Three bank robbers -- Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler -- flee from New Jerusalem after shooting a bnak clerk in their getaway. They find every waterhole on their escape route poisonous. Nonetheless, when a dying woman asks them to rescue her newborn baby and makes them its godfathers, they reluctantly take on the task.
It's the first sound version of Peter B. Kyne's THREE GODFATHERS; eventually there would be five screen adaptations. Today we think of DIE HARD as a Christmas movie. More than ninety years ago, this was a Christmas movie, a story of the redemption of three thieves, at the same time sentimental -- can we credit the idea of the Good Bad Man that was a staple of the genre? -- and brutal. The desert landscape that the leads stagger through was the actual Mojave Desert in August.
The characterizations are one-note; William Wyler, in his first sound movie and the last western he would direct for twelve years, had to rely on his actors to figure out how to give a good performance. Instead, he relied on cameraman George Robinson to shoot a long take as Bickford stumbles onward with the baby, dropping useless money as he goes. It's a brutal movie for any era. For 1929, it's astounding.
It's the first sound version of Peter B. Kyne's THREE GODFATHERS; eventually there would be five screen adaptations. Today we think of DIE HARD as a Christmas movie. More than ninety years ago, this was a Christmas movie, a story of the redemption of three thieves, at the same time sentimental -- can we credit the idea of the Good Bad Man that was a staple of the genre? -- and brutal. The desert landscape that the leads stagger through was the actual Mojave Desert in August.
The characterizations are one-note; William Wyler, in his first sound movie and the last western he would direct for twelve years, had to rely on his actors to figure out how to give a good performance. Instead, he relied on cameraman George Robinson to shoot a long take as Bickford stumbles onward with the baby, dropping useless money as he goes. It's a brutal movie for any era. For 1929, it's astounding.