A Best Of Hart Was Never Better

1919 Looks a Hundred Years Better with Wagon Tracks

Ring out news --- Bill Hart on Blu-Ray! Never thought I'd see the day, but here it is, courtesy Olive Films, and result is swell. Wagon Tracks looks last week shot, the way you dream all silents might register if only they'd been better protected. So are over 90% really lost? Painful to ponder, but after all, most of antiquity is gone, looted, unaccounted for. But think, once upon long-ago time, all the Harts looked like Wagon Tracks, better in fact what with nitrate projection. Viewers then beheld beauty we never will. Few times I saw nitrate projected was like stepping into a woodcut. At moments of Wagon Tracks, though, I felt I might do it again. Blu-Ray reclaims every tear Bill shed for big emotional scenes done here, him walking plank of a kid brother lost to crooked cards and back-shooters. Killing is by all appearance done by winsome Jane Novak, though Hart smells fish. A "good" woman just couldn't commit such an act. He knows, and will prove, her no-good gambler brother and snaky fiancée in back of the deed. How Bill unmasks them is stops-out application of Hart justice as fans expect from this hardest-bitten apostle of frontier realism.

Bill Uses Tried-True March and Thirst Method To Force a Murder Confession

But how real was Hart's west? Better to never mind that and just enjoy. Idea most of time was to lay moral dilemmas on Bill and let him sort out which loyalty to keep, which unworthy object to discard. Hart went swift as judge/jury, more so than moderns are comfortable with at times, which of course, is glory of work he did that we can still access. The Wagon Tracks finish is corkscrewed with punish of sins and sacrifice set at alter of love. It's all so precise that a slight misstep could bring the whole thing a cropper and see all of cast roasted over Indian fire. How careful-calibrated were Hart shows ... you come away satisfied that right is done, universal themes applied as they were to all media that told tales of the sweep westward. This was how a public wanted myths, and Wagon Tracks, like all of Hart, got it done to their liking. Even after a century, would we have it any other way?  I could hope Olive sells five thousand units of Wagon Tracks, but .... And yet Bill's one that even the uninitiated often take shine to. His persona is fresh wind against a current-day Code so strictly applied.