This film was initially available up until a few years ago on a bootleg VHS copy from Balzac Video, which appears to no longer be listed on the internet. Griffith, in the actions scenes, but even at this early stage in his career there is evidence that the director is very much at home in the Western genre, as his later films would go on to show. It is the latter version that was discovered in Czechoslovakia.įord openly flaunts the directing influences of his older brother, Frank Ford, and D.W.
There were apparently two different versions of Straight Shooting, one in which Harry rides off into the sunset, the other version, released in the 1920s, ending with Harry getting the girl, the sister of the murdered boy. We see an example towards the end of the film of Carey’s trademark gesture of holding his his right arm just above the wrist, a gesture referenced by Wayne as he stands framed in the doorway of the cabin at the end of The Searchers. Harry has a crisis of conscience when he witnesses the father of the settler family burying his murdered son, and switches sides, eventually gunning down ‘Placer’ Fremont, the outlaw leader who murdered the young boy. As with a lot of the other films Carey made with Ford, he plays a recurring character called Cheyenne Harry, who epitomises the ‘good badman’ figures that we see John Wayne play in later Ford movies such as 3 Godfathers and The Searchers.Ĭheyenne Harry is recruited to run off a family of settlers from their land or even kill them if necessary.
The main difference here is that this film consists of 5 reels with a running time of just over an hour, making it the first (almost) feature-length film Ford ever directed. One of the first of these was Straight Shooting, which miraculously survives in a complete version discovered in Czechoslovakia back in the 1960s. John Ford directed quite a few 2 and 3 reel Westerns for Universal Studios starring the popular actor Harry Carey from 1917 to 1921.
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