User Reviews

Sergeant Darwin Karr stops Captain James Sterling from laying violent, lustful hands on Vinnie Burns. Sterling is drummed out of the army -- can't have anyone, even officers, doing that to the commanding officer's daughter. Sterling gets himself a few henchmen and works out a plan to get Miss Burns to marry him: by threatening to hang Karr if she won't.

It's a very violent western from Alice Guy's Solax studio. Most of the studios turned out westerns; Vitagraph had a unit shooting nothing but, and Essanay was built on the popular "Broncho Billy" series. Madame Guy, however, preferred something a little less pulp-fictionish, even if it wound up being, like the French westerns of the era, a Western-Camembert.

I've seen a few--probably more than most have--of Alice Guy-Blaché's Westerns now, of which the world's first female filmmaker and French émigré appears to have made a good many for her Solax studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey--despite all of that seeming to consist of at least one or two contradictions or surprises. I recall that Georges Méliès's less-famous and also French brother, Gaston, is reputed to have made some Westerns, too, around the same time and place, so I suppose it was somewhat de rigueur, if you'll excuse my French, for immigrant filmmakers to the pre-Hollywood capital of filmmaking on that side of the Atlantic to adopt that most quintessential of American genres during the transitional period of film history. Richard Abel, for one, has written books on Pathé's likewise attempts to gain a foothold in the American market. Regardless, the Guy Westerns I've seen include: "Across the Mexican Line," "Greater Love Hath No Name" (both 1911), "Parson Sue," "Frozen on Love's Trail," "Algie the Miner," "The Little Rangers" and this, "Broken Oaths" (all 1912).

Honestly, only "Algie the Miner" stands out to me as among Guy's best and most interesting work, as it tackles gender roles and sexuality in the West, although some of the others are noteworthy, too, for featuring women in action and stunt-related roles that would be more typically occupied by men in future Hollywood Westerns. "Broken Oaths" is more expected of that later pattern, where we basically have a love triangle of a goodie and baddie fighting for control of the damsel-in-distress.

Technically, the picture doesn't stand out for the most part, either, and it seems as though Guy's locations were limited, as the scenery here may seem similar, as well as not used as effectively, as in "Two Little Rangers," which also involves the baddie being chased until he falls off a cliff. It seems odd, too, that the bad guy is wearing the white shirt in this one, as Hollywood has so programmed me to think of white and black outfits as codes for good and bad characters. Anyways, some of the editing here is awkward, including a title card concealing what would otherwise be a jump cut between the baddie's arrest and dishonorable discharge, and the final chase and cavalry rescue isn't cut together particularly well, either. There's one remarkable exception to all this, though, where we see the goodie about to be lynched as through POV shots masked as if we were looking through the binoculars with her. It's some decent cutting based on eyeline matches and POV shots for a 1912 one-reeler.

Otherwise, the only interesting things I noticed here involve a scene where a tied-up character fires a gun with his mouth, and a henchmen wears one of the most ridiculous-looking hats I've seen in a movie--at least since I saw Dorothy Gish intentionally wearing silly-sized headwear in "Nell Gwyn" (1926). Surely unintended, that hat makes this film potentially more amusing than thrilling.