User Reviews

Charles West is a writer in the Southwest. He is looking for color for his writings, so he stops at "The Red Dog Hotel", wins obscenely large sums of money at faro, and proceeds to escape having his throat cut by happenstance and the good will of poor Mexican girl Mary Pickford, whom he smiled at.

It's a ridiculous story. West deserves to be found dead in his room in the morning with his possessions missing. However, that's not the point of looking at this Biograph short, which is available in a beautifully preserved sepia tint on Youtube. It's beautifully shot, too, and shot on location, probably during one of the yearly trips Griffith and company took out west each winter.

A very tense and dramatic picture of the old Southwest. It gives a wild night's adventure of an American in and near a Mexican inn. Two men sat behind the reviewer. They seem to have knocked around a good deal. All through the reel, they kept making intelligent comments on it to each other. Their last remark was, "That's some picture." It is indeed full of good things, humor and humanity, and "some picture." The difference between romance and realism is that one is what the human heart wants and the other is what it gets it is only a rank pessimist who will say that, in real life, they never mix. This picture is a most remarkable mixture of both. 'The realism comes from the lively care not only in the development of the plot; but in the smallest matters too. The action reveals, for instance, little unexpected flashes of character. Plainly, it was made by a man who sees life with his eyes open, and is a picture to please thoroughly every kind of audience, a Saturday night feature. The camera work is excellent. - The Moving Picture World, May 25, 1912