THE NIGHT RIDER (Jay Hunt, USA, 1920, 7)

Overflows with the heroine’s personality — I’d watch a whole disc of Texas Guinan, a tough and feisty gal more typical of the West than the John Ford leads. There is a great sequence where she, a ranch owner suffering from rustler raids, decides to get married and it’s a sexes-swapped version of one of those Central Asian(?) countries’ marriage rites where a man has to kidnap his woman to prove himself worthy of her. It plays as comedy, but it gets real complicated when she decides she still wants a night rider to guard the cattle. You’ll hardly believe the last image of the first reel. The second reel is a bit more rote and less bizarre — action scenes against the rustlers. However it is competent, watchable and sometimes inspired...