Summary
Amid the glacial hush of the Klondike, where auroras bleed across permafrost like celestial hematomas, Laughing Bill Hyde—half myth, half cardsharp—rides a cyclone of whiskey breath and gold dust. A lanky cowboy-satirist with a lariat tongue, he drifts into Dawson’s neon dusk, pockets rattling with fool’s nuggets and punch-line punch cards. Around faro tables sticky with blood and gin, he locks eyes with Mae, a dance-hall siren whose mascara flares like smudged coal under midnight sun; their courtship is a quickdraw of glances, each syllable a ricochet between bawdy vaudeville and Arctic melancholia. But the Yukon demands tribute: a crooked syndicate—fronted by the ivory-capped speculator Conville—claims the motherlode that Bill jokingly salted for laughs. Suddenly the jest curdles into manhunt: sled dogs howl across cinemascope tundras, revolvers cough black-powder haikus, and a violin-playing Mountie—equal parts Javert and jester—pursues our antihero toward the precipice of American myth. In the apogee, Bill, now a snow-blind Icarus, gambles his last breath on a single flip of a frozen card, wagering whether love can outwit death in a universe wired to the house.
Synopsis
The Atlanta Journal on October 4, 1918, advertised this movie with the following blurb: "Atlanta's last chance to see the best movie to date of the wild, free days of Alaska, when men fought and women loved along the Yukon in a mist of snow and gambling hells and gold mining, is Friday and Saturday at the Strand Theater, when Rex Beach's 'Laughing Bill Hyde' ends a week's engagement that has drawn capacity houses to the Strand every day. Will Rogers, cowboy wit of the Ziegfield Follies, is the star of the this thriller and Will Rogers is second to none."
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