When Reverend Robert Henley and his sister Faith arrive in the town of Hell’s Hinges, saloon owner Silk Miller and his cohorts sense danger to their evil ways. They hire gunman Blaze Tracy to run the minister out of town. But Blaze finds something in Faith Henley that turns him around, and soon Silk Miller and his compadres have Blaze to deal with.
Directors: Charles Swickard, William S. Hart (uncredited) & Clifford Smith (uncredited).
Stars: William S. Hart, Clara Williams, Jack Standing, Alfred Hollingsworth, Robert McKim, J. Frank Burke, Louise Glaum.
An early western with Hart at the top of his form. It is more a morality tale than a traditional western . It uses the west as a backdrop for the confrontation between good and evil. Hart though redeemed by his love for a pious girl is unrelenting in his revenge on a lawless town that becomes Sodom in flames at the fiery conclusion of the film. Well worth watching (Jean Hersholt and John Gilbert were extras in the film. I couldn’t spot either of them.)
many thanks for this film .Jon
HELL’S HINGES is probably the first great American western & heralds in the traditional anti-hero redeemed by piety, faith, kindness & a beautiful innocent young woman. Some of it still plays so well & the ending confrontation and climatic visions of a burning hell on the plans are remarkable by any standard. The acting style is, of course, dated & stilted & outdated even in its own time since most of these performers came from the stage but the image of Bill Hart with is two guns standaing in the flames is truly icon. Thanks for offering this Jon.
Captivating and genuinely impressive. I’ve watched this film twice now since learning about it early in the year, and I absolutely adore it. There are certainly some breathtaking sequences–the burning of the town of course, but also smaller moments, like Blaze and his horse tumbling over each other down the cliffside–but what is most impressive about this film to me is just how cleanly and skillfully it tells its story, setting up the characters and the thrust of the plot with fresh immediacy, then rattling along at a rhythmic and sprightly pace from beginning to end, never once letting a sequence outstay its welcome. I don’t know whose behind-the-camera influence this is thanks to; I’m rather surprised that a film with three directors feels so cohesive in vision and singular in execution. The whole thing comes across as supremely confident in itself, and deservedly so.
The extremely handsome William S. Hart carries the movie with his performance, ranging from sardonicism to earnestness to fury. Almost all the other actors are excellent as well, though surprisingly I don’t actually care for Clara Williams as Faith here, despite her being the secondmost-important actor credited. I find her performance to be somewhat charmless and so lacking in nuance as to almost be caricaturesque, but Hart’s well-acted captivation with Williams’s Faith and the sincerity with which he pulls off Blaze’s conversion and subsequent innocent religious honesty make up for the shortcomings in actual chemistry between the actors.
I’m far enough along in my own religious journey to have gained enough horrific firsthand experience of what a force for evil Christianity is in the world that I cannot overlook the naïveté of the movie’s depiction of Christianity as an unproblematic, uncomplicated, unquestioned Good. Silent cinema’s lack of dialogue tends to cause the stories told in the medium to be nigh-operatic in the way they paint with broad, emotional strokes, so it’s not exactly unexpected that Hell’s Hinges would be so simplistically black-and-white (so to speak) in its understanding of religion and morality, but there are examples of silent films which manage to have more complexity in their melodrama: Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, for example, or Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book, both of which manage to make much more honest and interesting statements about dissolution and moral character while still painting with the broad brush of silent cinema (to say nothing of how Dreyer manages to do so from within a yet more explicitly Christian framing than Hell’s Hinges has). I will say, admittedly, that the film does make gestures toward Christian hypocrisy, but it does so by framing such behavior as the moral failings of individuals rather than as indicative of flaws within the foundation of the religion itself or its Scriptures. Despite all of this, however, Hell’s Hinges is written, staged, and filmed with such skill that even I am genuinely touched by Blaze’s conversion and his earnest seeking of the way of Christ. His shift in motivation and allegience combined with his difficulty in abandoning a life of violence is a common enough theme in Christian works–Lloyd C. Douglas’s novel The Robe comes to mind–but it feels neither stale nor trite here, coming across instead as tragic and terrifying, at least to me. Again, Hart’s performance does a great deal of heavy lifting.
This version on rarefilmm seems to be sourced from the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Treasures from American Film Archives DVD set (from 2000) or its Encore Edition (from 2005), both out of print. You can see most of the films from this set, including Hell’s Hinges, as well as many other films preserved by the NFPF on their website (https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/treasures-from-american-film-archives-online-edition). The piano score for this restored version of Hell’s Hinges was written and performed by Martin Marks, and it provides an excellent backbone to the film, incorporating a variety of tunes, including some well-chosen and powerfully performed sections from hymns.
A commenter above states that Jean Hersholt and John Gilbert are extras in the film but that he wasn’t able to identify them. I’m afraid I can’t help with Jean Hersholt, but John Gilbert is on camera-left, holding up the right side of the drunken preacher, at 45:12. Once you spot him there, he’s remarkably easy to pick out through the rest of the film, either always or almost always wearing a wine-dark shirt with a bright (perhaps white or yellow) bandana and showing a consistently delighted look on his face. Despite his pencil moustache, he’s only sixteen in this role, according to the NFPF.
The film being from 1916, its story and characters have long been in the public domain by now. I would really love to rewrite it as a novel one day, though I have other projects I’d like to get through first.
Thank you, Jon, for posting this film and increasing its reach.