Nelson McDowell

A Johnny Mack Brown western from Supreme Pictures, one of the smallest of the poverty-row studios. Brown plays Billy Donovan, a drifter who rides into a valley looking for the man who murdered his sister and hires on at the Halloran ranch, where a masked night rider the locals call the Phantom has been picking off anyone who gets too close to a stolen fortune. Directed by S. Roy Luby, who cut his teeth editing B-westerns before moving into the director's chair. The phantom-rider gimmick gives it a whiff of the era's "weird western" cycle — more mystery than shootout. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Western

James Fenimore Cooper's novel as a sweeping silent epic, shot in the California mountains standing in for 1757 upstate New York. Wallace Beery is the vengeful Huron Magua, Albert Roscoe the scout Hawkeye, and Barbara Bedford the kidnapped Cora, with Harry Lorraine as the Mohican Chingachgook. Maurice Tourneur began the picture but was injured when a car drove off a cliff, and his assistant Clarence Brown — later the director of Garbo's finest films — finished it, earning his first screen credit. Regularly ranked among the best silent adaptations of American literature, it was restored by the Library of Congress. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Drama · Silent