Country: United States
Director: Jay Hunt
Writers: Thomas H. Ince (scenario), C.
Gardner Sullivan (scenario)
Stars: Joe Goodboy, Sessue Hayakawa and
Tsuru Aoki
Release Date: 24 December 1914 (USA)
Production Co: Domino Film Company
Runtime: USA: 20 min
Sound Mix: Silent
Color: Black and White
Genres: Short | Drama
The most fascinating series of Indian
Westerns remain those produced by Thomas Ince between 1912 and early 1915, of
which the two-reel Last of the Line is itself one of the last. By the time of the
film’s Christmas Eve 1914 release, the New York Motion Picture Corporation had
become a curiously inappropriate name for a company whose films were shot
primarily within sight of the Pacific in the Santa Monica “Inceville” studio
and the hills above. One key to the films’ success was Ince’s hiring of skilled
riders and authentic gear from the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show
out of Oklahoma. More essential was the recruitment from their Pine Ridge
Reservation in South Dakota of some 50 Oglala Lakota (Sioux), who play the
tribe at the center of this tragedy of a chief and his white-educated son.
The first movie Westerns, made on the
East Coast and off in Europe, had come to be mocked for their unconvincing
Indian impersonations. As the industry trade paper Moving Picture World
grumbled in 1911, “We have Indians à la Français, [and] ‘red’ men recruited
from the Bowery.” But the paper’s review of Last of the Line could single out
its lead: “The old Indian is fine. He has all the dignity and grandeur that one
could want.” The actor, unidentified in the film’s publicity material (and
sometimes misidentified as William Eagleshirt, another Lakota in the company),
went by the name of Joe Goodboy. All but one other of his known films are now
lost, including Ince’s The Patriot (1916), about which a reviewer noted, “Joe
Goodboy drew tears from many an eye unused to weeping in the theater.” Said to
be 80 at the time of Last of the Line, the actor apparently preferred not to
reveal his exact age or history. Never again in Hollywood would Native
Americans play themselves with such prominence and regularity as in Ince’s
pre–World War I productions.
But the most surprising casting in Last
of the Line is that of the chief’s drunken son, played by the Japanese-born Sessue
Hayakawa. Although Hayakawa is best remembered for his Academy Award–nominated
role as the prison camp commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), his
remarkable career began more than four decades earlier when he rose rapidly to
become one of Hollywood’s first superstars, with an international following
rivaling those of Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart. (In 1916, the year
after his star-making role in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat, Hayakawa was
ranked number one in a Chicago Tribune “favorite player” poll, right above
Beatriz Michelena—the star of Salomy Jane, also featured in Treasures 5.) After
emigrating to study economics at the University of Chicago, Hayakawa had begun
stage acting when Thomas Ince signed him for the New York Motion Picture
Corporation’s stock company, casting him in 1914 in two features and at least
15 shorter films, including Last of the Line. As recognized then and since,
Hayakawa had a subtlety about his acting that made his costars seem even more
melodramatic, and in this he shared the “restraint” praised also in Ince’s
American Indian actors.
Hayakawa’s casting in the film might
suggest all sorts of uncomfortable racial assumptions—by filmmakers and
audiences alike—but one is reminded too of the end of Thomas Berger’s great
1964 novel Little Big Man, when its 111-year-old frontier antihero, Jack Crabb,
is reduced to watching Westerns on television and continues that industry
trade-paper complaint: “It gets on my nerves to see Indians being played by
Italians, Russians, and the like, with five o’clock shadows and lumpy arms…. If
the show people are fresh out of real Indians, they should hire
Orientals—Chinese, Japs, and such like—to play them parts; for there is a
mighty resemblance between them two, being ancient cousins. Look at them
without bias and you’ll see what I mean.” Although that “without bias” is a
nice touch, recent DNA research on the prehistoric origins of the first
Americans lends support to Crabb’s notion. Playing the Sioux maiden whom
Hayakawa’s character accosts at the riverbank in Last of the Line is another
Japanese immigrant, Hayakawa’s real-life bride of six months, Tsuru Aoki. Ince
reversed the casting in The Wrath of the Gods (1914), also starring Hayakawa
and Aoki, where the Lakota play Japanese fishermen and villagers.
Last of the Line abandons the usual
Indians-versus-cavalry story line for one in which the central conflict is
within the tribe. One obvious criticism of the film is that it has its Indian
chief accept the spiritual values of the conquering U.S. Army, which will
perform the ritual of honor for his son. Against that, however, we are made to
understand that the chief’s son has been ruined, before the film even begins,
by two encounters with the white world with long histories of cultural
devastation: the education of Native American children in government boarding
schools and the introduction of alcohol into native families. Both topics made
for popular silent film plotlines. The Selig Polyscope company’s Curse of the
Redman (1911) had taken on the alcoholism of a Sherman Indian High School
graduate, and later a string of features—notably Strongheart (1914), Braveheart
(1925), and Redskin (1929)—played variations on the tale of a chief’s son lost
to both cultures after years at the white man’s schools. Thomas Ince himself,
who signed an agreement with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be responsible for
his Native American actors (in these years before the 1924 Indian Citizenship
Act), issued threats to Santa Monica saloon keepers that he would prosecute
anyone selling them liquor.
Ince’s paternalism extended to his long
resistance to crediting production personnel, and Last of the Line was
originally issued with no directing or acting credits. But thanks to Sessue
Hayakawa’s fame just a couple years later, we have the reissue print seen here,
with his name now above the film’s new title, which makes a dubious claim for
the chief’s motivation in his Pride of Race.—Scott Simmon
About the Preservation
Only about 10 percent of Thomas Ince’s
Westerns are known to survive. This Museum of Modern Art 35mm print of Last of
the Line was struck in 2010 with support from the National Film Preservation
Foundation.
Further Viewing and Reading
Oglala actor Joe Goodboy’s other known
surviving film, the three-reel The Invaders (1912), is in More Treasures from
American Film Archives. Ince’s two-reel The Indian Massacre (1912), with
William Eagleshirt, can be seen on the Saved from the Flames DVD (Flicker
Alley). The two-color Technicolor Redskin (1929) is in Treasures III: Social
Issues in American Film. George Eastman House’s preservation of The Wrath of
the Gods (1914) is available as an extra on the Milestone DVD of The Dragon
Painter (1919), also starring Sessue Hayakawa and of interest in this context
for its Yosemite Valley locations, which stand in for Japan.
The essential study of Hayakawa is
Daisuke Miyao’s Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke
University Press, 2007).
