Hell Bent. 1918. USA. Directed by John Ford. Screenplay by Harry Carey, Ford. With Harry Carey, Duke Lee, Neva Gerber, Joseph Harris. DCP. 57 min.
John Ford was 23 years old and had been directing Westerns for Universal for barely a year when he made Hell Bent with Harry Carey, his principal collaborator during the period when Ford was developing the visual grammar he would use for the next five decades. Of the nearly 30 films they made together, only a handful survive, and Hell Bent is one of the more complete—57 minutes of a picture whose original length was closer to five and half reels. Carey’s recurring character Cheyenne Harry is a morally flexible drifter, presented without the heroic uplift that would become Western convention; Ford and Carey were already working with the morally ambiguous figure of the “good bad man.”
Hell Bent shows Ford controlling landscape with absolute authority: The desert exteriors are composed with a sense of depth and spatial relationship beyond the reach of most directors of the period. The melodramatic plot—Harry reforms himself for a woman while pursuing a villain into Mexico—is a delivery mechanism for incident and image rather than the point. Ford would return to these desert spaces throughout his career, but rarely again with quite this economy of means.