Wild Horse (1931)

You can’t watch this film with Hoot Gibson (1892-1962) and not have mixed feelings. It is a window into the past that shows a lot more than you really care to see.

Born in Nebraska in 1892, Gibson reportedly left home at the age of 13 to join the circus. By 16, he had worked as a cowboy and as a performer in Wild West rodeo shows. In his early twenties, he began in movies as a stuntman and double. After returning from service in WWI, he had a career as a film star that ranked him for a while among the likes of Tom Mix.

In 1931, when Wild Horse was made, he was pushing 40 and a new army of younger talent was taking over the western – such as singing cowboy Gene Autry. With his own ranch and his own movie pals, Hoot kept on making movies, though he never really survived the transition to talkies.

Appearing along with Hoot in this film is the far more authentic cowboy-actor Skeeter Bill Robbins. More cowboy than actor, Robbins was the manager of Gibson’s ranch in Saugus, California. A head taller than Gibson and skinny as a pipe cleaner, Robbins looks even thinner next to the well-fed Gibson.

Poster for King of the Rodeo (1929)

The plot. Wild Horse is set at a ranch rodeo, with Hoot as a bronc rider. The wild horse of the title is a magnificent stallion called Devil worth $1000 to anyone who captures him. Gibson and Skeeter Bill do the capturing, but a jealous competitor, Gil Davis, steals the horse after killing Skeeter, and wins the money.

A bank robber figures into the story as witness to the murder. But when the sheriff arrives the evidence points, unfortunately, to Hoot, and he gets arrested for the death of his partner. “The best pal I ever had,” he says.

Out of jail again, he is trampled by the now-captured wild horse and hospitalized. After recovering, he successfully rides the horse before a cheering crowd. Then he captures the killer, who makes a confession when he is confronted with the truth by the robber, who has now been captured, too.

First westerns: Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford

Let's wrap up the survey of the earliest western filmmakers with a look at two directors - Cecil B. DeMille and the young John Ford - and the cowboy actors who starred in their pictures: Dustin Farnum, Harry Carey, and Hoot Gibson.

Cecil B. DeMille

Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille. These two partners made the first feature-length western, The Squaw Man (1914), based on the Broadway play of the same name. It was their first picture, and they shot it working out of a barn on Vine Street in Hollywood.

It starred New York actor Dustin Farnum, who had gained fame in the lead role of another Broadway play, adapted from Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Here is a clip that comes about 20 minutes into The Squaw Man. Farnum is Bill Carston, an upper-class Englishman believed wrongly to have stolen money from a fund for orphans.

He comes to America and eventually finds his way out West, where he buys a ranch. In the opening scene below, he stops a pickpocket from robbing a man in an upscale New York café. Together the two new friends leave town, and we are quickly in the land of cowboys, cattle, saloons, and Indians.

The success of this film was quickly followed by Lasky and DeMille's filming of The Virginian (1914), with Dustin Farnum again in the lead role. The film version follows the stage version of the play, which eliminates the novel’s narrator and focuses on the key scenes. It opens on a card game in the saloon where the Virginian says to Trampas, “Smile when you call me that.”