Sergeant Tim Ryerson of the North West Mounted Police is commissioned to round up a gang that smuggles Chinese laborers across the border. While visiting his fiancée, Sylvia Sturgis, at her father's ranch, Tim becomes suspicious of ranch foreman Ferdinand Baird, who is the leader of the smugglers.

Snowflakes swirl like moths around the kerosene lamp of a North-West Mounted Police outpost, and already the screen exhales a frost-bitten fatalism that only silent cinema can perfume. The Cyclone—misleadingly titled if one expects meteorological spectacle—is instead a human tempest: greed, lust, and chivalry braided ...

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Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.

Clifford Smith

Clifford Smith
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" Snowflakes swirl like moths around the kerosene lamp of a North-West Mounted Police outpost, and already the screen exhales a frost-bitten fatalism that only silent cinema can perfume. The Cyclone—misleadingly titled if one expects meteorological spectacle—is instead a human tempest: greed, lust, and chivalry braided into a 58-minute whirl that leaves splinters of racial trauma and pulp romanticism lodged beneath the fingernails. Director J.P. McGowan, a stunt-maestro who once leapt between l..."
Todhunter Marigold, Joseph Anthony Roach
United States

