Cruze, James (1884-1942)  

Director. Cruze made only five Westerns, two of them marginal to the genre, but the first of them was the classic pioneer movie, The Covered Wagon. The sweep and vigour of this film, the realism and urgency of the fording of the river and the buffalo hunt, the superb use of landscape, combine to make it perhaps the first great Western. The Pony Express was a worthy successor. If Cruze's version of Ruggles of Red Gap survives, we may one day-see Edward Everett Horton in the Laughton role, but unhappily several of Cruze's major silents are lost.