Hell's Hinges (1916)
released 5th March 1916
Cast:
William S. Hart
Clara Williams
Jack Standing
Alfred Hollingsworht
Robert McKim
Louise Glaum
Hell's Hinges (1916)
Western
63m
New York Motion Picture Corp., Kay-Bee Productions
Director:
William S. Hart
Writer:
C. Gardner Sullivan
"Big Bill" is once more that terrible two-handed gunman whom you all love so well
When Thomas H. Ince signed with Harry Aitken’s Triangle Film Corporation in July 1915, his move signalled the start of William S. Hart’s career as a filmmaker of only feature-length films. By the time he made Hell’s Hinges he had already cemented his status as cinema’s foremost Western hero; films like The Darkening Trail (1915) and The Disciple (1915) had refined his image as the screen’s ‘good-bad man,’ a loner not above breaking the law, but possessing a strict moral code that ultimately resulted in right prevailing.
Despite his position as one of Ince’s foremost stars, Hart’s salary remained at just $125 per week in July 1915. Ince’s frugality became a source of rancour between the two men, which didn’t improve when Ince eventually doubled Hart’s salary. Hart still felt he was underpaid. After all, Mary Pickford was earning $400 per week and Charlie Chaplin $500 – and Ince himself earned a reputed annual wage of $15,000.
By late 1915, Ince was arguably the most powerful and procedurally innovative producer in Hollywood. His creation of a detailed shooting script, which enabled him to control costs by breaking a film down scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot, allowed him to oversee multiple production units simultaneously. It was a business practice that the whole industry would soon adopt.
Ince produced Hell’s Hinges under the Kay-Bee banner with a budget of approximately $30,000, nearly double the standard expenditure for a Hart picture. The expanded budget allowed for a larger cast of extras, a more extensive location shoot, and the construction and spectacular incineration of an entire frontier town.
Hart had by then assembled a tight-knit creative team. Screenwriter and former journalist C. Gardner Sullivan started in movies writing for Edison before joining Ince and becoming the principal architect of Hart’s screen persona. Within a year of Hell’s Hinges release, Hart’s trusted assistant Clifford Smith was directing films of his own, racking up almost ninety credits before his untimely death of peritonitis in 1937. Cinematographer Joseph H. August, the third member of Hart’s creative triumvirate, entered films as a wrangler, handling and training horses at Inceville before training as a cameraman. From The Disciple (1915) onwards, he shot virtually every Hart feature through to the star’s last film, Tumbleweeds (1925).
Shooting of Hell’s Hinges began on 4th September 1915 and was completed in October. Hart selected Clara Williams as his love interest for the eighth (and penultimate) time, and Jack Standing, who would die of pneumonia in 1917, played the key role of the preacher. Louise Glaum, another Hart regular who briefly challenged Theda Bara as queen of the vamps, played the saloon girl who helps engineer the preacher’s downfall.
Further down the cast list were two unknowns just starting out on their careers. Danish emigre Jean Hersholt, who arrived in the USA in 1913, would become one of Hollywood’s outstanding character actors and earn huge respect for his selfless humanitarian work. In Hell’s Hinges, he plays the barman who notifies Hart’s character of the rowdy disruption taking place at the new preacher’s makeshift church. Eagle-eyed viewers might also glimpse nineteen-year-old John Gilbert, one of the silent screen’s biggest heartthrobs, as drunken reveller.
Principal photography took place around Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino National Forest of Southern California. The studio constructed thirty-eight timber buildings on the Ince lot in Culver City to create Placer Center, a fictional frontier town based on the notorious Virginia City in Nevada. The set was then one of the largest to be purpose-built for a Western, and an example of how Hart’s insistence on authentic, atmospheric locations enhanced his films.
Hart’s personal experience of the Old West informed not only the look of the ramshackle town but the clothes worn by its residents. Unlike contemporaries like Tom Mix, whose films glossed over the realities of the time and its people, Hart was a stickler for authenticity. But he also wanted to create a sense of the same epic scope he had witnessed when viewing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). He realised this ambition with the mob sequences in Hell’s Hinges and the climactic inferno.
When the Western town of Hell’s Hinges burned to the ground on the screen of New York’s Knickerbocker Theatre, the audience gasped. The film’s climax was so visceral that contemporary reviewers reached for biblical metaphors. “A conflagration that gives a truly Gehenna-like finish,” enthused the New York Press. It was an inferno that marked the Western’s arrival as a serious dramatic art form.
William S. Hart
William S. Hart in Hell's Hinges (1916)
This synopsis of Hell's Hinges contains SPOILERS
The plot sees newly ordained Reverend Robert Henley (Jack Standing) arriving in the frontier town of Placer Center, known locally as Hell’s Hinges. He has been sent there by superiors who fear he is too weak-willed to resist the temptations of city life. His sister, Faith (Clara Williams), whose devout belief in the scriptures he doesn’t share, accompanies him.
His arrival in his new parish swiftly dispels his vision of pretty young senoritas swooning over his loving guidance. Hell’s Hinges is “a gun-fighting, man-killing devil’s den of iniquity that scorched even the sun-parched soil on which it stood.” Overrun by rogues and cut-throats, its few decent people are like “a drop of water in a barrel of rum.”
Saloon proprietor Silk Miller (Alfred Hollingsworth) sees the reverend as a threat and engages feared gunman Blaze Tracy (Hart) to deal with him. But when Tracy joins the mocking crowd gathered to greet the minister, the sight of his sister prevents him from sending Henley on his way.
The following Sunday, Miller’s mistress Dolly (Louise Glaum) incites the town’s lawless element into disrupting the sermon Henley is giving in a barn. Faced with their unruliness and her brother’s meek surrender, Faith defiantly sings a hymn. A drunken cowboy approaches the stage, intent on dancing with her, but Tracy intervenes, allowing Henley to finish his sermon. The gunman is unmoved by the minister’s shallow, unconvincing words, but the sincerity of Faith’s fervent speech touches him deeply, and he switches his allegiance from Miller to the minister. With a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of whiskey by his side, Tracy even reads a bible for the first time.
With the minister under Tracy’s protection, Miller devises a subtler scheme to drive Henley from the town: he enlists Dolly to seduce him the day before the new church opens. She succeeds spectacularly. Henley doesn’t show for the service, and Tracy leads the churchgoers to the saloon after one of Miller’s henchmen tells the gathered faithful that they will find him there. In a room upstairs, they find the drunken Henley on a bed with Dolly.
The next morning, while Tracy is away searching for a doctor for him, a delirious Henley joins the regulars in Miller’s saloon. When someone suggests burning down the church, Henley leads the rabble. They find their way barred by the town’s decent folk, and a pitched battle ensues. Henley is shot and killed in the melee, but the church’s protectors cannot prevent the church from being torched.
Tracy returns to town to find the law-abiding townspeople fleeing into the desert and the lawless drunkenly celebrating in the street. Enraged after finding Faith and her dead brother, he confronts Miller and his cohorts in the saloon. He shoots the saloon’s oil lamps, deliberately starting a blaze that will consume the entire town.
End of spoilers
Joseph H. August excelled at creating tension between expansive landscape photography and intimate, low-key portraiture. He claimed he never used a foreground reflector on a Hart film. Sometimes, he would substitute a white bedsheet for fill light, illustrating his pragmatic, stripped-down approach. A Film Comment review of Hell’s Hinges noted August’s “fine camerawork, utilising long panoramic shots, excellent cutting and a sure control over the masses of extras.” Those panoramic shots, such as the high-angle view over Hell’s Hinges, give the film its moral geometry: a God’s-eye vantage point over a fallen world. His low-key interior work was equally important. The scenes inside the saloon and Dolly’s room suggest an atmosphere of genuine sin rather than studio artifice.
Hell’s Hinges enjoyed enormous success, receiving praise from both critics and the public. Variety reported that “the story is crammed full of action and the scenario is replete with interest.” Motion Picture News stated that “conviction is the key-note of the entire production, and the dramatic work presented is of the highest order.”
Hart also received much praise. “No actor before the screen has been able to give as sincere and true a touch to the Westerner as Hart. He rides in a manner indigenous to the soil, he shoots with the real knack,” said the New York Press. The New York Herald suggested, “William S. Hart is beginning to typify certain things in the film world. He is ever stoical, slow to anger, but possessed of the powers of a hundred men when aroused.”
Only Moving Picture World struck a note of dissension in its otherwise positive review of 19th February 1916. Its reviewer warned Hart was “a good enough actor not to require a perpetual repetition of the Western badman reformed through the sweet and humanizing influence of a pure-minded girl, Hart should try himself out in some other role… [he] fails to win with a large percentage of the modern audience.”
The reviewer’s words would eventually prove prophetic. Hart’s adherence to grimy realism combined with melodrama and sentimentalism fell out of favour as Tom Mix’s brand of over-dressed, action-packed drama entranced audiences of the 1920s.
Sources: The Complete Films of William S. Hart: A Pictorial Record, Diane Kaiser, Koszarski; My Life East and West, William S. Hart; Dark Star, Leatrice Gilbert Fountain; Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury, Joe Franklin; Preserved: 50 Treasures from American Film Archives, Scott Simmons, Martin Miller Marks; The Western, from Silents to the Seventies, George N. Fenin; William S. Hart: Projecting the American West, Ronald L. Davis; Thomas Ince, Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer, Brian Taves.