The Girl of the Golden West (1923)

A now forgotten star of the later silent era, Sylvia Breamer took on the old David Belasco stage chestnut in this remake of Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 Western classic. Miss Breamer plays a saloon owner who becomes a pawn between two men, a swashbuckling bandit (played in his usual florid style by J. Warren Kerrigan of The Covered Wagon fame) and a tough lawman (Russell Simpson). The center-piece of the story is, of course, the climactic poker game, in which the stakes are the bandit's life and the girl's virtue. According to contemporary reviews, Sylvia Breamer was sorely miscast as the tough, yet feminine saloon boss and that the film was no improvement over the DeMille original. There would be three further remakes of the old stage play: 1930, starring Ann Harding, and 1938, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, plus the 1943 Italian Una Signora del l'Ovest, featuring Michel Simon, Isa Pola and Rossano Brazzi. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi