The Half-Breed

Douglas Fairbanks plays the title character in this 1916 Western, a story of intolerance and racism in Old California adapted from a Bret Harte story by Anita Loos. Fairbanks plays Lo Dorman, the orphan son of an Indian woman and the white man who abandoned both mother and son. Raised in the woods by a white naturalist, Lo is an oppressed outcast from white society due to his native blood. When he falls in love with a white woman (Jewel Carmen), he is targeted by the racist town sheriff (Sam De Grasse)—the man who is also Lo's heartless father. Fairbanks was a star of romantic comedies and action films when he took on this role to show his dramatic chops—playing a non-white hero in an interracial romantic triangle, certainly a rarity in 1916 (even if it can't quite follow through with a happy ending). Handsomely directed by longtime Fairbanks collaborator Allan Dwan, this is a minor historical cinematic landmark and an important film in Fairbanks’s career before he became the star of grand, swashbuckling adventure spectacles. Long available in incomplete form, the film was restored in 2013 from three separate sources and is presented here with a piano score composed and performed by Donald Sosin. Extras include another 1916 Fairbanks Western directed by Dwan, The Good Bad Man, with Fairbanks as a Robin Hood-like figure who commits nonviolent robberies and gives the money to fatherless children; audio commentary on both films by film scholars Tracey Goessel and Robert Byrne; a restoration featurette; and a photo gallery. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)