★★★
“S_e _o_s t_ W_r”
If the above doesn’t make much sense, there’s good reason for that. Things tend not to, when half of them are removed
. Albeit for reasons that are largely not the makers’ fault, because this film only partially survives. Originally released in 1929 with a running-time of 87 minutes, the only version that remains is one re-released about a decade later, which has been chopped down to under fifty minutes, including new opening captions which comment on the looming second global conflict. What remains still packs quite the wallop, as an anti-war movie which doesn’t shy from the brutal nature of World War I. It’s a part-talkie, with sounds for some of the music and dialogue, and it’s very effective when used.
For example, we hear Rosie (Rubens, in one of her last roles before dying tragically young) sing a jaunty little number called “There is a Happy Place (Far, Far Away)” to cheer up the troops. A few minutes later, she sings it again to a dying soldier, as heroine Joan Morant (Boardman) watches from the shadows, and it’s utterly heart-breaking. Joan is there for reasons which have largely been lost in the edit down to the shorter version. But they seem to be related to her boyfriend, Reggie (Burns), who has gone off to war – he has a drinking problem, though whether this is a result of the conflict is similarly hard to determine. She disguises herself as a man in order to replace him after his drinking renders him unfit for active duty. This exposes her to the true horrors of trench battles, which go far beyond what she could possible have imagined.
It’s an area where the poor quality of the surviving print work for the film, because the battle re-enactments (including some impressive model work for the nineteen twenties) almost look like grainy newsreel footage. Of course, Boardman is as convincing a man as most cross-dressing soldiers are i.e. not very. You have to accept that conceit as a given, and not ask awkward questions about things like bathroom facilities. After about the half-way point, the dialogue all but stops, and things unfold thereafter accompanied only by music and some sound effects. Some sections are truly the stuff of nightmares, such as when the soldiers have to advance, only to be driven back by the enemy unleashing a tidal wave of liquid fire against them.
Seeing the men trudging back, as the entire skyline burns behind them, or (the then newly-invented) tanks driving into the same fiery hell, are images which feels like they could easily come out of 1917, or any modern war movie. The chaos of warfare is reflected in the way it’s almost impossible to tell friend from foe, in the flames and the smoke and the near-darkness. The troops advance again, coming under withering fire from a German machine-gunner. Joan shoots him in the head, after running away from a would-be rapist (!). But it’s all too much for the poor girl, and she has to be carried back to safety by the truly heroic (and non-alcoholic) Sergeant Pike (Holland), whose entire back story was another victim of the editing. It’s all frustrating, and makes it very difficult to judge, because I’m basically watching half a movie. What there is, however, packs considerably more of a punch than I expected.
Dir: Henry King
Star: Eleanor Boardman, John Holland, Edmund Burns, Alma Rubens
This takes place in the ski resort of Park City, during the event it’s best known for: the Sundance Film Festival. Beginning with a plummet from a chair lift, the town is plagued by a series of “accidents” – quotes used advisedly. For they are actually the work of a female vigilante calling herself the Sword of Justice, and dedicated to punishing men for their crimes against her gender. On the other side is Belle Bannon, a former Marine, who had anger issues even before going into the military. Now a hunting guide and member of the ski patrol, she is determined to find and stop the killer. 
I think, if you’re going to try and recreate the eighties, it might help if you were there. I was. Co-writer/director Tabet? Not so much. She seems repeatedly to confuse the look and feel of the decade with the seventies. The repeated needle-drop of Sweet song “Fox on the Run” – actually released in 1974 – is the most blatant example. It explains why the results are a bit of a mess. A well-intentioned mess, to be fair, and you can usually see what they are aiming for. However, throwing a character in solely so they can refer to eighties films like Commando and Cobra, is painfully clunky, and is a more accurate reflection of the approach in which this indulges.
This feels like a modern Western. I think it was shot up on the borders of Utah and Arizona, since I recognized scenes shot at the Buckskin Tavern, in that area. While contemporary, with relatively minor tweaks, it could easily take place a century or more ago, back when robber land barons were a thing in the Old West. Lupe (Covarrubias) is in desperate straits, with her mother Adamina (Miranda) in need of money to pay for medical treatment she can’t afford. There’s another shock: the father, Carl (Fitzgerald), who Lupe long believed dead, is actually alive, and might be the last chance of getting the necessary funds. So she decides to make the journey to see him.
This is the last (and at 120 pages, slightly the longest) book in the Sheriff Bride series, each installment written by a different author, which my wife Barb and I read together. (She appreciates these books much more than I do.) Here, our focus is on the youngest Hardin sister, Rob (Roberta); and three years have passed since the opening of the first book, so she’s now very close to 18, and probably is 18 by the end of this installment. (In western Texas in the late 1870s or early 80s, she would be viewed as of legitimately marriageable age –and the series title is a clue that this might be a relevant consideration.) While I don’t go so far as to recommend the series to most readers, if you do read it, I recommend doing so in order; you need the understanding of the situation and the characters as these have developed over time in the earlier books in order to properly experience this one.
Despite the fact that all of the books of this series are written by different authors, they exhibit a lot of similarity in style, and also in literary quality. Since the quality tends to be wanting, that’s not a good thing. (My wife Barb really likes these books, which is why we read them together; and even I find the premise novel and intriguing. But it suffers from mediocre and even amateurish execution.) However, Williford has a bit smoother, less pronoun-averse and a trifle more textured prose style than her colleagues, and also a more realistic and less “vegetarian” approach to the realities of lethal force in law enforcement than the first two books displayed. There are situations that can arise where killing a determined aggressor is the only way to protect innocent lives; and she recognizes both the fact that a decent person doesn’t want to do that and may be severely torn up by the pain of doing it, and that neither the reluctance nor the pain change the moral necessity of doing it at times. In fairness to the author of the first book, Teresa Ives Lilly, her heroine realized this as well, but was able to make a decision to disable rather than kill in the particular case she had to confront. But circumstances may not always provide that option…
I wonder if this film was made as some kind of bet. How many tropes and clichés can 
My rating for the first book was two and ½ stars. Several aspects of this second one, though, don’t work as well for me in terms of realism, and I wasn’t able to give it more than two stars. First, while (for at least some Native American peoples) tribal law may have allowed the fathers of young women to sell or gamble them away as slaves, by the late 1870s U.S. law didn’t countenance that. So the community’s project of buying Morning Glory’s freedom was unnecessary. Given the long warfare between Texans and the Comanches, and the ill-feeling of many whites in that era towards Indians, as well as Texas’ secession in the previous decade with defense of slavery as one of its officially-avowed reasons, the community’s unanimous sympathy with Morning Glory also seems a bit of a stretch. Though it’s true that slavery was much less entrenched in arid west Texas than in the east Texas cotton country; and Jo’s mother was apparently Northern-born, since her two brothers died fighting for the Union.
Second, it’s a standard romance-genre trope that at least one party to the romance has hang-ups to overcome, but Tom’s here seem sort of contrived. Yes, his previous fiancee broke their engagement because she didn’t want to live in a place like Waterhole; but it’s patently obvious that Jo doesn’t have that problem, and by now the community is becoming more female-friendly than it was then. His fear for her safety in a potentially violent job is more credible (if she has a problem shooting a deer, might she not also have a fatal hesitancy in shooting a human, even with her life on the line?), but the denouement here doesn’t actually discredit that fear. That brings me to some issues with the denouement.
In the first book, I had no trouble believing that a sober woman with quick reflexes, who’s trained and experienced with a pistol, could outdraw a partly-drunk male, even if he and a bunch of cowed townsfolk thought he was pretty hot stuff with his gun. It was said in the Old West that, “God created men and women, but Col. Colt made them equal.” But here, I did have trouble believing that a woman could tackle and physically overpower a presumably bigger and stronger armed male; and not much respect for her intelligence in trying it, when she could easily have covered him with her own gun from behind and demanded his surrender. Her two armed sisters didn’t display much smarts there, either.
If I were Tom, that incident would have exacerbated my concern for her, not laid it to rest. The outcome of the tale here also depends on believing (which I’m not certain that I do) that it can automatically be assumed that every cave in west Texas is inhabited by a swarm of bats which will emerge at sunset; and we’re also asked to believe that Jo’s love for animals makes her the only Hardin sister who would know this, when all of them are wilderness-wise. I also had a problem with our heroines letting an arrested petty thief just walk out of jail, even on the condition that he leave the area, in exchange for a tip leading to the arrest of bigger prey. Finally, although I give Cox credit for treating inter-racial romance positively, the secondary romance here came across to me as implausible and unconvincing.
All of this said, I did finish the book (my wife and I read it together – and she liked it much better than I did, her taste in Westerns not being nearly as critical), and it held my interest. Cox’s characterizations aren’t deep, but most of the characters are likable. Like the author, the main characters are evangelical Christians, and there’s a positive portrayal of the role of faith in their lives. We also see the effects of Christian conversion in a couple of cases, though we’re not privy to the scenes/conversations where those conversions take place (so there’s no lengthy evangelistic exposition). The series can appeal to fans of Westerns, Western romance and “Christian fiction” who don’t expect much depth and just want some harmless, time-passing entertainment.
A brief word about the cover art is in order. It’s a nice bit of action-heroine iconography, and does depict an actual scene from the book (a rifle-shooting contest). But while the young lady here has lovely brown eyes, we’re told in the books that Jo and all of her sisters are green-eyed; and the kind of colored nail polish this markswoman is wearing didn’t come into vogue until the 1920s. So, no awards for accuracy here!
Author: Brooksie Cox
Publisher: Lovely Christian Romance Press, available 
While this is an excellent and very original premise for a novella series, though, the execution of it here has to be called somewhat lackluster. Lilly’s prose style tends to be repetitive, both in language (and in using character’s names over again where a pronoun would serve her better) and in ideas, with points often being restated or reemphasized in the same paragraph when it’s not needed; she also has a tendency to tell when there would be more effective ways of showing. Some attempt was made at editing, but the proofreading was poor (there are only a few typos as such, but I finally deduced that the three or four bracketed repetitions of a sentence in different words were vestiges of textual corrections that weren’t edited out in the final draft!).
Turns out that Marvel and DC are not the only ones creating “cinematic universes” based on comic book. Another example can be found, perhaps surprisingly, in Indonesia. This film is part of the Bumilangit Cinematic Universe, and is a follow-up to 2019’s Gundala. I haven’t seen that, but I’m 99% sure that the scene in the end-credits is a direct cross-over to that, featuring its hero, given the apparent prediction late on of a team up to come between him and Sri Asih. Otherwise, though, this stands on its own, and you don’t need to have seen Gundala, or be familiar with the comic-book series about Sri Asih, created by R.A. Kosasih, and first published all the way back in 1954.