Summary
Delmar Spavinaw—half Osage, half Oxford, wholly incandescent with grievance—steps out of a Kansas dawn in immaculate linen, law degree rolled like a Molotov in his breast pocket, ready to burn the gilded gerrymander called justice. He loves Evelyn Huntington, whose eyes carry the bluish hush of confiscated skies; her father, the hanging judge, has turned ancestral acreage into a chessboard where Indians are always pawns. Ross Kennion, widowed land-baron, clutches a deed that Spavinaw swears is written in his mother’s blood; together they form a scalene love triangle whose hypotenuse is a surveyor’s line severing prairie from soul. When the gavel falls on eviction, Spavinaw unleashes a symphony of subterfuge: a parchment heist, a bullet that kisses Kennion’s shoulder like a Judas bride, a night stampede that sounds like the earth itself trying to outrun its history. Rustler Juan Del Rey, part coyote, part Greek chorus, helps him spirit away the parchment, but the abduction of Kennion’s tow-haired heir and the wide-eyed Evelyn turns morality into quicksand. Sheriff’s stars glitter on the horizon; Spavinaw flees southward, shackled to Doll Pardeau—Evelyn’s schoolmate, now a flapper on the lam—her bobbed hair snapping like semaphore in the wind. Between bovine avalanche and the law’s hot breath, they vault onto a freight car, the iron wheels counting rosary beads for every sin America refuses to confess. As the caboose recedes, the prairie keeps burning, the deed keeps smoldering, and the audience—left on the cindered brink—realizes the border is not a line but a scar.
Synopsis
Delmar Spavinaw, an educated half-breed, loves Evelyn Huntington, daughter of a racist judge. Evelyn's other suitor is Ross Kennion, a widower with one child, who owns a vast tract of land which Spavinaw insists belongs to his Indian mother. Spavinaw seeks revenge when Judge Huntington decides to evict the squaw. Assisted by cattle rustler Juan Del Rey, Spavinaw steals the title to the land, wounds Kennion, stages a raid on the judge's cattle, and attempts to kidnap Kennion's son and Evelyn. The arrival of the sheriff forces him into flight across the border without his hostages. En route he meets Doll Pardeau, a school friend of Evelyn's, and together they ride for the Mexican border. Caught between a cattle stampede and a sheriff's posse, the couple catch a passing freight train, leaving calamity behind as the train slowly passes.
Review Excerpt
"
There are Westerns that gallop across the screen waving flags of Manifest Destiny, and then there is The Half Breed—a 65-minute stick of dynamite wedged between Griffith’s paeans to white hoods and Ford’s later hymns to sagebrush camaraderie. Shot in 1922, dumped into distribution purgatory, and resurrected only in smeared 16mm dupes, it plays today like an autopsy performed on the American psyche. The celluloid itself seems bruised; each scratch is a scar of censorship, each missing intertitl..."
