See how far yuh can throw it,” suggests the outlaw leader after mulling over what to do with an abandoned newborn. He and his two surviving accomplices from a bank holdup have stumbled across the infant with its dying mother in a lone covered wagon at a dry waterhole.
Hell’s Heroes was far tougher than what audiences had come to expect of Hollywood westerns. The trade paper Variety labeled it “gripping and real … something convincingly out of the ordinary … distinctively atmosphered with genuine wasteland and arid desert … The finish is tense because it is unsweetened.” William Wyler might have savored this praise more for his “unusually well cast and directed” movie if Variety hadn’t credited him as “Wilbur Wylans.”
Evidently Wyler was not yet a familiar name, even in the industry. In his forty-five-year directing career, he was nominated for Academy Awards as best director twelve times—still a record—and won three. But before Hell’s Heroes, he was known, if at all, only for the smallest scale westerns. After emigrating in 1920 from Alsace (then newly ceded to France from Germany) to take an entry-level job from his mother’s cousin, Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle, Wyler worked his way up to directing many of the company’s most modest products, turning out twenty-one two-reel and eight five-reel westerns by 1928. Three of those five-reel features survive, along with part of another, an excellent percentage for Universal silents. The earliest of Wyler’s surviving features, The Stolen Ranch (1926), already reveals a rare talent in its witty staging of a story about a PTSD-afflicted World War I veteran, tormented by the sound of gunshots when he returns stateside to save his ranch.
Among studios, Universal was slowest to convert to sound and movie houses in rural America, where westerns were popular, were the last to equip for talkies. Thus Hell’s Heroes was released in both silent and sound versions. One surprise is just how well the story works in both. As the robbers gallop from New Jerusalem, the town minister shoots at them with a six-gun in each hand, wounding one and killing another. (The minister grabs a Bible in time to hear the dying outlaw’s last words.) A sandstorm discourages the posse and stampedes the outlaws’ horses. Dry and poisoned waterholes turn their escape into a question of survival.
The three central actors were universally admired: “Charles Bickford’s performance stands out brilliantly” (New York Daily Mirror); “Charles Bickford … is startlingly realistic … and Raymond Hatton and Fred Kohler are equally convincing” (Picture-Play); the three “are so good that there is little to choose among them” (New York Evening Journal). Bickford had been in Hollywood only a few months but had already shed Broadway stage mannerisms. His characteristic gruffness and physical strength (watch how he tosses the Mexican dance-hall girl) are ideal for this role as the outlaw leader. Burly Fred Kohler, playing Wild Bill, was a frequent western villain, memorably in John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924). Wiry Raymond Hatton, playing Barbwire, the one wounded in the escape, had every sort of role in his five-hundred-film career, including as John Wayne’s comic sidekick in several later “Three Mesquiteers” movies.
Hell’s Heroes comes by its authentic look honestly. Panamint Valley, starker than Death Valley just to its east, provides a blank slate for the desperate foot travelers. California’s Red Rock Canyon envelops the central scenes with the dying mother. Exteriors for New Jerusalem were shot in Bodie, the ghost town deep in California’s eastern Sierras, withering since its boomtown gold-mining heyday in the late 1870s. Considering its remoteness, rough access road, and 8,400-foot altitude, it’s not so surprising that this ready-made genuine Old West town seems never to have been used previously as a movie set. (Universal’s location manager, Jack Lawton, was said to have “discovered” it.) Hell’s Heroes captures Bodie (now Bodie State Historic Park) before its catastrophic 1932 fire, which destroyed about three-quarters of its buildings, including the bank used for the robbery scene. The church, from which the fighting minister emerges and where the film’s conclusion is set, still stands.
Even though Hell’s Heroes is now recognized as one of the more inventive early sound films, it’s easy to prefer the silent version, and not just because available prints of the sound version are dingier. A couple of the silent version’s best scenes are missing from the sound one: the return to town of the discouraged posse and lazy sheriff, chugging mugs of water, washing, and satisfied that the parched outlaws will be “meat for the buzzards”; and the touching sequence when Wild Bill writes his farewell note at night using a bullet’s lead tip. A backward tracking shot as he trudges grimly from the camp toward his death hints at the staging in depth for which Wyler would become celebrated. Among the witty flourishes here are the way Barbwire keeps expecting a barroom foot rail when he bellies up to the bank counter, the way Fred Kohler’s huge hand wraps around most of the tiny newborn, or the way a low tracking shot of footprints in the desert sand silently narrates a little story of the last surviving outlaw casting off everything he carries, except the baby.
Shot in August 1929 in scorching desert heat and completed by October, Hell’s Heroes was held for release until Christmas week in New York City (and early 1930 elsewhere). It was the third of five authorized film adaptations of San Franciscan Peter B. Kyne’s frontier Christmas story “The Three Godfathers,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1912. (It’s sometimes said that Kyne enlarged his magazine story into a novel, but the only thing enlarged for the book version was the typeface.) The story tosses together New Testament elements: the Three Wise Men at Jesus’ birth, the Penitent Thief at the crucifixion, and, again from the Gospel of Matthew, the incident of two disciples borrowing or stealing a donkey and colt for the entry into Jerusalem. Kyne narrates all this with purple prose and cringeworthy pseudo-
scripture.
The other adaptations are gentler than Wyler’s. The first two, both starring Harry Carey, are lost: The Three Godfathers (1916) and Marked Men (1920, directed by John Ford), each have Carey’s outlaw returning to town to live happily, achieving “complete reformation” (as a review of the 1916 version puts it). Three Godfathers of 1936 provides the lead outlaw with a romance in the frontier town and ends with close-ups of his former love cradling the fat and smiling baby. The Technicolor 3 Godfathers of 1948 is John Ford’s lightest hearted western, deaths notwithstanding. In all versions, the story is a male weepie (New York’s Morning Telegraph labeled even Wyler’s “an out-and-out sob opera”) filled with self-sacrifices more typical of women’s melodrama. (For the Three Godmothers version, see 1912’s The Female of the Species, where two thirst-crazed women in the desert forgo plans to murder a third when they come across a dead Indian’s newborn.)
Peter Kyne loathed Wyler’s gritty adaptation, which was an immediate box-office hit: “Mr. Wyler murdered our beautiful story … It is dreadfully directed and dreadfully played by that leading man … I don’t care how much money the picture makes, my conscience will not let me cheer for the atrocious murder of one of the few works of art I have ever turned out.” But it’s less that Wyler abandoned Kyne’s parable of Christian redemption than suggested it through visuals, as in deep-staged backtracking shots of a cross-shaped Joshua tree guarding over Barbwire’s death, or in the resurrection of the three outlaws when they unbury themselves after the sandstorm. As reviewers noticed, not since the Death Valley climax of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1925) had the California deserts become so stark a stage for struggles and death. But in Hell’s Heroes we come to admire and root for the doomed outlaws. Wyler found a path between Stroheim’s pitiless savagery and Kyne’s painful sentimentality to leave us the last great silent western.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald and Mas Koga