Summary
Across the dust-creased Rio Grande, a figure half troubadour, half revenant—The Bearcat—rides into Three Pines with a six-string slung like a carbine, spitting murder-ballads that dangle between his teeth like cloves of bitter garlic. Yet the town’s marrow-soft dawn swallows his menace: he saves rancher’s daughter Alys May from a runaway mustang, and the act ricochets into friendship with Sheriff Bill Garfield, a laconic lawman who wears silence like a silk cravat. Gifted employ on the sprawling May spread, the Singin’ Kid swaps gun-oil for saddle-soap, crooning to night-herded cattle while desire for Alys coils inside him like hot barbed wire—she is pre-contracted to urbane Aitken, college-cosmopolitan foil to the Kid’s prairie apostasy. When Aitken and brother Peter ride back east-washed from campus, past sins resurface: Mary Lang, a sloe-eyed reminder from a neighboring township, blackmails Aitken over a dissolved flirtation. The Kid intervenes, throttling the payoff; blood soon pools beneath Mary’s accomplice, and suspicion funnels onto the balladeer. Through a haze of lynch-mob whispers he unspools evidence of his blamelessness, exposing the true culprit just as the last chord of his own death-song seems inevitable. Aitken, pride deflated, boards the east-bound iron horse, clearing mesquite-scented air for the outlaw-cum-cowhand to claim Alys and rewrite his legend in gentler key.
Synopsis
The Bearcat, alias The Singin' Kid, crosses the Rio Grande into Three Pines, singing bloodthirsty verses, but in spite of these he makes friends with Sheriff Bill Garfield and likewise with Alys May, daughter of cattle rancher John P. May, by saving her from a runaway. As a reward he gets a job on the ranch and falls in love with Alys, though warned she is engaged to Aitken, her brother's college chum. Aitken and Peter return from college, and Aitken becomes involved in an affair with Mary Lang, a former sweetheart in a neighboring town, who wants a payment to forget the flirtation. The Kid keeps Aitken from paying, and when Mary's accomplice is murdered he takes the blame, but later he proves himself innocent. Aitken departs for the East, leaving the field free to the Kid and Alys.
Review Excerpt
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The first image that scalds itself onto the viewer’s retina is a horizon the color of scabbed iron, the Rio Grande threading like a dirty vein while titles in florid art-nouveau announce The Bear Cat—a 1922 western that sings rather than speaks, its intertitles inked with the cadence of outlaw ballads. There is something perversely poetic in watching a man introduce himself via murderous verse yet earn the town’s trust by rescuing a runaway phaeton; it is as if Homer’s Iliad were recast with ..."
