SLIFF 2018 – THE HALF BREED (1916) w/ Live Music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra Nov. 10th at Webster University

THE HALF BREED (1916) with live music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra will screen after the new documentary I, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS Saturday at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. The prgram starts at 7pm. Ticket information can be found HERE 

There’s nothing better than silent films accompanied by live music! The Rats and People is a treasure and St. Louis is lucky to have them here. I’ve seen them perform with silent films several times, often at The St. Louis International Film Festival, and usually at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium and it’s always a stunning good time at the movies. You’ll have the chance to see them perform their magic this Saturday, November 10th when they premiere their new score for THE HALF BREED (1916)

During the peak of the silent era, the dashing Douglas Fairbanks was the first “King of Hollywood,” ruling the box office in a series of epic adventures — swashbuckling in “The Mark of Zorro,” dueling in “Robin Hood,” and soaring in “The Thief of Bagdad.” Using first-person narration — with the actor voiced by Peter Facinelli — “I, Douglas Fairbanks” deftly combines film clips and newsreel footage to tell the fascinating story of both Fairbanks and early Hollywood. French producer Martine Melloul participates in a Q&A. The documentary screens with the newly restored silent “The Half Breed.” The smiling swashbuckler Fairbanks starred in this Western melodrama written by Anita Loos and directed with flair by Allan Dwan. St. Louis’ Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra returns to SLIFF with an original score and live accompaniment.

From Roger Carpenter’s We Are Movie Geeks review of the Kino release of THE HALF BREED:

“As so often has happened over the years, silent films have been lost to time, or survive only in very poor or often incomplete prints.  Because these films weren’t thought of as “art” many were scrapped due to high storage costs, recycled for their silver content, or were destroyed by fire due to their high combustibility.  Others were resold to budget distribution companies, recut and retitled, and released as totally different films.  Thus was the fate of many Douglas Fairbanks movies from his time at Triangle Pictures.  The Half-Breed is a classic case in point.

Based upon a short story and rewritten for the screen by its author in collaboration with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes novelist and pioneering screenwriter Anita Loos, The Half-Breed tells the story of a baby abandoned by his white father and Native American mother and raised by an elderly man who lives deep in the woods.  The baby, named Lo (Douglas Fairbanks), comes to town when racist white men kick him out of his home because “Indians can’t own property in this county!”  At first he seems to experience kindness when a preacher invites him into church as an example of tolerance, but soon enough even the preacher exposes his own racist tendencies when Lo shows an interest in the preacher’s daughter.  Nellie (Jewel Carmen), is the pretty daughter with lots of suitors, including the local sheriff (Sam De Grasse) and an aristocratic young man called Jack Brace (George Beranger).  Things get testy as Nellie seems to choose the half-breed.

The Half-Breed is part western and part romantic drama. It’s interesting in that it seems to address racism head-on, as in the scene when the preacher uses Lo as a “stage prop” for his sermonizing on intolerance.  There is some irony as well, as in a scene where the sheriff remarks to Lo that, “Not all white men are the same,” to which Lo smiles, shakes his head, and walks away laughing, as if thinking to himself, “You’ve got that right, buster.”  Perhaps inevitably, though, the film exposes itself towards the end when Nellie chooses the white aristocrat and Lo engages with a Mexican girl, herself a half-breed.  Birds of a feather, and all that….

Perhaps as entertaining as the film itself is the story behind its restoration.  The film premiered in 1916 and flopped.  It was quickly sold off to another distribution company who recut the film and substituted dialogue cards, shortening it down to a two-reeler along the way.  The film was long known to exist in three different forms:  one in a 16 MM version at Lobster Films; one as a recut version in the Cinemateque Francais; and a terribly damaged and partial but seemingly original print in the Library of Congress, which was re-discovered in the 1970’s in an excavated swimming pool in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. Painstakingly restored to as close to its original runtime and storyline, The Half-Breed premiered in 2013 at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

The film is not only important as an early example of a full-length Douglas Fairbanks movie, but many other important filmmakers worked alongside Fairbanks on this outing.  Aside from the aforementioned Anita Loos, The Half-Breed was produced by D.W. Griffith and directed by journeyman Allan Dwan, who has an astounding 407 directing credits to his name (easily half were one- or two-reelers in the early days of cinema).  Victor Fleming, of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz fame, shot the film, and there is even a brief appearance by Elmo Lincoln who would go on to fame and glory as the silver screen’s very first Tarzan.”