I caught "The Great K & A Train Robbery" with Tom Mix on the Western Channel once in the wee hours of the morning. It was a pretty good print, from the Killiam collection, with a piano score by William Perry. It was the first Tom Mix feature I'd ever seen.
The film knocked me off my feet. It's a mad, delirious juggernaut of a movie -- preposterous, breathtaking and brilliant.
It has the sort of silliness of set-up and incident that one associates with serials. Mix makes his entrance dangling from a rope sling up under a sheer rock overhang a couple hundred feet in the air. He's wearing a Lone Ranger mask -- since he's working undercover as a railroad detective. When the train robbers he's eavesdropping on discover his presence he slides down the rope directly into the saddle of his horse Tony and gallops away.
From that moment on the pace rarely slackens -- it's as though all the action climaxes of a twelve-part serial have been strung together into an hour-long feature, with just enough space in between to tell a very simple story. And what action climaxes they are. Gasp-inducing stunts on horses and moving trains, some of the most exciting and beautiful running inserts in the history of Westerns -- most of it shot in the awesome landscape of Royal Gorge, Colorado and vicinity.
The tone is lighthearted but never campy -- the impeccable photography, the rigor and daring of the stunts, and the frank virility of Mix himself lend it all a kind of muscular gravity. Yet its speed and the virtuosity of its photography and action staging give it a lyrical quality, too -- a lilt that is intoxicating.
We're a long way from the grit and grim morality of William S. Hart's Westerns. The tone is in fact closer to that of a Buster Keaton silent feature, and very nearly as sublime.
There are some disappointing lapses -- a few cheesy-looking moving cycloramas outside the train windows and behind Mix and leading lady Dorothy Dwan as they ride double on Mix's horse . . . some lame ethnic humor involving a black servant . . . an anti-climactic final round-up of the bad guys in a cave with an underwater entrance (!), which is a real let-down visually after the earlier confrontations on the hurtling train.
But Mix and Tony make a lovely screen couple, Dwan is charming and energetic, the intertitles are witty -- and the film is filled with exquisite, unforgettable images.
It's superlative entertainment -- one of the genuine miracles of silent cinema.
[The first two images above are from the Silents Are Golden web site -- one of the great Internet resources for silent film. Check it out!]