Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Big Dan features fights, deaths, loose women, adultery, even an attempted rape-the very stuff of today's R-rated movies. But Big Dan's antagonists are less villainous than selfish and unfeeling, its scarlet women amusing, the fight exhilarating rather than brutal. It's a prime example of a nice picture. Yet it's never mawkish: the title character (cowboy star Charles "Buck" Jones) is no do-gooder, just a good man who deals fairly yet firmly with others, and whose decisiveness and code of ethics make positive things happen. (He's a trainer of prize fighters who thinks he's through with women until a girl he rescues from the streets changes his mind.) If this sounds unlike the William Wellman of The Public Enemy and The High and the Mighty, think instead of The Happy Years (1950) and Goodbye My Lady (1956), little pictures that are among the director's most heartfelt. This was Wellman's third film as a director-his second of six with Buck Jones-and it is the earliest in existence. Its restoration raises the total of Wellman's silent features that survive to five out of fifteen.Preservation funded by the AFI Challenge Grant.