The Half-Breed (1916)

The greatest movie ever made..!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

An action-packed slog

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Pretty heavy themes in this 1916 melodrama. I have just been rediscovering Fairbanks' early works and this one caught me by surprise. After watching silent films for almost 50 years, what a joy it is to see them digitally restored. A far cry from the fuzzy 8mm prints of my youth. If I had seen a musty out of focus truncated print of this film, I would have missed much of its joy. Thank you to all who worked so hard to bring this one back to all of us.

While Douglas Fairbanks is famous for his fantasy and adventure films (such as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, ROBIN HOOD and THE MARK OF ZORRO), he also made a variety of other films...including some westerns early in his film career. TCM showed two of them tonight, THE GOOD BAD MAN and THE HALF-BREED. Both are about equally enjoyable, though THE HALF- BREED is exciting to watch because of its location filming in Boulder Creek (near San Jose) and Calaveras County (near Yosemite). Seeing all these giant redwoods is reason enough to see the movie!When the film begins, a native woman has a baby and has been dumped by the father of the child. She is friendless and neither the whites nor Indians want anything to do with her. She then gives her baby to a nice old naturalist living in the woods then she kills herself! So the child is raised away from civilization by the old man. When the old guy dies, the now grown Sleeping Water (Fairbanks) travels to the nearby town and learns that pretty much most of the white folks he meets are Indian-hating scum. He decides to leave and return to the woods and is soon joined by Teresa, a woman who has stabbed two perverts who couldn't keep their hands off her. Additionally, Nellie from town inexplicably has fallen for Sleeping Water...as has Teresa. What's next? See the film.While this is not a great film, it does do a nice job of humanizing the main character and the plot all centers on how trashy the 'civilized' white folks could be. In many ways, this is like a great silent western, THE SQUAW MAN...which is a must-see. As for THE HALF-BREED, it's very good for when it was made and ages reasonably well. Sadly, the film was restored by piecing together many different prints and some of them are pretty shabby condition- wise.

The Half-Breed (1916)*** (out of 4)A young Indian woman brings her newborn son to the home of a white man where she drops it off and shortly later kills herself. The baby, part white and part Indian, grows up to live a normal life but when his caretaker dies, the townspeople run him out. Soon he sees various racial injustice and pretty soon finds himself in the woods with another outcast.THE HALF-BREED isn't the greatest film ever made but it's certainly an entertaining one that fans of silent cinema should enjoy. Douglas Fairbanks plays the title character and does a very good job with the role. Obviously the actor is very energetic but he manages to handle the small, quiet scenes just as well as any of the stuff that has him running around. The actor was very believable as the somewhat naive man who doesn't realize that people will hate him just because of his skin color.The film's story isn't all that original and deals with the half-breed going up against a sheriff who just happens to be his real father, although neither one realizes it. The film features some terrific visuals and especially the scenes in the forest. There's a terrific climax where a fire breaks out and the movie ends on a very poetic note. The main reason to watch this film is certainly for Fairbanks and you have to wonder what his female fans in 1916 thought about his nearly nude entrance at the start of the picture.

But now, because of much labor and love by Robert Byrne and his team including the Cinémathèque française, the Library Of Congress and Lobster Films, it is nearly complete. I just saw it this past Saturday, 11/2/2013 at the Packard Campus theater in Culpeper, VA. In what might have been an early movie first, the lead character is sympathetically shown despite having native blood. Living as an outcast, young Lo Dorman (Fairbanks) is welcomed back into society by pretty preacher's daughter Nellie (flirty Jewel Carmen), who cares not a whit about his mixed parentage. SPOILER ALERT: But Dorman's presence in town proves uncomfortable for Sheriff Dunne (Sam DeGrasse) -- who, unbeknownst to anyone himself, is Lo's father. The sheriff does his worst to discredit Lo in the eyes of the townsfolk. Our hero joins with another "outcast," dance-hall girl Teresa (Alma Rubens). Now with the merged sources from three prints (and months of labor reassembling each shot, scene) it has a beginning, middle and end. In an interview with Kevin Brownlow, director Allan Dwan revealed that The Half-Breed almost didn't get made, thanks to the interference of Fairbank's then wife, who didn't want her husband to appear as an "unwashed" half-breed. To circumvent this, Dwan inserted a scene showing a nearly nude Fairbanks taking a "bath" in a river, then thoroughly scrubbing himself and his clothes with sand. "He was a washed Indian, not a dirty Indian," Dwan explained. "I only put the scene in to satisfy Mrs. Fairbanks."