Straight Shooting

After his apprenticeship in adventure series with his brother Francis Ford, John Ford connected the beginning of his directing career with the versatile actor Harry Carey, who in early 1917 sought to break away from his mentor David W. Griffith's sentimentally melodramatic conception of the West. They made a loose series of twenty-six western films with the main character Cheyenne Harry. Straight Shooting was the first of them. Originally, according to the then stereotype, it was to be only two-part. Ford and Carey deliberately shot more material in such a way that it could not be cut. Universal's management finally agreed to release the film in a longer, author-intended version. Unlike the action-comedy form of westerns Hoot Gibson or Tom Mix, whose origins in rodeo and traveling shows influenced their work, Ford and Carey sought to create a film West close to the artistic expression of Russell and Remington, which is rough and harsh in its authenticity. (NFA)