1916 / 64m - USA
Romance, Western
0.5*/5.0*
Hell's Hinges poster

Watches

February 20, 2021

0.5*/5.0*

It turns out silent westerns suffer from pretty much the same problems as silent dramas. Excessive overacting, intrusive intertitles and bland storylines make these films unnecessarily tough to get through. For a genre that isn't really high on my list of favorites to begin with, the limitations of classic cinema only seem to be making things worse.

Hell's Hinges is only an hour long, but it easily feels like two. The film houses a basic plot about a gang of bandits who aren't too happy when a reverend visits their town. They hire a gunslinger to get rid of him, but he falls for the charms of the reverend's sister and turns on the gang that hired him.

There's a lot of reading to be done, with lengthy intertitles that really slow things down. Performances are poor, the cinematography is bland and though the finale is quite action packed, it never gets very exciting. A pretty big waste of time and one of the worst westerns I've watched so far.