While Douglas Fairbanks is famous for his fantasy and adventure films (such as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, ROBIN HOOD and THE MARK OF ZORRO), he also made a variety of other films...including some westerns early in his film career. TCM showed two of them tonight, THE GOOD BAD MAN and THE HALF-BREED. Both are about equally enjoyable and both have nice location shoots. When the film begins, a guy named 'Passin' Through' (Fairbanks) is introduced. He's a bit of a petty criminal who helps the poor and downtrodden...but is also more like an 11 year-old who is a criminal. He causes little serious harm but is more a traveling jerk. However, his jerky ways and traveling come to an end by the finale of this film. Why? Because he learns the truth about his absent father...and how a REALLY bad man named Frazer (also known as 'The Wolf') is responsible for his murder...and Passin' is determined to punish him...as well as marry the sweet girl (Bessie Love).This is a very exciting film for 1915. Sure, later westerns were a bit more sophisticated...but not much. The story is very well done for the time and Fairbanks and the rest quite engaging. By the way, the quote in the summary is the way Passin's girlfriend refers to him. My how times have changed.

Turner Classics debuted this film about a week ago as I write this, showing the 1923 re-issue of the original 1916 film. It was an early starring vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks as well as Bessie Love who was his romantic interest in the story. The difference in their ages is palpable as Fairbanks was thirty three at the time and Love was still a teenager of eighteen.Fairbanks' character in this early Western goes by the name of 'Passin' Through', likely in recognition of not staying in one place very long due to his outlaw nature. However that outlaw nature arises from a Robin Hood like quality of robbing for food and minor baubles that he presents to widows and children less fortunate than himself. Fairbanks actually wrote the story with a bit of an autobiographical slant, as his own father left the family when Doug was only five years old. When Passin' Through eventually hooks up with lawman Bob Evans (Pomeroy Cannon) who knows a bit of his mother's history, he becomes fixated on finding the man who killed his father and made him an orphan, due to the mother's inability to cope with her loss.The movie offers generally competent performances from the principal players, but what compelled me more was the location photography. With the restored 1923 print we get some impressive desert scenery with riders on horseback threading their way through brush filled landscape that's quite competently filmed. There are also a couple of scenes of Maverick City that resemble, how can I best describe it, an era picture postcard. Within this milieu, the story plays out pretty much as a standard Western most fans are used to, with the good guy posse chasing down the outlaw bunch, and Passin' Through's nemesis The Wolf (Sam De Grasse) gunned down by Marshal Evans and the film's hero.For me it's always a treat to experience something new, in this case an early silent film with Fairbanks in the lead role. This would have been only the second time I've seen him; for a much more athletic performance I'd have to recommend his 1926 picture "The Black Pirate". In quickly looking up Bessie Love's career stats on IMDb I was genuinely surprised to learn that her film career lasted right up until 1983, a span of almost seventy years! It's bits of trivia like that, that make being a film fan so rewarding.

This newly restored Douglas Fairbanks feature has been screened at two festivals this year, the San Francisco Silent Film festival and 'Mostly Lost 3' in Culpeper, Virginia. I saw it on the latter occasion, and it's a pleasure to report that this is a terrific movie, and a significant addition to the Fairbanks canon. Originally produced for the Fine Arts Corporation, and released by Triangle in the spring of 1916, The Good Bad Man marked a venture into unusual territory for the star at this juncture in his career, when his vehicles tended to be breezy comedies with modern settings. Although there are some comic moments, The Good Bad Man is a straightforward Western with a serious theme, closer in tone to a William S. Hart production than it is to a typical Fairbanks romp of the mid-1910s, such as His Picture in the Papers or The Matrimaniac. The star wrote the screenplay himself, and gives an unusually impassioned performance, which suggests that this project was close to his heart.Doug plays a good natured drifter who calls himself "Passin' Through." He's an outlaw but not a bad guy, for he never hurts anyone when he commits his robberies, nor does he take anything of great monetary value, such as jewelry. He collects trinkets for himself, just whimsical souvenirs really, but makes a point of taking food and other goods for children who truly need assistance. Passin' Through has a special interest in helping orphans and fatherless boys, and we learn that he struggles with what we call "father issues" nowadays. It seems that his father died before he got a chance to know him, and he harbors doubts that his parents were legally married when he was born. (In reality Fairbanks's father was a drunkard who abandoned his family when Doug was a small boy; the star's real-life father issues may account for his choice of material here, as well as the notable intensity of his performance.) As the story begins, Passin' Through arrives in a frontier town and almost immediately butts heads with the local crime boss, a mean-spirited crook known as The Wolf. He gets himself into trouble and is arrested, but with the help of a kindly lawman our hero learns the truth about his parents, and the role The Wolf played in his father's death, and eventually gains an advantage over the villain and avenges himself.That's the gist of the plot, but what makes this film special isn't the story so much as the performances, as well as the visual aspects of the production. Doug has a nice rapport with leading lady Bessie Love, who was still a teenager when she appeared in this film, and cute as a bug. Their first scene together concludes with a memorable detail: as Passin' Through takes his leave of his new love interest, he suddenly produces a train conductor's ticket-punch, and pops a little hole in a ribbon that's part of her outfit. It's as if he's claimed her, or marked her as "his." She's startled for a moment, but appears to have no objections. In addition to the charming scenes between Doug and Bessie, what's most striking about this film are the beautifully scenic desert locations, and the climactic shots of riders—an impressive number of them—on horseback, galloping across the landscape. Director Allan Dwan, who worked with Fairbanks several times, handles the action scenes deftly, while cameraman Victor Fleming (who, of course, went on to become an estimable director in his own right) makes a major contribution: the cinematography is beautiful.We're lucky the film looks so good. In fact, we're lucky we can see it at all, when we consider how many silent movies are lost. For decades The Good Bad Man was believed to be among the missing, but in recent years a 35mm print was located at the Cinémathèque Française, and this is the one that's been restored and shown at the aforementioned festivals. At 'Mostly Lost' the screening was introduced by Rob Byrne of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, who showed us examples of footage before and after the restoration. He also explained that what survives is not the original 1916 release, but rather a reissue from 1923, which was re-edited and reworked in minor ways. (For instance, Bessie Love's character Amy was renamed Sarah May.) In any case, it's a pleasure to see a "new" Douglas Fairbanks production from this early, crucial period of his career. The Good Bad Man is a real treat for silent film buffs, and here's hoping it is screened widely and often in the years to come.

The loss of this film is a particularly tragic one for those who follow the early film career of Douglas Fairbanks Sr, along with those who study the growing art of silent cinema. This was the popular actors sixth film in which he starred in as well as wrote. The Good Bad Man was a western spoof directed by the notable Allan Dwan and photographed by Victor Fleming. A full synopsis of this film is hard to track down, but basically the story is about a fellow who was orphaned at birth and grows up to be a Robin-Hood-like bandit, robbing the rich so that he can finance a home for unwanted children. He calls himself "Passin' Through" and he eventually meets Bud Frazer/The Wolf ( Sam De Grasse ) the man who killed his father. Bessie Love has a small part in this her fifth film playing the standard heroine. Silent film enthusiasts can only hope a copy of this early Fairbanks film someday resurfaces.Update: The Good Bad Man was reissued in 1923 after it had been revised and updated. A copy of this film survives and has been restored and shown at several Silent Film Festivals as of May, 2014. This is good news for silent film fans and those keen to see an early Douglas Fairbanks film.