Summary
Sonora, a sun-scorched blister on the lip of the Mojave, exhales dust and deceit; into its ochre maw rides Bat Carson—Stetson tilted like a guillotine blade—bearing a tin star and a vendetta against larceny. Gold sluices from the local mine in coffles of ironclad wagons, yet each convoy hemorrhages bullion under the wide-eyed moon. Carson’s investigation, equal parts bloodhound and balladeer, sniffs out a serpentine conspiracy: Phil Harland, the mine’s diffident clerk, leaks timetables to Fay La Cross, a chanteuse whose hips spell out Morse code across a saloon’s sawdust. Fay’s favors, however, pivot on the purse strings of Con Norton, a velvet-jacketed satyr who owns the watering hole and the town’s nightmares; Sheriff Jim Canby, badge polished by graft, plays turnkey to the whole charade. Bat, smitten with Phil’s sister Phyllis—her gaze as crisp as high-desert starlight—arrests the weak-willed clerk, hoping to cauterize the rot. Spurned by Norton, Fay barters her testimony for absolution, but on trial day the puppet master abducts her, galloping toward a sandstone labyrinth. What follows is a cavalry of silhouettes against a vermilion sky: a pursuit through arroyos where every hoofbeat is a metronome of doom, a last-second rescue, and a sprint back to the courthouse that rewrites fate—Phil freed, Norton shackled, and Phyllis’s hand promised beneath a canopy of sagebrush and spent gunpowder.
Synopsis
When U.S. Deputy Marshall Bat Carson is summoned to the town of Sonora to investigate the robberies of gold shipments from the nearby mine, he meets and falls in love with Phyllis Harland. At the mine office, Bat soon discovers that Phyllis' brother Phil is leaking information of the shipments through his dance-hall girlfriend Fay La Cross. Upon further investigation, Bat learns that the masterminds in the operation are saloon owner Con Norton and Sheriff Jim Canby. After Bat arrests Phil for his role in the robberies, Fay, since spurned by Norton, agrees to testify against him in court. On the day of the trial, Norton kidnaps Fay, and Bat follows in pursuit. After a thrilling chase, Bat rescues her and races back to court to win both Phil's freedom and Phyllis' hand in marriage.
Review Excerpt
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The first thing that strikes you about The Terror is how it weaponizes silence. In 1920, sound-on-film was still a laboratory curiosity; directors like Jacques Jaccard had to orchestrate emotion without spoken syllables, relying instead on the staccato flicker of iris-ins, the syncopated gallop of intertitles, and the synesthetic crunch of a boot on desert gravel. The result is a picture that feels paradoxically louder than most talkies—every gesture amplified, every shadow elongated.
Tom Mix..."
