Summary
A plain-ranch drifter, Sim Gage—nicknamed “the Sagebrusher” for the alkali dust that clings to every thought—lives in a Montana basin where horizons sag like cracked leather. His lone confidant, Wid Gardner, pens a laconic newspaper plea for “a helpmate, stout of heart,” and from Cleveland’s soot-choked hosiery district answers Mary Warren, lately dismissed from her counter job, clutching a single trunk and a cataract of secret grief. En route west she is struck by a blinding fever; sunrise becomes pewter, faces blur to bruises, yet she steps off the train, pupils clouded, believing she has signed on as housekeeper to a widower rancher. Sim, bow-legged and gap-toothed, beholds her city-spun grace—gloved fingers, vowels round as pearls—and feels the rude sting of his own mirror. Meanwhile Frederick Waldhorn, a cardsharp draped in seal-skin rectitude, disembarks from the same rail spur; he recognizes Mary as the rightful heir to a Great Lakes shipping fortune he long ago embezzled. Across the saloon’s swing-doors looms Big Aleck, ox-broad and carnivorous, who covets both Sim’s water rights and any unclaimed woman. Sightless Mary navigates this masculine maze by touch: splinters of cedar, scent of lye soap, the tremor in Sim’s wrist when he offers coffee. Dr. Everett Barnes—city-trained, eyes the color of river ice—arrives to treat her neuropathy; candle-lit examinations turn to murmured sonnets, and a triangle hums beneath the prairie silence. Sim, sensing he is outclassed by medicine and metropolises, rides into a spring cloudburst to rescue Mary when a dam of ice jams and the valley floods. He perishes in the chocolate-brown surge, his last gesture pressing her hand to his weather-cracked cheek. Weeks later, when bandages unwind, Mary’s vision floods back: first the gold flare of cottonwood leaves, then the doctor’s anxious smile. Love’s ledger rewrites itself; she grieves the rough-hewn guardian she never saw alive. Wid Gardner, who started the chain of letters, finds solace in Annie Squires, Mary’s traveling companion, a woman whose laughter snaps like dry kindling. The film ends on a dawn wagon ride: two couples, one widowed by water, one betrothed by ink, crossing a land as stark and forgiving as blank paper.
Synopsis
When Wid Gardner, a friend of the "Sagebrusher" Sim Gage in Montana, advertises for a wife for Sim, he finds Mary Warren. Mary, who has recently lost her shop job in Cleveland, goes West under the impression that she is to be a housekeeper. By the time she arrives, she has become blind and cannot see the ugliness of the poor but honest Sim, who realizes that Mary is too refined for him. After some complications involving Frederick Waldhorn, who recognizes Mary as the girl whose legacy he has stolen, and Big Aleck, Mary and Sim are married. The young, handsome Dr. Barnes, who is working to restore Mary's sight, has also fallen in love with her. Eventually, Sim gives his life in rescuing Mary from a flood. Mary's sight then is restored and she confesses her love for Dr. Barnes. Finally, Mary's friend, Annie Squires, who accompanied her from Cleveland, becomes engaged to Wid.
Review Excerpt
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Across the flickering silence of 1920, The Sagebrusher arrives like a love letter scorched at the edges—its postage stamp the wide Montana sky, its ink diluted by alkali tears. What could have been a stock oater about a lonesome cowpoke and a mail-order bride mutates, frame by frame, into a meditation on seeing versus perceiving. Director Edwin Wallock, doubling as the rugged Sim, refuses to tilt his Stetson toward easy sentiment; instead he lets the landscape do the talking: sagebrush hissing ..."
