Victorian morality of Hart's Westerns was left far behind. In Tom Mix the Jazz Age found its ideal Western star.

Mix's films were undeniably enjoyable. The stunt work, much of it performed by Mix himself, was excellent; fights on top of trains were a speciality. The films were usually made on location, often at spectacular sites such as the Grand Canyon. The hero's personality was engaging but uncomplicated: brave, gallant, resourceful. He rarely actually killed anyone. In The Great K & A Train Robbery Tom swims underwater to enter the cave where the villains are hiding. He surfaces (still wearing his hat!) and finds them plotting. He places his hat over a frog, which swims away and distracts the gang. Catching them off-guard, Tom then engages them, about a dozen in all, in a huge fistfight and captures the lot.

No less fantastic than any of the plots in his films was the biography that Mix constructed for himself over the years. At various times he asserted that he had charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, fought in China and the Philippines, joined up with the Boers to fight the British and campaigned against Diaz in Mexico. None of this was true. Though he had joined the army he never saw active service and eventually deserted. More relevant to his film career was the time he spent with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, the same outfit which was later to be hired by Thomas Ince. Mix's experience with Wild West shows turned him into an excellent rider, with the result that his films relied greatly on feats of horsemanship (which Hart's never had). At the close of his career (his last film, The Miracle Rider, was made in 1935), Mix returned to his beginnings and toured with the Sam B. Dill Circus. Many-other Western stars of the period also had their roots in the world of the circus and Wild West show, where they acquired the traditional skills of the cowboy: riding, roping, shooting. Art Acord, Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Jack Hoxie, Tim McCoy and William Boyd all at some time appeared live in the arena, and some, like Tom Mix and Ken Maynard, moved back and forth between film work and touring. Maynard had in fact appeared with Pawnee Bill's show in 1920; Pawnee Bill had of course previously been in partnership with Buffalo Bill himself, so the continuity between the Western film and its origins was strong. Ultimately this tradition, the commercialization of the cowboy, was to prove far more influential on the film Western than the world of the legitimate theatre as represented by William S. Hart.