Broncho Billy plays a practical joke on an old friend, but it backfires when the man has a heart attack.Broncho Billy plays a practical joke on an old friend, but it backfires when the man has a heart attack.Broncho Billy plays a practical joke on an old friend, but it backfires when the man has a heart attack.
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Featured review
Hi Ho Broncho away!
Gilbert Anderson's right to be considered the "first" film star is a bit debatable. Certainly he was acting from very early on (1903) for Edison, Vitagraph and Selig and directing from early on too (1905) but the first film stars emerged as such at all pretty much the same time - André Deed (Boireau) in France in about 1906, Max Linder, undoubtedly the first superstar, two or three years later, the "Vitagraph" girl Florence Turner, Maurice Costello, John Bunny, John R. Cumpson and the first "Biograph" girls in about 1908-1909, Mary Pickford shortly afterwards, Ford Sterling and Mabel Normand with the launch of Keystone in 1912, Fatty Arbuckle shortly afterwards, Charlie Chaplin in 1914-1915. So Anderson, who only gradually emerged as a star around 1910, was one amongst many.
Three things contributed to creating films stars - one the fact that films were gradually becoming longer, secondly that they were increasingly being "scripted" and thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, the development of the film series, whether loosely based on a particular comedian who developed a particular "character" (as with Linder, Bunny, Arbuckle, Normand and Chaplin) or, less commonly, as a named character in a series. John Cumpson is one of the earliest examples of this, starring as "Jones" in an occasional series of comedies for Griffith at Biograph (although there had been an even earlier "Jones" series directed by James White for Edison way back in 1900).
From about 1908 such series (often associated with serials as they might be both) were becoming more and more popular in France (Nick Carter, Zigomar etc) but, although there were some attempts by Selig and Edison (again!)in 1911-13 (The Adventures of Kathlyn and Who Will Marry Mary?), it was only with the huge international success of Feuillade's Fantômas and of Pathé's The Perils of Pauline in the US itself (both 1914) that the form took off in the United States and, in its feminised US form, made stars of the various successive "serial Queens").
Where then Anderson really stands out is in having created as early as 1911 for Essanay a series with a named character that had no connection with the serial - a series which would run for four years and generate over a hundred films. This is entirely exceptional at the period. It not only made Anderson one of the first cowboy stars (the career of Tom Mix starts around the same time) but established the tropes for a form of western that, although it is not perhaps the one with which most people are today familiar, has always maintained a small but respectable place in the development of the genre.
The Anderson western is not "historical" and is more "wild and woolly", as people said at the time, than "Wild West". There are no Indian wars, no US cavalry; even the outlaws (and Broncho Billy is himself at times one of their number) are rather mundane miscreants, not the dashing anti-heroes of the historico-mythical West. Nor for that matter does it have anything in common with the "epic" western - the cattle drives, the wagon trains, the land rushes, the battle between cattlemen and farmers, Pony Express and Walls Fargo or the building of the railways. Nor, although Essanay was one of the first companies to move there, does it make much use of the scenic potential of California.
At the time of the earliest films, western adventure itself was not historical; it was a current event, even if it was no longer happening in the historical "West" but up in Alaska on the border with Canada. It was the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon of 1896-1899 that really first inspired a cinematic interest in "the West"; tales of trappers and Indians were more often the subject of French films (those made by Pathé's US subsidiary and then by Georges Méliès' brother Gsston). It was only when the bulk of the US film companies had moved to California (where the gold rush had occurred fifty years earlier) that they began steadily to contribute towards "historicising" and mythologising the genre.
So it is this sympathetically rustic modern West that Anderson provides, a rather ordinary little community based largely around mining with a bit of ranching on the side with more or else the same preoccupations as any other kind of remote predominantly male small-town community, the principal preoccupation being naturally to secure a wife. Although the series is not very consistent in detail (Broncho Billy always has the same name but is not always recognisably the same character), it did establish a reasonably consistent overall ambiance. The town of Snakeville was not only home to Broncho Billy but would become the base for other spin-off characters who would each have their own mini-series - Alkali Ike(Augustus Carney), Mustang Pete (Harry Todd), Slippery Slim (Victor Potel) and Bloggie (Ben Turpin) plus a certain number of more minor recurring characters. Because relatively few of the films are available, this family "situation comedy" aspect of the Snakeville westerns is not always very evident to the modern viewer. There was not really any equivalent cinematic universe of such importance until Hal Roach's "Our Gang".
In being one of the first (perhaps even the first) to create such a separate independent world on screen, Anderson is really the predecessor not merely of the many western series that would dominate the "B-film" market for decades to come and of the franchise series (westerns and others) of the thirties (The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Blondie, Philo Vance, Charlie Chan etc) but also of all the television series (western and others) that progressively took their place from 1949 onwards.
Three things contributed to creating films stars - one the fact that films were gradually becoming longer, secondly that they were increasingly being "scripted" and thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, the development of the film series, whether loosely based on a particular comedian who developed a particular "character" (as with Linder, Bunny, Arbuckle, Normand and Chaplin) or, less commonly, as a named character in a series. John Cumpson is one of the earliest examples of this, starring as "Jones" in an occasional series of comedies for Griffith at Biograph (although there had been an even earlier "Jones" series directed by James White for Edison way back in 1900).
From about 1908 such series (often associated with serials as they might be both) were becoming more and more popular in France (Nick Carter, Zigomar etc) but, although there were some attempts by Selig and Edison (again!)in 1911-13 (The Adventures of Kathlyn and Who Will Marry Mary?), it was only with the huge international success of Feuillade's Fantômas and of Pathé's The Perils of Pauline in the US itself (both 1914) that the form took off in the United States and, in its feminised US form, made stars of the various successive "serial Queens").
Where then Anderson really stands out is in having created as early as 1911 for Essanay a series with a named character that had no connection with the serial - a series which would run for four years and generate over a hundred films. This is entirely exceptional at the period. It not only made Anderson one of the first cowboy stars (the career of Tom Mix starts around the same time) but established the tropes for a form of western that, although it is not perhaps the one with which most people are today familiar, has always maintained a small but respectable place in the development of the genre.
The Anderson western is not "historical" and is more "wild and woolly", as people said at the time, than "Wild West". There are no Indian wars, no US cavalry; even the outlaws (and Broncho Billy is himself at times one of their number) are rather mundane miscreants, not the dashing anti-heroes of the historico-mythical West. Nor for that matter does it have anything in common with the "epic" western - the cattle drives, the wagon trains, the land rushes, the battle between cattlemen and farmers, Pony Express and Walls Fargo or the building of the railways. Nor, although Essanay was one of the first companies to move there, does it make much use of the scenic potential of California.
At the time of the earliest films, western adventure itself was not historical; it was a current event, even if it was no longer happening in the historical "West" but up in Alaska on the border with Canada. It was the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon of 1896-1899 that really first inspired a cinematic interest in "the West"; tales of trappers and Indians were more often the subject of French films (those made by Pathé's US subsidiary and then by Georges Méliès' brother Gsston). It was only when the bulk of the US film companies had moved to California (where the gold rush had occurred fifty years earlier) that they began steadily to contribute towards "historicising" and mythologising the genre.
So it is this sympathetically rustic modern West that Anderson provides, a rather ordinary little community based largely around mining with a bit of ranching on the side with more or else the same preoccupations as any other kind of remote predominantly male small-town community, the principal preoccupation being naturally to secure a wife. Although the series is not very consistent in detail (Broncho Billy always has the same name but is not always recognisably the same character), it did establish a reasonably consistent overall ambiance. The town of Snakeville was not only home to Broncho Billy but would become the base for other spin-off characters who would each have their own mini-series - Alkali Ike(Augustus Carney), Mustang Pete (Harry Todd), Slippery Slim (Victor Potel) and Bloggie (Ben Turpin) plus a certain number of more minor recurring characters. Because relatively few of the films are available, this family "situation comedy" aspect of the Snakeville westerns is not always very evident to the modern viewer. There was not really any equivalent cinematic universe of such importance until Hal Roach's "Our Gang".
In being one of the first (perhaps even the first) to create such a separate independent world on screen, Anderson is really the predecessor not merely of the many western series that would dominate the "B-film" market for decades to come and of the franchise series (westerns and others) of the thirties (The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Blondie, Philo Vance, Charlie Chan etc) but also of all the television series (western and others) that progressively took their place from 1949 onwards.
helpful•10
- kekseksa
- Nov 25, 2017
Details
- Runtime19 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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