Summary
A silk-scarfed scion trades mahogany boardrooms for pine-scented precipices, carving identity from granite and gossip; his tailored vowels soon echo through the Sierras like a rebel yodel. Under the watch of ancient sequoias he confronts Slim Dixon—moonshiner masquerading in a Smokey-bear hat—flooring him with one righteous haymaker that sends rotgut bottles glittering into the underbrush like comets. Word of the newcomer ricochets to Red Hobbs, sovereign of this sylvan purgatory, who forbids his lantern-jawed daughter Ann from fraternizing with the ‘dude.’ She still signals love from a crag, semaphore against starlight, until chains of patriarchy clap around her ankles and she is entombed in a gold-rat tunnel that smells of rust and bat guano. Dick descends, fists first, through henchmen and moral fog, until only Hobbs stands between him and the echo of Ann’s heartbeat. Their brawl—a sweaty ballet of knuckles and grunts—ends when the crime-lord slips into the current, swallowed by moonlit foam. Dixon, last wolf on the ridge, tries to gallop away with the girl; Dick vaults onto the saddle, tosses the rogue like tumbleweed, and claims both the landscape and its heiress with a kiss that tastes of sap and liberation.
Synopsis
Dick Dawson decides against going into business with his father and goes west to become a forest ranger. He is thought to be a mollycoddle until he levels Slim Dixon, a whiskey runner disguised as a ranger. Dixon seeks revenge and informs the leader of the gang, Red Hobbs, of Dick's potential danger. Dick meets Red's daughter Ann, who is prohibited from seeing Dick again. When she is caught signaling him from the mountain peak, her father binds her hands and feet and places her in a mine. Dick rushes to save her but is first confronted with Hobbs; a fist fight ensues, and Hobbs rolls into the river and drowns. Dick reaches Ann just as Dixon is about to carry her off on horseback; undaunted, Dick disposes of Dixon and proposes marriage to Ann.
Review Excerpt
"
There is a moment—blink and you will miss it—when Francelia Billington’s eyes glint the exact shade of amber jacklight as she peers through pine boughs, and you realize The Ranger and the Law is slyly painting the West not in ochre cliché but in chiaroscuro psychology. Released in the exhausted summer of 1921, this six-reel programmer should have evaporated like so many bootleg negatives. Instead, it endures—slender as a birch switch—because everyone involved mistook poverty-row haste for aest..."
