The Gun Woman

Texas Guinan is the Tigress, owner of a "resort" in a struggling mining town. Men kill themselves because she won't marry them. Off the stage come two men: Ed Brady, a proper Boston who is penniless. Him she offers a grubstake. He falls in love with her. The other is Francis McDonald. Him she falls in love with.

He tells her that he has a business in mind, and once it's a success, there's a little cottage waiting for her. She lets him set up a rigged gambling wheel. When he has enough money, off he goes, saying he'll send for her. Meanwhile, there's a strike nearby and everyone pulls up stakes and heads off, except for Guinan and Brady. That's where McDonald has set up his own "resort" with nary a thought for her.

It's a very good story and it's directed by Frank Borzage (although that did not mean what it would come to mean over the next fifteen year). It remains good throughout. Yet watching it, I could see that Texas Guinan was not a good enough actress.

It was through no fault of hers. She had come to Triangle from the vaudeville circuit (even earlier she had been a Sunday school teacher and Lowell Thomas had been her pupil), and shows herself capable for light acting. She's got an easy, happy smile and a casual go-to-Hell stance that she must have used a lot running a speakeasy in the 1920s and telling the Feds off. Yet here she is, appearing ina Borzage movie, and it's Borzage's meat: ordinary love that runs so deep that it becomes something else, something mystical, something overwhelming. Miss Guinan is never overwhelmed. She's a good businesswoman who can face up to reality. She's glad to do a favor, and kind, but she never loses self-possession. The closest she comes to it is moving very slowly, which looks weird.

So she made a few more features, and short subjects, for increasingly minor companies. Eventually she left for greener fields, to speakeasies, where her easy, I'm-in-charge and Hello-Suckers was just what the customers were looking for. And Borzage went back to work, sometimes making one for the studio, one for himself, waiting for the actress who could play that role. It took ten years.