The Half-Breed
About The Half-Breed
Lo Dorman’s Native American mother, left by his white father, gives the baby to a white man and kills herself. After the foster father dies, the town pushes Lo out. He lives inside a giant redwood. Nellie, the preacher’s daughter, flirts with him. Sheriff Dunn, who wants her, hates him. Teresa, traveling with a patent-medicine man, stabs that man in a jealous fit and ends up with Lo. Dunn finds a letter in the tree and learns he is Lo’s father. Douglas Fairbanks plays Lo. Jewel Carmen plays Nellie. Alma Rubens plays Teresa. Sam De Grasse plays Dunn. Allan Dwan directed.
Cast & crew
More about The Half-Breed
Anita Loos wrote the screenplay from Bret Harte’s story In the Carquinez Woods. D. W. Griffith is the producer credit. He did not direct it. Victor Fleming photographed it. Triangle released it on 30 July 1916. Wikipedia times it at 73 minutes. The name Lo Dorman is a pun on the French for sleeping water. Prints and fragments turned up in the Dawson Film Find in 1978.
Themes
Making
Fairbanks was under contract to Harry Aitken’s Triangle and Fine Arts. This was a western melodrama, not one of the smiling athletic comedies. Dwan shot the forest scenes in Sequoia and near Santa Cruz.
Look
Victor Fleming photographed Fairbanks in the redwood and in the town.
Preservation
Prints and fragments were found in the Dawson Film Find in 1978. A copy is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Tom Wilson plays Dick Curson. Frank Brownlee plays Winslow Wynn. George Beranger plays Jack Brace.
- Nellie is not the woman Lo stays with. Teresa, a Mexican outlaw in the reading Monica Nolan gives, is.
- The redwood trunk is his house.
- A Commons file uses the 1916 title.
Scenes
- The mother leaves the baby and goes off to die.
- Lo makes a house in the redwood trunk.
- Dunn finds his own letter and learns he is the father.
Influenced by
- Bret Harte’s story In the Carquinez Woods
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (The Half-Breed (1916).webm)
