Hell's Hinges (1916)

William K. Everson has suggested that the newbie coming to William S. Hart for the first time would do well to skip over Hell’s Hinges because the star’s intensity could create discomfort and bad laughs. Among the heroes of the early western film, Hart’s characters were easily the most intense bad-asses of them all. When it came to eyes into which you had to stare, you’d pick a snake over Hart’s any day.

In Hell’s Hinges, Hart is Blaze Tracy, a bad man as unforgiving as his name. He’s one of the hombres in the town of Placer Center, nicknamed “Hell’s Hinges,” “a gun-fighting, man-killing devil’s den of iniquity that scorched even the sun-packed soil on which it stood.” Silk Miller (Alfred Hollingsworth) runs the saloon and is defined as “no man’s friend.”

A young pastor named Robert Henley (Jack Standing) is sent to town to remove him from the temptations of the big city. He comes with his mother and sister Faith (Clara Williams) and they are immediately taken to heart by the local “Petticoat Brigade.” They soon turn a barn into a church.

Blaze and Silk insist that their city has no use for eastern civilization and try to hurrah the Henleys out of town. But then something, let’s call it miraculous, happens. When Blaze sees Faith (“finds faith”?) it’s his road-to-Damascus moment. He isn’t smitten by her youth and beauty—she’s plain and devout, dressing modestly and rapidly approaching spinsterhood. But he senses a purity of spirit and begins to realize that there is more to life than the pleasures that lie on the surface. The good in this bad man rises.

But Silk won’t give up so easily. He uses Dolly (Louise Glaum) the dance hall girl to seduce Henley. Using sex and booze, Dolly dampens Henley’s inner light just as Blaze’s begins to, well, blaze.

When the treachery is discovered, Blaze hurls Dolly to the floor and attempts to rescue Henley who is by this time so besotted he refuses Blaze’s help. Silk leads the town no-goods to the church, where he convinces Henley to burn the place to the ground. In the gunfight that follows, Blaze lights the rest of the town on fire, and the film ends on a Sodom and Gomorrah note.

Joseph H. August was the cinematographer, as he was for other of Hart’s films, and his capturing of the fire is magnificent. Heat and wind combine to create genuine pillars of fire. You know as you watch that the picture has to have a pyric finale; it does, and August films it beautifully.

The movie’s credited director is Charles Swickard, but Clifford Smith and Hart were uncredited collaborators. It was written by C. Gardner Sullivan and produced by Thomas H. Ince. 

The cast is uniformly good. You can see in Glaum’s dance hall harlot the ego-driven selfishness that will emerge in full bloom in Sex four years later. As always, Hart is riveting, a dime novel villain who transforms into an Old Testament instrument of furious righteousness.

Supposedly Jean Hersholt and John Gilbert are a pair of uncredited rowdy cowboys in the crowd.