Popular reviews

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  Review byCineanalyst ★★★½

  Racism Cures Misogyny

  The tellingly-titled “The Aryan” is something of the once-lost Rosetta Stone to understanding cowboy star William S. Hart’s good-badman character’s inevitable reformation as not only a matter of Christian conviction but of white supremacy. It may not always be obvious—as, indeed, the evangelism isn’t in every film, either—but once one’s introduced to “The Aryan,” there’s the sense that, yeah, that’s always kind of there in his oeuvre. Film historian Andrew Brodie Smith largely credits Hart’s screenwriter C. Gardner Sullivan for these, for a time very popular, character and scenario dynamics. For a couple other examples on race, there’s the supposedly-comedic Chinese caricatures in “Wolf Lowry” (1917), and there’s the dubious depiction of a Native-American woman in “Blue…

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  Review byPUNQ ★★★

  What stood out to me the most was the terrific acting jobWilliam S. Hart did with his character. Undoubtedly a darker western with a high white man's moral tone. Was so weird seeing big Hart in scenes with a young and petiteBessie Love. She was super adorable, he tortured and scary, yet she showed no fear near him. She becomes his strength as he stands up to the men abusing women in this outlaw town. Easy to get why Hart is one of the biggest western superstars in cinema history.

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  Review byLuka ★★★

  Routine Hart Western. Competently made, but it's all been seen before many times.

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  Review byRichard Cross ★★★

  William S. Hart makes something of a dark-hearted hero in this early Western. He misses his mum's death due to a scheme by Louise Glaum to part him from his money, so he carries her off into the desert and makes her his slave for a couple of years. It's kind of difficult, therefore, to get behind him when redemption arrives in the form of Bessie Love. Watchable enough, and worth watching simply because it's been locked away from the world for so long.

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  Review byD-Mo ★

  In this recently discovered film, William S. Hart, an early Western film icon, portrays a complex anti-hero marked by betrayal. A woman manipulates him, preventing him from being with his dying mother and attending her funeral. Her motive? She believes, rightly or wrongly, that a man's relationship with his mother is a potentially destructive force in his life.

  Andrés Levinson, an archivist at the Buenos Aires Cinema Museum, offers a critical analysis in the Pordenone Silent Film Days catalog. Levinson delves into the film's racial undertones, the controversial views of its screenwriter, and the origins of these views in D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation". The analysis also touches on the anti-Mexican sentiment present in Hart's films, the portrayal…

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  Review byFladacase ★★★

  This review may contain spoilers.I can handle the truth.

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  Review byAndrew Ford ★★★½

  1916

  A sturdy William S. Hart vehicle, of which only an incomplete version survives. This finds Hart learning how to trust women again after being severely double-crossed by one.

  The restored version features some still photo recreations to fill in the gaps in the narrative, but - as with most of Hart's stuff - the story beats are clean and concise enough that it doesn't feel like all that much has really been lost.

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  Review byMarcos Adrian Perez Llahi ★★★★

  Pavada de rescate del Museo del cine. Un wéstern de cuando el género tofavia se estaba gestando. Casi un melodrama de hombre, en realidad, con una interesante complejidad dramática y algunos planos de excepcional belleza. Los intertitulos con giros criollos y los inserts medio caseros que se ve que también metía la distribuidora local son un plato. La película se llama The Aryan, si, y es un año posterior a El nacimiento de una nación.