The Darkening Trail (1915)
Released 31st May 1915
Cast:
William S. Hart
Enid Markey
George Fisher
Nona Thomas
Milton Ross
Louise Glaum
The Darkening Trail (1915)
Drama
54m
New York Motion Picture Company
Director:
William S. Hart
Writer:
C. Gardner Sullivan
After completing filming of On the Night Stage in early September 1914 – but before either that film or The Bargain were released – William S. Hart returned to New York on a second-class train ticket in search of acting work. Believing the western genre to be dead, Thomas H. Ince at New York Motion Pictures had refused to make any more, but suggested Hart direct, offering him $125.00 a week to do so. Hart preferred to continue acting. Once back at Westport, where he lived with his sister, Mary, and bulldog Mack, he took the train to Manhattan several times a week but found no acting work.
Accounts of Hart’s return to Ince differ. Brian Taves, in his book Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer, states that Hart wired the producer asking for another chance to act and Ince relented; Hart claimed he received a telegram from Ince offering him the opportunity to act and direct in another two-reeler which soon had him travelling back across the country, this time with sister and dog in tow. Once again, they travelled second class; to save money, they ate sandwiches and milk whenever the train pulled into a station long enough. In Los Angeles, he rented a modest house near Inceville until he found quarters at 534 Figueroa Street in Los Angeles with an enclosed yard to prevent Mack from fighting other dogs.
Their new home’s only drawback was the journey into work each morning. In his autobiography, Hart recalled, “I would get my breakfast at a little restaurant on Sixth Street, take the Edendale trolley, and at the junction of Lakeshore and Sunset catch the old Ford bus from the Mack Sennett Studio, where our laboratory was. This bus took film to camp every morning and returned at night with the day’s work. It meant fifty miles a day of travel, and getting up at five o’clock every morning to be at camp at eight o’clock. I never reached home, via the same route, before seven or seven-thirty in the evening.”
The first short Hart directed, with twenty-year-old Clifford Smith as his assistant, was Two-Gun Hicks. It would be the first of fifteen times that Hart and Smith would work together. The two men produced a further five two-reelers before the end of 1914, most of them penned by C. Gardner Sullivan. Each cost around $1,000.
By the end of May 1915, Hart had starred in and directed seventeen shorts and one feature and grown a following among western fans. Ince allowed him a surprising level of creative freedom, trusting his increasingly popular star to deliver the formula that found most favour with moviegoers. “I worked sixteen hours a day,” Hart remembered, “and worried eight.”
William S. Hart
Enid Markey in William S. Hart's The Darkening Trail (1915)
Despite Hart’s experience of living in the West, former cowboys who worked as riders and stuntmen at Inceville found his perception of the Old West amusing, and as his success grew, many found him to be pompous. Director Irvin Willat said of him, “I didn’t get along well with Bill Hart. I supervised the cutting of one or two of his pictures. He was a bit of a ham, but a tremendous asset. I never considered him a great actor. He belonged on Fourteenth Street in New York and not in the New York Motion Picture Company in Los Angeles.”
The Darkening Trail represented something of a departure from Hart’s usual westerns. Here, he plays a miner in the then present-day Alaska in love with store owner Ruby McGraw (Enid Markey), who repeatedly rejects his proposals of marriage. Hart doesn’t appear in the movie until 20 minutes in; before his introduction, we are shown the reason for the arrival in camp of Jack Sturgess (George Fisher), an Easterner who heads to the wilds of Alaska when his wealthy father discovers he has impregnated and abandoned Ruth Wells (Nona Smith). The note Jack sends Ruth after learning of her condition emphasises his caddish nature: “I am sorry but I can’t do a thing for you. I guess you will come through all right at that. You of course understand that I am not to be bothered further. Goodbye.” Jack is a charmer, though, and smoothly wins Ruby’s heart after she comes across Ed bullying Jack to entertain his drinking buddies. He soon grows tired of Ruby, however, and begins plotting how to be rid of her…
The Darkening Trail was the first feature-length movie Hart directed, and the structure feels a little off with that lengthy prologue before the real plot kicks in. Writer C. Gardner Sullivan could have established Jack’s caddish nature in a couple of minutes. Instead, we have twenty minutes from the perspective of Ruth, who disappears from the movie, her plight unresolved, when Jack sets sail for Alaska. Hart is on safer ground once the plot moves to Alaska; the film could easily be set in the old west, and he sticks closely to the formula he had established with his shorts – apart from an ending that wouldn’t be out of place in a Russian tragedy.
The film generally found favour with the critics. Motion Picture News described it as, “a corking good feature, with a heart interest story and fine Alaskan atmosphere. Variety’s review was less favourable, describing the film as a “melodrama of the old school.” Although it praised Hart for playing his role “with a certain feeling that makes it stand out as the one big thing in the picture,” it suggested that “it is the story rather than the acting, production or direction that causes the feature to fall into the mediocre class.”
W. H. Productions re-issued The Darkening Trail in 1918 under the title The Hell-Hound of Alaska.
Sources: William S. Hart: Projecting the American West, Ronald L. Davis; My Life East and West, William S. Hart; Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer, Brian Taves; Motion Picture New, April 1915, vol. 11 No 21; Variety, 11th June 1915.