Scott Lord Silent Film: The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1924)

SILENT FILM The book Pictorial Beauty on the Screen, written by Victor Oscar Freeburg in 1923, was dedicated to James Cruze, director of the silent film 'The Covered Wagon' (ten reels). The introduction to the volume was written by silent film director Rex Ingram. Ingram notes that the silent film "must be composed of certain pictorial qualifications such as form, composition and a proper distribution of light and shade." Film poetry began with the silent film, despite any rennaisance in the nineteen seventies. Allan Eyles notes that "The Covered Wagon" (Cruze, 1923), made in the United States at a time when film criticism was giving more than a cursoy glance to the work of Swedish silent film director Victor Seastrom who had only just then arrived in America with Mauritz Stiller to bring a close to the Golden Age of Swedish Silent, was remarkable for its depicting the relationships of the characters within narrative to the enviornment in which the story takes place, its plotline built around the interaction of its three primary characters.

After mentioning "The Covered Wagon" as having been a western differing in genre from the comedies directed by James Cruze, author Gary Carey, Museum of Modern Art, in his volume Lost Films, as early as 1970, writes of the comedy "Beggar on Horseback", directed by Cruze during 1925 having been once considered lost before copies of it had resurfaced. Gary Carey includes the comedy 'Merton of the Movies", which featured the cameos of fifty silent film actors and actresses, directed by Cruze during 1923 as having been a Lost Silent Film during 1970 while overlooking a sevond satire on tinseltown titled "Hollywood", also presently considered lost, starring Viola Dana and directed by James Cruze during 1923.

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